In the months following the October 7 massacre, Eveline Shekhman began hearing increasingly alarming stories from Jewish doctors, nurses, and medical students across the United States.
Some described being doxed, others said they feared speaking up in class or at work, and many felt there was no organization dedicated to representing them within the health-care system.
So, Shekhman founded the American Jewish Medical Association (AJMA) and became its CEO.
“Antisemitism in medicine is, at its core, a patient-care crisis,” she said during recent testimony before the US House Committee on Education and Workforce, adding that patient care is now being affected because of rising Jew hatred.
There are about 250,000 Jewish health-care professionals in the US, including physicians, nurses, mental-health professionals, pharmacists, allied health workers, administrators, researchers, and faculty, according to the AJMA, and Jewish Americans represent roughly 14% of all US physicians.
Shekhman founded the AJMA in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre, when she started seeing increasing signs of antisemitism in health care and realized that there was no organization dedicated to representing Jewish Americans in the health-care system, she told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
The AJMA has gained new members very quickly, and it now works with about 3,000 Jewish medical professionals across the country and 400 medical students, Shekhman said.
Working to keep the environment 'patient-first'
“We’re the only ones that eat, sleep, breathe health care,” she said. “We know health care, because our members are all health-care providers across all levels, across all specialties,” she said. “Right now, we’re just focusing on the patient-care environment, making sure that it stays patient first, that there’s no discrimination, that it is safe, that geopolitics doesn’t enter that space, that there are no distractions.”
As soon as some sort of distraction enters a medical environment, “it disrupts the whole setting,” Shekhman said.
“So, if a surgical tech is wearing a surgical cap that’s either a keffiyeh or a Palestinian flag, that’s a distraction, and that’s a disruption, and that’s a patient-care situation,” she said.
As soon as associations or institutions start trying to implement Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), or they have awards for anti-Israel behavior, or they have [problematic] lectures, it affects patients on the ground, Shekhman said.
When that happens, the AJMA steps in and examines the rules and bylaws within a hospital, dress-code policies, and the legal ramifications, she said.
“There is also case law within the US to say that if there are political symbols, or if there are actions, not including religious ones, being shown by health-care providers within a patient-care setting that are disturbing to the patients, then they can be asked to have that removed, and they can be reprimanded, because that should not be allowed,” Shekhman said.
“There’s a power play in place,” she said. “Anyone who comes in as a patient is vulnerable. They don’t understand the medicine. There could be a health risk. There’s a safety risk. You have this trust in your physician and the health-care team, and now it’s being played upon.”
Jewish physicians speak out about antisemitism
Many of the Jewish physicians the AJMA has spoken with have been doxed and threatened, so it is now negotiating to have a system or technology in which personal information can be taken off the Internet, Shekhman said.
Connected to this are attempts to intentionally damage a Jewish doctor’s reputation, she said.
Shekhman cited the story of a Jewish physician and his wife who went to speak at a town-hall meeting against a BDS resolution. The next day, all of a sudden, he had a slew of negative patient reviews from people who weren’t his patients, she said, “and that’s the lifeblood of a physician.”
The AJMA also focuses a lot on medical students, who speak of being excluded from societies or sitting through lectures in which the professor is talking about the war in Gaza and a “supposed genocide,” Shekhman said.
“It’s difficult for them to speak out because of the power play that’s in place, and they don’t want to lose [their] rotation,” she said. “They don’t want to get a bad grade. What we do is when we hear that something’s going on, we connect them with the local chapters, and we try and make sure that there is an attending physician who is mid-career to provide the support.”
Apart from antisemitism, the AJMA is also dedicated to celebrating and creating community, Shekhman said, adding that it helps medical students find Hanukkah celebrations, Passover Seders, or a place to go for Shabbat.
“Have faith,” she said. “We can create change. I truly think that as a community, if everyone does one little thing collectively, we can build the foundation to change the future.”