RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two months after Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel, Baylor College of Medicine canceled a lecture scheduled many months before on “Antisemitism in Medicine,” to be given by me and another physician who has received many antisemitic threats, some of which led to police protection. Last year, my long-running course at Baylor on medicine and the Holocaust was canceled. It has become increasingly evident that medical schools, medical-licensing bodies, and medical organizations are reluctant to acknowledge, let alone confront, the fact that their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies breed antisemitism in medicine.

For the past 20 years of my nearly 50-year affiliation with Baylor, I offered an elective course, Healing by Killing: Medicine during the Third Reich, to first-year medical students. The course describes Hitler’s adoption of the German medical profession’s eugenic racist ideology and the central and indispensable role of physicians in designing and implementing the Holocaust. It also includes many disquieting photos and film clips from Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps. Judging by essays submitted in earlier years, the students took to heart the lessons about the potential for physician abuse of patients.

In April last year, I gave the fifth of the course’s nine lectures, “Why the Jews?” The first half of the lecture outlines the history of antisemitism; the second half is about countertransference, a common psychological phenomenon that occurs when a physician allows his or her feelings to influence a patient’s treatment. I asked the students to identify personal biases that could interfere with good patient care, such as biases against patients with a particular diagnosis, disability, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, political party affiliation, religion, educational level, personal features such as tattoos, and so on, and gave as an example my experience as a young doctor with a suicidal Palestinian graduate student, an example I had used many times before.

Several weeks later, two Baylor faculty members informed me that a student in this lecture filed an “anonymous grievance” because the student “felt uncomfortable.” They offered almost no specifics other than my use of the word “Palestinian” and said that the course could be canceled if students filed additional anonymous grievances. A faculty member from Baylor’s Center for Professionalism then told me that the policy of anonymous grievances is based on the school’s belief that medical students are a “vulnerable population.” She said that she did not necessarily agree with this policy, but it was her job to implement it. A few weeks later, the course was canceled, even though no additional anonymous grievances were filed. The president of Baylor College of Medicine upheld the cancellation. (Baylor did not respond to a request for comment about its decision to cancel the lecture and the course by the time of publication.)

The choice to treat medical students as a vulnerable population assumes that medical students have so little agency and are so emotionally delicate that they must be empowered to file anonymous grievances to protect them from their professors. Instead of encouraging students to speak with and possibly learn from their professors, students who feel uncomfortable are authorized to inform on them; professors are subject, without due process, to proceedings conducted by faculty who blindly follow DEI and intersectional dogma.

Students at elite universities now engaging in protests that oppose Israel’s existence and call for violence against Jews will bring their antisemitism with them to medical school, where this or any other of their harmful biases are unlikely to be challenged. DEI encourages medical schools to treat medical students as a vulnerable population in their relations with their professors — cast as a kind of oppressor — and with patients with whom they feel uncomfortable. DEI at medical schools prioritizes students’ feelings over their duty to learn their profession and care for patients.

Baylor College of Medicine is not alone in promoting DEI dogma, which propagates antisemitism, in medical training. This is evident from overt expressions of antisemitism by students at Georgetown University Medical School and George Washington University School of Medicine. Since 1997, the Liaison Committee for Medical Education, the accrediting body for American medical schools, has included an accreditation standard related to student diversity. The influential Association of American Medical Colleges is “committed to DEI across all its services, programs, and projects . . . including those focused on fostering anti-racism in practice.”

DEI continues to shape the training of physicians after graduation from medical school. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which sets and monitors voluntary professional education standards for residents and fellows, works with “industry experts and faculty facilitators to develop and implement projects that address workforce diversity and build inclusive learning environments.” In October, the American College of Surgeons added a new “tool kit” to its DEI and anti-racist educational programming. The American Medical Association, in response to the lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina (resulting in the landmark 2023 Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action), stated its intention to “urge medical school and undergraduate admissions committees to proactively implement policies and procedures that operationalize race-conscious admissions.”

As Abe Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, told Jewish Insider, DEI is “based on a faulty premise — that . . . all white people are oppressors.” In the DEI mindset, Jews are coded as white, which puts them in the oppressor category. DEI, says Foxman, leads to “bias, illiberalism, reinforced, legitimized and institutionalized antisemitism” and “cannot be fixed.” David Harris, former head of the American Jewish Committee, agrees, describing DEI as a threat to “liberal understanding of American societal aims.”

A survey by Ian Kingsbury and Jay P. Greene of Do No Harm, a health-care advocacy group, found that 100 out of 194 medical associations and medical schools “posted responses to the conflict in Ukraine, while 15 of those 194 issued statements regarding the war in Israel.” Writing in Tablet, the authors note that they began collecting information on statements 17 days after the October 7 Hamas attack. They view the discrepancy as a “foreboding sign.”

Since October 7, we have seen confirmation that antisemitism has crept into medicine. In social-media posts, Dr. Dana Diab, an emergency-room physician in New York City, applauded Hamas’s massacre as giving Israelis “a taste of their own medicine”; for this she was fired. The group Doctors Against Genocide invited Representative Rashida Tlaib, who was censured by the House for her antisemitic remarks, to speak at a press conference it hosted. The “genocide” in the group’s name reflects the preposterous claim that Israel is attempting a genocide of the Palestinians. These doctors were either never taught, or are indifferent to, the dangers of countertransference.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that antisemitism has become a problem in organized and academic medicine. Unless DEI, which incubates antisemitism, is eliminated from medical education, the consequences for today’s patients, especially Jewish patients, could be grave. Medical educators must recall that the first responsibility of physicians is to do no harm to a truly vulnerable population: their patients.