Jewish doctors alarmed by “rampant” antisemitism and even violence at health-care institutions in the US have launched their own national advocacy group to combat the hatred in medicine.
Thousands of medical professionals from across the country have joined the new American Jewish Medical Association to stand up for Jews, the group recently told The Post.
“It’s fundamentally scary for those of us who care about humanity. It’s Nazi Germany all over again,” said Manhattan plastic surgeon Yael Halaas, founder and president of the new group and a graduate of Columbia University and Cornell Medical School.
The hatred leveled against Jews after the Palestinian terror group Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion of Israel hit home for Halaas, whose Jewish parents emigrated to the US from Cuba and Argentina.
Many members of her dad’s family were killed in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
Medical schools particularly have become hostile environments for Jewish students, the organizers said.
Among the troubling incidents:
-George Washington University’s medical school hosted a faculty panel in December that declared the terrorists have a “right of resistance” against Israel.
-Some medical professionals have praised the Hamas Oct. 7 attack on Israel and denied the fact that victims in Israel were sexually assaulted.
— A sign that read, “Free Palestine from Nazi Zionist Schwein” — the German word meaning “pig” — appeared in front of the cancer center at the University of California at San Francisco’s medical school.
— Anti-Israel protesters at rallies at Columbia University’s Medical School/Mailman School of Public Health have chanted “From the River to the Sea,” a phrase many interpret as calling for the elimination of Israel and celebrating suicide bombers who kill Israelis.
“The Jewish medical students are bullied into silence,” Halaas said. “They are being ostracized. It shouldn’t be controversial to say Israel is integral to Jewish identity.
“Anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” she said.
The term “zionism” refers to the right of the Jewish state to exist.
Orthopedist Cary Schwartzbach, a Queens native who practices in Fairfax, Va., and a son of Holocaust survivors and treasurer of the new group, said, “Oct. 7 was a wake-up call.
“It opened the gates for antisemitism,” the doctor said.
“There’s a sense of hostilities against Jews. Antisemitism has made a lot of hospital residency programs uncomfortable for Jewish students,” he said.
“We need a voice. We need to protect ourselves. We need to protect medical school students.”
Larisa Geskin, an oncologist and director of the Comprehensive Skin Cancer Center at Columbia University’s Medical Center who emigrated from Latvia in the former Soviet Union when she was 20, said she was stunned by the antisemitism she’s personally witnessed on campus.
“There is rampant anti semitism in the medical community,” the 56-year-old doctor said.
“This is so familiar to me. In the Soviet Union antisemitism was rampant. I never thought I’d hear the same rhetoric in the United States that I heard in the Soviet Union,” she said.
Given how Jews have been abused throughout history, the doctors said it’s horrifying to hear propaganda painting Israelis as white oppressors.
“Jews are also a minority. We need protection like other minorities,” Geskin said.
“We see history repeating itself. We feel we have to say something. They were chanting `From the River to the Sea’ in my backyard. This is what is happening in the medical community.”
