Mercer Island resident and Regional Director of StandWithUs Northwest Randy Kessler said that Jews in America have seen a tremendous rise in antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel.

As part of the global nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on Israel education and fighting antisemitism, Kessler helped bring the Seattle area’s inaugural Jewish healthcare professionals event, “Diagnosing and Treating Antisemitism in the Healthcare Industry,” to the Island Synagogue on July 27.

Sixty-five people attended the two-hour morning gathering that featured speakers Michelle Stravitz, CEO of the American Jewish Medical Association (AJMA); Dr. Sheri Ross, who oversees medical outreach for the Center for Combating Antisemitism; and Dr. Audrey Covner, a medical doctor and attorney who currently teaches for the University of Washington’s nursing and public health departments.

“It’s important to bring Jewish healthcare professionals and trainees together, to gather them together in a supportive and protective community at a time when the healthcare community is not so safe necessarily for Jewish professionals and in some cases Jewish patients,” Stravitz said prior to the event. “In some cases, we are educating them on the issues that we’re seeing and facing, and in some cases we are supporting them in what they have been experiencing.”

Kessler, who joined StandWithUs Northwest in 2017, said that some people have been faced with antisemitism by “visibly expressing any form of Jewish identity, even wearing a Star of David necklace or saying that you went to go visit relatives in Israel. In many cases, what many medical professionals have found is that that’s resulted in, a lot of times, it’s exclusion from social activities or from professional groups.”

Dozens of attendees spoke with the panelists afterward and looked forward to taking the information they obtained from the event back to their workplaces, Kessler noted.

Ross works with StandWithUs as its director of medical outreach and offers to publicize the nonprofit’s training module that can fit into medical organizations’ toolkit to address antisemitism in the workplace, said Kessler, adding that mutually respecting others and speaking appropriately are key components in the training realm.

At the Mercer Island event, Covner shared the increased exclusionary incidents and sense of fear that she and her Jewish students have felt since Oct. 7, 2023, and why these occurrences motivated her to join the AJMA, according to Kessler. AJMA launched a Seattle chapter at the event.

Stravitz said that AJMA — a nonpolitical, nonprofit organization — was founded in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023, mainly because of people facing antisemitism in the healthcare space. Examples of antisemitism in the workplace are, according to Stravitz, healthcare professionals blacklisting colleagues, doxing their patients and more.

“We are a membership. And the idea is to create a united voice so we can speak up,” she said. “AJMA has a unique role that we can play because we can have a collegial relationship, be a trusted resource to hospitals, medical schools, medical associations whose members are members of AJMA.”

Kessler, who is joined in StandWithUs Northwest by fellow Island resident and associate director Jennifer Adut, said that as he hears more stories about antisemitism, “we are not going to sit passively by and wait for antisemitism to become dangerous and violent. We want to do our best to organize and basically assert our rights as American citizens to live full, free, safe lives here like everybody else.”

StandWithUs Northwest chose to host the event on Mercer Island because Kessler and Adut reside here, the city sits in a central location to the Seattle area and features a “wonderful synagogue” and has a large Jewish population, Kessler said.

Attendees listen to a speaker at the “Diagnosing and Treating Antisemitism in the Healthcare Industry” event on July 27 at the Island Synagogue. Photo courtesy of Randy Kessler