The Supreme Court just made it harder to regulate what therapists say to vulnerable patients. For Jews seeking mental health care in a field increasingly hostile to Jewish identity, the implications are urgent.

The Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision in Chiles v. Salazar has prompted immediate and understandable alarm.[1] By holding that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors is “presumptively unconstitutional” as applied to talk therapy, the Court has signaled that the First Amendment limits states’ ability to regulate what licensed therapists tell vulnerable patients. Over twenty states passed similar laws banning conversion therapy—debunked practices that claim to alter gender identity and sexual orientation; those bans will now face legal challenges as well.

The concern is justified. But the outrage over Chiles—driven by advocates who rightly see conversion therapy as weaponizing the clinical relationship against a patient’s identity—has obscured something that many in the Jewish community already know firsthand: conversion therapy is not the only ideology being imposed on patients from the therapist’s chair. It is merely the one that progressive institutions have chosen to oppose. For Jewish clients and therapists, there is another—and right now, almost nobody outside the Jewish world is talking about it.

Since October 7, many Jews have discovered that the therapist’s office—the one place where they should be able to process grief, fear, and trauma without judgment—has itself become hostile territory. A different form of ideological capture has taken hold across the mental health field.[2] Under the banner of “decolonizing therapy,” a movement now embedded in clinical training programs treats Zionism—and by extension, the connection to Israel that is central to mainstream Jewish identity—as a form of colonial pathology to be “treated.” In one widely circulated clinical diagram, Zionism appears alongside “rape culture” and “genocidal tendencies” as attributes of a “colonized mind.”[3] Jewish therapists have been blacklisted from referral networks based on presumed political affiliations.[4] Jewish patients who have walked into therapy seeking help processing the trauma of October 7, the hostage crisis, or rising antisemitism have found themselves sitting across from clinicians who treat their grief as complicity—who reframe their identity as part of the problem rather than something worthy of support.[5] The problem has become so widespread that the US House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce has opened a formal investigation into antisemitism at the American Psychological Association (“APA”), the nation’s foremost accreditor for psychological training and continuing-education programs.[6]

The parallel should be impossible to miss. The mental health field rightly recognizes that conversion therapy—telling LGBTQ patients their orientation is disordered and must be corrected—weaponizes the therapeutic relationship against a patient’s core identity. These “decolonizing” frameworks do the same thing to Jews: they tell Jewish patients that their connection to Israel, to Am Yisrael itself, is a colonial artifact—something to be dismantled in therapy rather than supported. Both subordinate the patient’s experience to the therapist’s ideology. In both cases, the therapist’s chair becomes a vehicle for ideology, not care.

There is now a case in Texas that highlights these very concerns—and that the Jewish community should know about. The Lawfare Project, a nonprofit legal organization that fights antisemitism and protects Jewish civil rights, represents the plaintiffs in Junger v. DSquared Relationships PLLC,[7] currently before a federal court in Texas. The plaintiffs—two Jewish therapists—allege they were fired from a counseling practice after objecting when the clinic selectively restricted discussion of Jewish identity and antisemitism, while other identity-based topics were discussed freely. According to the complaint and deposition record, when a non-Jewish therapist sought guidance from her Jewish colleagues about a Jewish client presenting with identity-related trauma, the clinic owner intervened, stating that soliciting input from Jewish therapists would yield a “one-sided response.” The Jewish therapists who objected to that characterization were terminated within days.

What the case record reveals will be painfully familiar to many Jewish readers. The clinic owners did not use slurs. No one spray-painted a swastika. Instead, as alleged, they operated from the kind of bias that has become all too recognizable since October 7: Jewish perspectives on Jewish experiences were treated as inherently unreliable; Jewish advocacy was dismissed as performance; and Jewish trauma was recharacterized as political rather than clinical. In depositions and text messages now in the court record, one owner described the terminated therapists as “zealots” whose concerns were “part of the victim story,” while the other stated that the therapists’ emails were changing her views of Jewish people generally to “aggressive.” This is the antisemitism that Jews across the community have been trying to explain to friends and colleagues for the past two and a half years—the kind that does not recognize itself as prejudice, and does the most damage precisely because of that.

This is where Chiles creates a genuine problem for the Jewish community. The majority opinion holds that states cannot use licensing authority to prevent therapists from “sharing particular views with patients.” The logic is straightforward: if the government cannot tell therapists they are forbidden from practicing conversion therapy because that regulates their speech, then state licensing boards will have even less power to go after therapists who impose anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish ideological frameworks on clients under the guise of clinical practice. The very regulatory tool that was built to protect vulnerable clients has been weakened—and Jewish clients are among those left most exposed.

The principle should be simple: therapists should not weaponize the clinical relationship to undermine a patient’s identity. It should not matter which identity is being targeted or which ideological framework is doing the targeting. A therapist who tells a gay teenager his orientation is sinful is committing the same category of professional violation as a therapist who tells a Jewish patient her connection to Israel is colonial. The political valence is different. The harm is the same. So why don’t Jewish clients get the same protection?

The Junger case points toward what may be the more effective legal path—and one the Jewish community should be watching closely. The Lawfare Project brought claims under Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, one of the oldest federal antidiscrimination statutes, which protects against race-based discrimination. The argument is that singling out Jewish identity in a professional setting is exactly that. A pending summary judgment motion argues that the defendants’ own deposition testimony shows they fired these therapists for speaking up, and that no trial is needed to hold them liable. If the court agrees, it will establish a powerful precedent: treating Jewish identity as uniquely suspect in professional settings carries consequences under federal civil rights law—consequences that do not depend on the state regulatory authority that Chiles has now constrained.

A win would matter far beyond one practice in Dallas. It would give legal teeth to what Jewish therapists and clients across the country already know: that the quiet assumption that Jewish perspectives are partisan, Jewish trauma is political, and Jewish advocacy is performance has become pervasive in the mental health field. These assumptions are not confined to fringe practitioners. They are embedded in training materials, clinical supervision, and the institutional culture of the profession’s most influential bodies—including the APA itself. And they operate through the same mechanism as conversion therapy: the authority of the therapeutic relationship.

The Court’s decision in Chiles may have limited what states can do through professional regulation. But it has not limited what federal civil rights law can do. For the Jewish community, the message should be clear: if a therapist, a clinic, or a professional institution treats Jewish identity as suspect, that is not just a bad therapeutic experience. It may be actionable discrimination. The regulatory path is now weaker. The civil rights path has never been more important.

Disclaimer: Jaclyn S. Clark is counsel at The Lawfare Project, a nonprofit legal organization that fights antisemitism and protects the civil rights of the Jewish community. She represents the plaintiffs in Junger v. DSquared Relationships PLLC, a federal case challenging the termination of two Jewish therapists. The views expressed are her own. 

[1]Chiles v. Salazar, 607 U.S. ___, No. 24-539 (2026) (Gorsuch, J.), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-539_fd9g.pdf.

[2]Miri Bar-Halpern & Jaclyn Wolfman, Traumatic Invalidation in the Jewish Community After October 7, 35 J. Hum. Behav. Soc. Env’t (2025), https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2025.2503441.

[3]Decolonizing Therapy Fuels Antisemitism, Jerusalem Post (July 29, 2025) (discussing a “colonized mind” infographic circulated on the Decolonizing Therapy social media page placing Zionism alongside “rape culture” and “genocidal tendencies”), https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-862643.

[4]Sally Satel, Inside the Campaign to Blacklist ‘Zionist’ Therapists, The Free Press (Aug. 12, 2024) (documenting an organized effort by members of a Chicago anti-racist therapist group to compile and circulate a blacklist of therapists with “Zionist affiliations”), https://www.thefp.com/p/campaign-to-blacklist-zionist-therapists.

[5]Sally Satel, Anti-Semitism on the Couch, Commentary (Jan. 20, 2026), https://www.commentary.org/articles/sally-satel/antisemitism-american-psychological-association/; see also Daniel Balva, The Abandonment of Jewish Therapists: Antisemitism in the Mental Health Field, ISGAP (July 2, 2025), https://isgap.org/flashpoint/the-abandonment-of-jewish-therapists-antisemitism-in-the-mental-health-field/.

[6] See Letter from Tim Walberg, Chairman, House Comm. on Educ. and the Workforce, to Dr. Debra Kawahara, President, American Psychological Association (Dec. 12, 2025) (https://edworkforce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/apa_letter_12.10.2025.pdf).

[7]Junger et al. v. DSquared Relationships PLLC et al., No. 4:25-cv-00650 (E.D. Tex. filed June 18, 2025).

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