I spent the spring arguing that after Chiles, it was civil-rights law — not licensing boards — that still had teeth for Jews in the mental health field. Last week, the federal government reached for it.

Not a metaphor — an actual chair, in an actual office, the kind with a tissue box angled toward you and a white-noise machine humming outside the door. A Jewish woman sits down in it because something is wrong and she can’t carry it alone anymore. Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s the friends who went quiet after October 7. Maybe it’s just the low static of dread she can’t quite name.

She came to the one room in American life that is supposed to be on her side. No questions asked.

And the person across from her — licensed, credentialed, trained on the best evidence the field has — listens to her describe her fear, her family, her attachment to the only country on earth a Jew can reliably flee to, and hears a symptom. A colonized mind. A pathology to be treated.

She walked in a patient. She walked out a diagnosis.

I’ve been writing about that chair for months. Last week, for the first time, the federal government walked into the room.

This spring I wrote a piece for these pages making a prediction I badly hoped I was wrong about: There’s a Conversion Problem in Therapy. It’s Not the One You Think. The argument was simple, and bleak. The Supreme Court, in Chiles v. Salazar, had just made it harder for states to police what a licensed therapist says to a vulnerable patient — and that was about to matter for Jews in a way almost no one outside the Jewish world was discussing.

The regulatory path, I argued, was closing. The civil-rights path was the one with a future.

Last week the federal government proved the point. On June 17, the Department of Health and Human Services opened a civil-rights investigation into the American Psychological Association — the largest professional body in American mental health, and the federally recognized accreditor that decides which training programs get to call themselves legitimate.

I did not expect to be writing the sequel quite this fast.

What the Feds Are Actually Investigating

The investigation grew out of a sweeping complaint the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed last August — the group’s first complaint against a healthcare organization to trigger a federal probe. The allegations track, almost line for line, what Jewish clinicians have been describing to me since October 7: that the APA promoted, or declined to discipline, anti-Israel activism inside its affinity groups; that it encouraged “decolonizing therapy” frameworks treating Zionism as a pathology — “essentially a pathologizing of Zionism and Jewish identity,” in the complainant’s words — and that it threw up roadblocks to a Jewish affinity group forming while excusing inflammatory anti-Zionism from its Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African affinity group.

Here is the part worth slowing down for, because it is the whole ballgame.

HHS did not open a file because the APA holds bad opinions. It opened it under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act — the provision that extends Title VI’s ban on race and national-origin discrimination to any health program that takes federal money. The........

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