JTA — For decades, Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist whose ideas about how the body records pain helped millions find language for their suffering, has been regarded as the world’s leading expert in the study of trauma. His 2014 best-selling book, “The Body Keeps the Score,” turned him into an unlikely celebrity, a household name among therapists, yoga teachers and patients.

But earlier this month, at a bucolic retreat in the Hudson Valley, the 82-year-old van der Kolk triggered trauma and suffering among many of his students with strident comments on Israel.

According to interviews with several participants as well their written accounts, van der Kolk strayed from his course on trauma and neuroscience to share his political views on a variety of current events, including the war in Gaza. They say he compared Israelis to Nazis, and doubled down on the analogy after being challenged by an audience member who told him she was the descendant of Holocaust survivors.

“At what was meant to be a trauma workshop, the person leading it inflicted fresh trauma on me and on several other Jewish attendees,” Avinoam Lerner, a Boston-based trauma recovery coach, said in an interview.

Van der Kolk’s remarks prompted several of the roughly 125 attendees to walk out and later to lodge complaints with the Omega Institute, the retreat center that hosted the event. Omega, a prominent global hub for alternative healing and spiritual practice, responded swiftly, condemning van der Kolk’s comments and announcing he would no longer be invited to teach there.

“Dr. van der Kolk made inappropriate and antisemitic comments that are deeply troubling and entirely inconsistent with Omega’s core values and community standards,” the institute said in a statement Friday.

Van der Kolk sent an apology letter to participants, retracting his claim about the war in Gaza and tracing the reaction he shared to his early life. He was born in the Hague in 1943.

“I want to express my deep regret for talking about what is happening in Gaza being........

© The Times of Israel