The JCRC tried to silence me for advocating for Palestinians, but I will not stop speaking out

I come from a family of poets and healers. My grandparents and great-grandparents were writers, jurists, teachers, and physicians. They were keenly attuned to issues of social justice and social development, because their generation was tasked with rebuilding Hyderabad after it was forcibly annexed into the newly formed Indian Union via military occupation in 1948. The stories and anecdotes of our grandparents are most often passed down to me and my cousins, not just as political history, but as a way of teaching us principles, such as humility, truth-speaking, and bravery. As a physician now targeted for defending Palestinian children’s healthcare rights, I have drawn upon the wisdom in these lessons.  

I work as a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist (CAP) for PrairieCare-Newport Health – the largest children’s mental health system in the U.S. (with the exception of the carceral system). As DEI Clinical Consultant, I used to educate my colleagues in trauma-informed care, which is best practice when caring for BIPOC youth. In July 2024, I delivered a clinical training in honor of BIPOC Mental Health Awareness Month on the historical roots of racial trauma within Black, Indigenous (Dakota), and Palestinian patient populations using a trauma-informed lens. Despite the talk being overwhelmingly well-received by healthcare workers and the talk setting a record for the largest number of attendees and registrants, this success was short-lived.  

Within hours, PrairieCare-Newport received an email from the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) calling the clinical education I offered “antisemitic,” and demanding PrairieCare-Newport “address today’s incident in a manner which is direct, transparent, and reassures both your Jewish stakeholders and the broader community that antisemitism, including the antisemitic content, which was delivered to your employees at today’s webinar, will not be tolerated.”

Within 24 hours of the JCRC’s email, the CEO of PrairieCare-Newport publicly apologized for and denounced the talk, without having watched it or read the positive feedback surveys from nearly 100 local mental healthcare workers who attended it. PrairieCare-Newport refused to release the recording of the talk. I was subsequently prohibited from offering any more externally-facing training or from teaching internally about Palestinian children’s mental health. As of this writing, I am no longer on the DEI/B Advisory Council, and my role as DEI Clinical Consultant has been effectively eliminated. 

What happens when doctors are silenced? By disrupting my work as a physician, teaching best practices when caring for BIPOC youth with complex trauma, the JCRC played a significant role in blocking access to equitable mental healthcare for BIPOC youth in Minnesota. Power structures – like the interplay between PrairieCare, Newport Health, and the JCRC – must be understood by physicians, because these are the systems that keep our patients and our communities unwell, uncared for, and unseen. This is why trauma-informed care is at the heart of my own work. Trauma-informed care establishes the importance of historical context, patients’ lived experiences, transparency in medical care to create legitimate spaces of psychological safety, and encourages patients to assert agency in their own care and healing.  More than 90% of my patients have complex trauma histories.  Structures of power that organize to eliminate clinical education that centers the voices of BIPOC patients are directly opposed to trauma-informed care. We can’t heal what we can’t name. 

I wasn’t familiar with the JCRC until they emailed my boss, but I have since learned that the JCRC is much like the Anti-Defamation League, whose bottom line is the propagation of pro-Israeli political interests and challenging any assertion of Palestinian life, rights, and, in this case, children’s mental healthcare. I learned that a few months earlier, the JCRC had a role in removing Dr. Raz Segal – renowned Jewish scholar of the Holocaust – from the University of Minnesota before he even started teaching. This loss of excellence in scholarship and teaching remains a deep loss for Minnesota. The JCRC also advocated against a permanent ceasefire in Gaza as the Minneapolis and St. Paul city councils deliberated and ultimately passed ceasefire resolutions in early 2024. Given these belligerent public stances by the JCRC, why did PrairieCare-Newport give the JCRC any leverage over clinical training and care? 

As a physician, I am trained to ask questions to understand root causes – biological, environmental, and structural – that compromise health. So I ask: Why does the JCRC have more impact on a hospital’s clinical care policy than a physician specializing in clinical care and training? Why does a clinical education training on BIPOC children’s mental health offend the JCRC? Why does the largest provider of mental health services for BIPOC youth – in the midst of a nationwide epidemic of teen suicide – listen to an outside non-clinical organization and ignore the local community that has repeatedly called for the release of my talk that taught evidence-based care? Why is the JCRC’s opinion more important than the needs of my BIPOC patients?

As a child advocate, this is infuriating. I completed four years of college and more than 10 years total of medical school, residency, and fellowship training before taking up my post as an attending physician in the Twin Cities. How is it that an organization that has nothing to do with BIPOC youth mental health can fire off one email, and the entire house of cards collapses? Are my patients’ lives so easily disposable?  

Let me then take this moment to honor my patients, because I see them in a way the JCRC never will. After caring for patients for nearly twenty years, I can tell you that it takes courage for our children to go through treatment for mental health struggles. It takes courage for them to be the first in their family to get care, to be away from their usual routines and friends, and activities, and to come to treatment day after day. My patients learn how to face their fears. How to articulate their feelings – even when those feelings are filled with losses and hurts. It takes immense courage for my patients’ parents to grieve the suicide attempts; they are trying to protect their teenagers from repeating. The JCRC does not value the courage my BIPOC patients and their families carry as they show up for psychiatric care, despite knowing the history of harm that medical institutions have done to their ancestors – sometimes grandparents and parents. I know this courage, because as a trauma-informed psychiatrist, I have these conversations with them at the start of their care. The moment when I hear the simultaneous realities of harm and hope gives me pause every time.  

Ultimately, there is nothing more important than the life of a child. Sounding the alarm on the JCRC in this moment as a CAP is similar to my role as a mandated reporter to protect children from harm. Mandated reporters often have to contend with hostile retaliation when calling attention to harm, because in doing so, we are refusing impunity to cause harm. I anticipate as much here. It doesn’t change my conclusion, which has important ramifications for clinical care and children’s lives. My colleagues have a right to high-quality clinical training that helps them care for their patients. All of our children – particularly Palestinian children enduring the impacts of genocide on their families and community today – have a right to be cared for by informed and trained mental healthcare workers without the disruption of the JCRC or any other structure of harm.