My first therapist was not Jewish. He had greying hair and glasses and looked like he was in constant pain. That was good enough for me. I told him about my anxiety, and he peered at me and made compassionate, sometimes astute, comments.
When Judaism came up, I offered quick translations — Yom Kippur (“that’s when you fast”), Jewish day school (“instilled me with moral values but didn’t let me wear lip gloss!”). We were in New York City, so my therapist probably did not need me to act as a live version of My Jewish Learning. I figured that our differences didn’t matter: I wasn’t in therapy to talk about the childhood trauma I endured when my family didn’t observe Shemini Atzeret. I was in therapy to treat my anxiety.
My second therapist wasn’t Jewish either. If she subscribed to any faith, it had something to do with insurance reimbursement. In our intake appointment she screamed at me for not bringing the right paperwork, and I spilled tears on her ancient fax machine.
My third therapist wasn’t Jewish, but my fourth therapist was. In fact, she was an acquaintance of my mother’s.
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“We’ve met!” she said, in our first appointment. “At a seder.” I tried to remember meeting my therapist at a seder. Had I once dipped parsley into the same saltwater dish as this woman? And now I was going to allow her to rearrange my mind? I had, and I was.
The Jewish therapist had many of the qualities you would expect: she worked on the Upper West Side and wore capacious sweaters and statement jewelry. She called me “sweetie.” She took an exuberant, maternal interest in my professional success.
I have now worked with nearly a dozen therapists, thanks to a combination of moving, my own fickleness and insurance coverage. Looking back on my years in therapy, I have tried to identify a pattern: is it better to have a therapist who shares my religion, my heritage, my background and my curl pattern? Do our commonalities lead to a better rapport, hastening the reduction of my anxiety symptoms? Could our similarities become a source of tension and resentment?
Research has weighed in on this question. Significant psychological literature has been devoted to the concept of the “therapeutic alliance,” a Dungeons & Dragons-sounding term which conveys the sense of partnership between the client and the therapist. This alliance, some research has found, is a strong predictor of success in therapy.
A particularly strong contributor to therapeutic alliance, according to two studies from 2023, is “social identification,” meaning the sense of belonging to the same in-groups. This is measured by answering questions like, “I identify with my therapist,” and, “My therapist and I have a lot in common with each other.” If you and your therapist both identify as Jewish, you may feel social identification with each other.
But social identification isn’t limited to religion or ethnicity — your therapist could establish it by demonstrating that the two of you both identify as matcha drinkers or Disney adults. And even if you prefer to confide in a fellow Jew, they may not be able to help you more than anyone else. One small study that focused on Orthodox Jewish patients found that those patients did equally well in therapy whether their therapists were Orthodox Jews or not.
A few years after I worked with my Upper West Side Jewish therapist, availability and proximity led me to a therapist let’s call Caleb. Caleb was young, not Jewish and often wore Hawaiian shirts. We belonged to a number of the same in-groups: we were both millennials, and we were both pursuing art, outside of therapy. By October 7, 2023, he had been my therapist for just a few weeks. After a tentative back-and-forth and a lot of hedging, we agreed that we were both disgusted by the callous response to Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians by some on the left, and by the way many on the right and center were justifying the Israeli government’s mass killings of Palestinian civilians.
Pretty good for a small town therapist who wears Hawaiian shirts, I thought.
That sense of therapeutic alliance didn’t last long. After Caleb found out I was Jewish, he asked, breathlessly, whether I was descended from survivors of the Holocaust. I could see that he hoped he had unlocked a key to my anxiety by introducing me to epigenetics — the theory that trauma can become encoded in a person’s DNA, passed down generation to generation.
It was a tender moment, deflating my therapist by sharing that most of my family arrived in the United States in the 1800s. I could see Caleb was let down.
“I think my family experienced some pogroms!” I said, trying to placate him. “Definitely, some pogroms.”
But besides that one Holocaust hiccup, I’ve never had a problem working with a non-Jewish therapist. It may help that therapy has Jewish roots. What we recognize as modern therapeutic styles and techniques were developed in great part by Jews, for a clientele that included a lot of Jews. You could rewrite Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song” with the names of famous Jewish psychologists (Freud, Frankl, Maslow, Milgram, Maté — the list goes on). Of course, a therapist could be ignorant or antisemitic, just like any other professional, but when I walk into a therapist’s office I feel, in a way, like I’m walking into a place where a Jew-ish artform is being practiced, the same way I do when I enter a theater.
Cathy Park Hong’s book “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning” opens with a recollection of Hong seeking a therapist. “I wanted a Korean American therapist because I wouldn’t have to explain myself as much,” she writes.
I can see how, for many people from marginalized identities, having a therapist who shares your background would reduce the pain of having to make yourself legible.
I’ve realized, though, that I like to explain myself. I prefer it. I like that my non-Jewish therapists don’t come pre-loaded with centuries of feelings about tradition and ritual and peoplehood. Jewish belief and practice is so prismatic, so personal, so intensely specific and charmingly contradictory that it is absurd to think that any Jewish therapist will have any innate understanding of me, or I of them.
If there was a difference between the Jewish Upper West Side therapist and my non-Jewish therapists it is that the Jewish therapist felt profoundly familiar. She wasn’t just Jewish — she was an American Jewish woman from a Reform background. Probably when we went to synagogue we read from the same loose, poetic translations in the Mishkan Tefilla. When I cried she said, “I see you’re emotional right now” in a sympathetic tone, which made me enraged. It actually reminded me, a little bit, of my mother.
And still, I ended up trying to convey my particular brand of Judaism by saying things like, “My family uses a separate set of dishes for Passover, but we drive on Shabbat and we all vote for different people in democratic primaries.”
Therapy, like Jewish practice, invites practitioners to make intensely personal choices: behavioral vs. psychodynamic, telehealth vs. in person, crying the entire time vs. crying in occasional, unexpected bursts. I don’t need a Jewish therapist to form a strong alliance. I won’t rule it out, though — seder is coming up soon, and if I meet a great Jewish therapist, I’ll see if we can form an alliance.
