By: Fern Sidman

A simmering debate over representation, identity, and the boundaries of ethnic recognition within American professional institutions has erupted into public controversy, as a coalition of national racial and ethnic psychological associations moved to oppose the formal recognition of an Association of Jewish Psychologists within the American Psychological Association. The dispute, now reverberating across academic and communal circles, has become emblematic of a broader cultural conflict over who is deemed entitled to collective recognition in an era increasingly shaped by identity politics. VIN News reported on Sunday of the unfolding controversy, situating it within a wider national conversation about antisemitism, professional inclusion, and the evolving grammar of race and ethnicity in the United States.

At the heart of the matter lies the decision by the Coalition of National Racial and Ethnic Psychological Associations, known as CONREPA, to issue a statement rejecting the bid to establish an Association of Jewish Psychologists as an official Ethnic Psychological Association within the APA. The coalition, which represents psychologists affiliated with Black, Native American, Latinx, Asian American, and Arab/Middle Eastern/North African communities, argued that Jewish psychologists are not underrepresented within the APA and that most Jewish Americans identify as white.

In the coalition’s formulation, to extend ethnic recognition to Jewish psychologists would constitute a conceptual error, one that “conflates religion, race, and ethnicity” in ways that obscure what it characterized as the historical and contemporary oppression of people of color.

VIN News, in its coverage of the statement, underscored the rhetorical weight of this claim. By framing Jewish identity primarily through the prism of whiteness, CONREPA effectively positioned Jews as beneficiaries of “white privilege,” thereby disqualifying them from the category of underrepresented ethnic groups in need of institutional advocacy. The coalition further argued that Jewish psychologists of color already have access to representation through existing EPAs, suggesting that the creation of a separate Jewish body would be redundant, if not distorting, in its implications for the APA’s stated commitments to racial justice.

Yet this framing has provoked a forceful response from Jewish communal organizations, most notably the Anti-Defamation League. VIN News has chronicled the ADL’s condemnation of CONREPA’s position as “indefensible,” discriminatory, and detached from empirical reality. The ADL’s chief executive officer, Jonathan Greenblatt, characterized the coalition’s reasoning as both factually flawed and morally injurious, arguing that it erases the lived experiences of Jewish psychologists who encounter antisemitism within professional settings and denies them the legitimacy of collective self-organization.

The controversy has unfolded against a backdrop of heightened sensitivity to antisemitism within the APA itself. The VIN News report noted that Jewish members of the association have long expressed concern about a hostile climate, citing past expressions of sympathy for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel and allegations of harassment directed at Jewish professionals. These grievances have now been amplified by the existence of a congressional investigation into antisemitism within the APA, a development that lends the current dispute a dimension of political gravity beyond the confines of professional self-governance.

For its part, the APA has taken steps in recent years to address concerns raised by Jewish members, including convening listening sessions and establishing a Collaborative of Jewish Psychologists. However, as VIN News reported, the ADL has criticized these initiatives as insufficient, pointing in particular to the APA’s silence in the wake of CONREPA’s statement. In the ADL’s assessment, the failure of the APA’s leadership to publicly repudiate the coalition’s position amounts to a tacit endorsement of a framework that marginalizes Jewish identity and minimizes antisemitism as a legitimate axis of discrimination.

The roots of this dispute reach into deeper theoretical tensions within contemporary discourses on race and ethnicity. The coalition’s invocation of the APA’s 2021 apology for its historic failure to address racism against people of color—an apology that notably did not mention antisemitism or religious discrimination—highlights a fault line in how different forms of prejudice are hierarchized within institutional reckonings. The VIN News report observed that this omission has been interpreted by many Jewish observers as emblematic of a broader tendency to treat antisemitism as peripheral to conversations about systemic injustice, despite the long and violent history of anti-Jewish persecution.

What renders the current episode particularly fraught is the way it exposes competing narratives of vulnerability and privilege. CONREPA’s position rests on a conception of oppression that centers race, construed largely through a binary of whiteness and non-whiteness. Within this schema, Jews who are phenotypically or socially perceived as white are categorized as beneficiaries of racial privilege, regardless of the distinct historical trajectory of antisemitism or the transnational character of Jewish peoplehood. VIN News has reported that critics of this approach argue that it collapses Jewish identity into a simplistic racial category, erasing the complex interplay of ethnicity, religion, culture, and collective memory that has defined Jewish existence across centuries and continents.

The ADL’s rejoinder, as presented by VIN News, insists that Jewish identity cannot be reduced to a matter of religious affiliation alone, nor can it be subsumed under a monolithic category of whiteness. Jews, the ADL contends, constitute a people with a shared historical experience of marginalization, displacement, and targeted violence, experiences that continue to shape contemporary realities of antisemitism in both overt and subtle forms. From this perspective, the bid to establish an Association of Jewish Psychologists is not an attempt to appropriate the language of ethnic marginalization, but rather an effort to secure institutional recognition of a community whose specific vulnerabilities are often misunderstood or dismissed.

The endorsement of CONREPA’s statement by major national associations—including the Asian American Psychological Association, the American Arab, Middle Eastern and North African Psychological Association, the National Latinx Psychological Association, the Association of Black Psychologists, and the Society of Indian Psychologists—has further complicated the terrain. The VIN News report noted that this broad coalition of signatories lends the opposition a collective authority that makes the dispute more than an isolated disagreement; it becomes a reflection of how different minority communities negotiate the boundaries of solidarity and difference within professional institutions.

For some observers, the episode reveals the unintended consequences of an increasingly rigid identity taxonomy. When institutional recognition is tethered to narrowly construed categories of race and ethnicity, communities whose identities do not map neatly onto these frameworks may find themselves excluded from formal mechanisms of representation. The VIN News report highlighted the concern that such exclusions risk reproducing hierarchies of recognition, wherein certain forms of marginalization are deemed more legitimate than others, not on the basis of lived experience, but according to theoretical orthodoxies.

The implications of this debate extend beyond the immediate question of whether an Association of Jewish Psychologists will be recognized within the APA. They touch on the broader issue of how professional bodies conceptualize diversity, equity, and inclusion in a pluralistic society marked by overlapping identities and intersecting histories of discrimination. As the VIN News report observed, the current controversy underscores the difficulty of constructing institutional frameworks that can accommodate the multiplicity of American identities without collapsing them into reductive categories.

In calling on the APA to formally recognize the Association of Jewish Psychologists, the ADL has framed the issue as a test of the association’s commitment to genuine inclusivity. Recognition, in this view, is not merely symbolic; it confers legitimacy, resources, and a platform for addressing the specific concerns of a community within the broader professional ecosystem. For many Jewish psychologists, the denial of such recognition is experienced not simply as a bureaucratic setback, but as a repudiation of their collective identity within a field that professes to value psychological well-being and social justice.

As the APA weighs its response, the controversy has already achieved a wider resonance, becoming a proxy for debates about antisemitism, identity politics, and the contours of belonging in contemporary America. The VIN News report has framed the episode as emblematic of a moment in which the language of inclusion is itself contested terrain, subject to competing interpretations and moral claims. Whether the APA ultimately chooses to challenge CONREPA’s position or to uphold it will signal not only how it understands Jewish identity, but also how it envisions the architecture of diversity within its ranks.

In the final analysis, the dispute over the Association of Jewish Psychologists reveals the fragility of professional solidarity in an age of polarized identity discourse. It exposes the tension between universalist aspirations and particularist claims, between the desire to rectify historical injustices and the risk of creating new forms of exclusion.