This workshop explores cultural humility in social work practice with Jewish clients and colleagues by clarifying what it means to be Jewish as a multidimensional identity that can include religion, culture, ethnicity, ancestry, and peoplehood. Participants will learn about the diversity within Jewish communities and traditions, and how these differences shape lived experience, family systems, community belonging, and clinical context.

Participants will learn to identify manifestations of antisemitism across clinical, institutional, and community settings and analyze how these experiences impact Jewish clients’ mental health and well being. Topics include comparative suffering and the minimization of Jewish pain, the politicization of Jewish identity and the harmful conflation of Jewish identity with political positions, and the double standards that can emerge in professional and community spaces. The training connects these dynamics to clinical and organizational outcomes, including minority stress, identity destabilization, anxiety, grief, hypervigilance, relational strain, and diminished trust in systems of care.

The workshop is practical and application focused. Using a trauma informed and culturally humble lens, participants will build skills to engage more effectively with Jewish clients and colleagues, strengthen therapeutic alliance and organizational trust, and respond in clinically sensitive and ethically grounded ways when bias, double standards, or invalidation arise. Participants will also examine how personal and systemic assumptions about Jewish identity and antisemitism can shape clinical judgment, workplace climate, and helping relationships.