Shortly after the October 7 massacre, Prof. Hedy Wald sat in her office, leafing through a stack of medical journals that had piled up on her desk. Her attention caught on one article—not a scientific study, but what she describes as a “political indictment cloaked in academic language.
” This was no isolated incident. Over the following weeks, more articles with sharply anti-Israel rhetoric, and at times even explicit antisemitic undertones, appeared in major medical journals. 4 View gallery Pro-Palestinian rally in San Francisco ( Photo: Editorial Credit Phil Pasquini shutterstock ) Prof.
Wald, an expert in family medicine with extensive training from institutions including Ben-Gurion University, Harvard and currently Brown University in Rhode Island, realized a line had been crossed. Academia, a realm she had always considered a sanctuary for knowledge and objectivity, was turning into a political battleground. “This cannot continue,” she thought.
Initially, she responded with letters to journal editors—some were published, while others were omitted. But the internal pressure continued. These articles, multiplying in frequency, accused Israel of genocide, with some even equating the silence of the medical community with complicity in Nazi crimes.
“This is not only misinformation,” she says, “but it actively contributes to creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and researchers in medical faculties.” As someone who teaches medical ethics and de.