3 Mantras for Culturally Safe Healthcare For Jewish Canadians
for Clinical and Academic Health Care Leaders
Culturally safe healthcare for Jewish Canadians is not a niche concern.
It is a test of whether the people in our systems can apply their stated values consistently—even when the issues are complex, politically charged, or uncomfortable.
If cultural safety is defined by the patient’s experience, then the standard is clear:
Jewish patients—and healthcare professionals—must be able to enter clinical and academic spaces without having to manage, explain, or defend their identity.
Here are Three Mantras To Help Support Clinical and Academic Health Care Leaders
Canadian physicians with a worldview of shared humanity and universal human rights can deliver culturally safe healthcare to Jewish Canadians using cultural humility; a basic knowledge of Jewish history, demographics, and practices; an approach to anti-Jewish racism; an openness to potential for implicit bias against Jewish people; and a trauma-informed approach.
There is no contradiction for physicians between providing culturally safe healthcare to all Jewish Canadians and inclusive spaces for all Jewish physician colleagues, and supporting and advocating a Middle East peace that equally values the safety, security, and rights of all peoples in that region.
For over a century, the Arab/Palestinian-Jewish/Israeli conflict has caused immense and ongoing acute, chronic, and intergenerational trauma for both Arabs and Jews in the Middle East and around the world. Canada and other liberal democracies acknowledge the rights to security, safety, and dignity of all peoples in the Middle East, including national self-determination for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and for Jews in Israel; and support peace to be achieved with the least amount of further harm possible for the millions of people in each group.
The most effective way for Canadian society to confront anti-Jewish racism is by strengthening what has served this country well for decades: commitment to universal human rights, liberalism, multiculturalism, and pluralism.
This approach is strengthened by Holocaust education that teaches both authoritarianism in general (“man’s inhumanity to man”) and the history of centuries of recurrent targeting of Jewish people in specific (“man’s inhumanity to Jews”).
The corollary to this approach is that leadership in confronting anti-Jewish racism must come from all leaders, and especially from non-Jewish leaders. Historically and sociologically, anti-Jewish racism does not originate within the Jewish community; it is imposed upon Jews by external actors who hold deeply distorted beliefs about who Jews are and impose external Western constructs on an ancient people with its unique combination of peoplehood, ethnicity, Indigeneity, and religion.