Medicine has a serious antisemitism problem. It especially has a problem among doctors, and a lot of that problem is concentrated among doctors educated overseas.

We identified a set of over 700 people from all walks of life profiled by the organization Stop Antisemitism for displaying flagrant hostility toward Jews and Israel. We found that health professionals were more than 2.5 times more likely to be found among antisemites than their share of the workforce. Doctors were almost 26 times overrepresented in the list of antisemites relative to their prevalence in the workforce. And half of those Jew-hating doctors received their medical degrees abroad.

The fact that Jew-hatred has found a perch among highly educated doctors and other health professionals runs counter to the conventional explanations for antisemitism. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other legacy Jewish organizations, antisemitism is born of ignorance, which must be fought through education. As ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt frames the issue, antisemitism intersects with “ignorance and conspiratorial thinking … Ultimately, any strategy for protecting the Jewish community must include education at its core—we can’t fight hate without changing hearts and minds.”

Both the past and present put the lie to Greenblatt’s hypothesis. Campus Hamasniks at Columbia and Harvard are radical and morally depraved, but they aren’t uneducated. Nor were the architects of the Holocaust, inheritors of a German cultural tradition that was arguably unmatched in its yearning for modernity.

The challenge posed by foreign-trained doctors is that they arrive in the U.S. after having largely completed their moral formation, sometimes in political systems that explicitly promote antisemitism.