When Robert Friedberg reached out to me with the idea of creating a handbook of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for Jewish American youth, he wasn’t asking whether such a book already existed. He knew it did not.

Bob is a leading expert in CBT with children and adolescents. He knew the field had been thoughtfully adapted for many populations. He also knew that when it came to Jewish children and teenagers, the shelf was essentially empty. There were scattered articles and thoughtful clinicians, but no comprehensive book examining how Jewish culture, tradition, faith, family, history, peoplehood and contemporary antisemitism shape the emotional lives of Jewish American youth.

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Bob knew that I wasn’t (and still I am not) a CBT expert. He reached out to me as a Jewish knowledge partner. He also brought together clinicians and scholars with deep grounding in both psychology and Jewish life, and they had a great deal to say about anxiety, depression, eating disorders, family relationships and the psychological toll of antisemitism, as well as the Jewish stories and practices that could help young people make sense of what they were experiencing.

The material, the expertise, the clinical imagination — all of it was there. What had been missing was the recognition that this knowledge needed to be shared.

That absence says something about how American Jews have come to understand ourselves.

Over generations, we worked hard to integrate into American society, and we have largely succeeded. But somewhere in that story, many of us lost sight of a second truth: we remain a distinctive cultural minority. Jewish identity increasingly came to be treated as a matter of personal religion rather than culture — something other communities had, and something other professionals needed training for. We were integrated, successful and often misperceived as white, and the assumption followed that no distinctive Jewish context needed understanding. Sometimes we absorbed that assumption ourselves.

The missing handbook wasn’t only a failure of the behavioral health field. It was evidence that the Jewish community hadn’t consistently insisted this attention was necessary. We’d grown used to walking into secular institutions and translating ourselves each time: explaining that Jewish identity isn’t only religious, that our relationship to ritual and Israel doesn’t fit familiar categories, that something abstract to others might be deeply personal to a Jewish teenager.

The Oct. 7 attacks didn’t create this problem: it exposed it. Jewish children and teenagers discovered that the adults and institutions around them lacked a framework for their experience: grief interrogated politically, antisemitism recognized only in its most traditional forms, well meaning professionals fluent about other communities but not about Jews. The predominant problem wasn’t hostility; it was a lack of language. Good intentions can’t substitute for cultural knowledge, and a clinician can’t explore the meaning a young person makes of an experience without understanding the world in which that meaning formed.

This matters especially in CBT, which begins with the recognition that our thoughts and interpretations shape how we experience events. Culture is part of that interpretive process. A Jewish child doesn’t enter therapy as a generic young person who happens to light Hanukkah candles. She may carry family memories, communal loyalties and a relationship to Jewish history that shape how she understands danger, belonging and hope. A culturally responsive approach doesn’t assume every Jewish patient is the same. It knows enough to ask.

As we worked on the book, it became clear that Jewish tradition didn’t need to be artificially attached to CBT. The conversation was already waiting to happen. Both traditions take seriously how our interpretations shape our lives. Both place questions at the center of growth. The Talmudic davar acher, another interpretation, trains the mind to resist the assumption that our first reading is the only one possible. The biblical “Ayeka?” (Where are you?) calls a person toward self awareness. Cheshbon hanefesh, an honest accounting of the soul, makes change possible rather than trapping us in guilt. Even na’aseh v’nishma (we will do and we will understand) anticipates a core insight of behavioral therapy: sometimes action precedes insight.

None of this means inserting a Hebrew phrase into a session for decoration. The purpose is to meet young people within the language and structures of meaning that already shape their lives.

Years before this project, I visited a Buddhist temple in Singapore and heard a monk speak about pushing suffering away. The phrase stayed with me because it felt so foreign to the tradition that formed me. In Judaism, suffering is rarely pushed away. It’s wrestled with and given voice. Jacob wrestles through the night; Job protests; Jeremiah laments; the Psalmist cries from the depths. Cultures don’t just supply different holidays and foods. They carry different instincts about pain, healing and what it means to become whole.

The handbook now exists. It brings together 26 contributors from 22 institutions in a remarkable gathering of clinical and Jewish wisdom. But one book doesn’t resolve what its absence revealed; it can’t replace research not yet conducted, or change training programs where Jewish identity remains peripheral, or guarantee that Jewish young people will meet clinicians prepared to see the cultural dimensions of their lives.

Here lies a critical challenge for Jewish leaders and funders. A community that doesn’t examine itself through a cultural lens won’t commission the research or build the institutions to serve it. Mental health is one example. It should make us ask where else the shelves are empty. Where have we mistaken successful integration for cultural neutrality? What are we now scrambling to build after Oct. 7 that should have existed long before?

We need to fund direct services at this moment of growing distress, but we also need to fund the knowledge infrastructure beneath them: research, training, curricula, clinical tools and durable partnerships between Jewish institutions and the universities and hospitals that shape American public life.

The goal isn’t to pull Jews away from the larger society, or to reduce Jewish identity to vulnerability, or to let antisemitism become the only lens through which our young people are understood. The goal is a fuller, more accurate description of who we are: an American Jewish community that is profoundly integrated and yet meaningfully distinctive. Those truths don’t contradict each other. Our belonging doesn’t depend on convincing ourselves we’re no longer a minority.

The most important thing about our handbook may not be that it now exists, but rather that, for so long, it didn’t. The empty shelf was trying to tell us something. It’s time we learn to notice the others that need to be filled.

Rabbi Nico Socolovsky is an educator, writer and Jewish communal leader whose work explores Torah, Israel, ethics and emotional life. Born in Buenos Aires and ordained in Jerusalem, he is co-editor of and contributor to the Handbook of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with Jewish American Youth (Springer, 2026).