Dr. Phil delivers remarks during a National Day of Prayer event in the White House Rose Garden, May 1, 2025. Photo courtesy of Joyce N. Boghosian/White House.

By VITA FELLIG

JNS

The television host Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, has received death threats, been swatted repeatedly and faced an onslaught of hate mail for supporting Israel publicly since Oct. 7.

“You get to a point where you have to decide what really matters in life, and right and wrong is not a relative term,” he told JNS, shortly before taping an episode of his show about Jew-hatred with Eric Adams, the New York City mayor.

“What happened on Oct. 7 was wrong at every level,” McGraw told JNS. “It wasn’t an act of war. It was a war crime.”

My Fight

The backlash has strengthened Dr. Phil’s resolve to stand up for the Jewish state. “The Jews’ fight is my fight,” he told JNS. “If somebody is picking on a Jew with anti-Semitism, and I’m standing there watching it and do nothing—that’s bystander liability in my opinion.”

“I’m as guilty as the person picking on him if I don’t step up and say something and do something,” McGraw told JNS.

The talk show host held a conversation, recorded live, with Adams on Sunday, June 8, at the Tribeca Synagogue in Manhattan, where the mayor broke the news that he has signed an executive order recognizing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred and urging the City Council to codify it into law.

Assault On Values

Dr. Phil told JNS prior to the taping that Hamas’s terrorism represents a broader assault not just on Israel but on core American values.

“Right now, the focus is on Israel and Jews, but if you study Hamas at all and some of the other terrorist organizations, they’re after the West,” he told JNS. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re Jewish, Christian, atheist or somewhere in between. This isn’t a Jewish issue. It is a human issue.”

Recent anti-Semitic attacks in Washington, D.C., and Boulder, Colo., have been downplayed by the mainstream media, according to McGraw.

“I fear that what has happened is this whole dynamic has been way over-simplified, particularly for a lot of young people that have just boiled this down to a narrative of oppressed and the oppressor,” he told JNS.

Oversimplified

“The avant-garde thing to do today is to stand up for the underdog, stand up for the oppressed, and they don’t dig in deep enough to find out what ‘oppressed’ really means,” said McGraw, who holds a clinical psychology doctorate.

“People jump on this idea and find themselves celebrating and cheering on a terrorist organization, who are murderers and absolute psychopaths, and you kind of get the world PR machine behind it,” he said.

McGraw acknowledged that the death toll in Gaza is disturbing to the wider public but said that the blame rests squarely with Hamas for provoking a war against Israel.

“I hate that children are losing their lives over there, who didn’t get a vote,” he told JNS. “But Hamas knew exactly what was going to happen.”

“The Palestinians say, ‘Well, there’s been more deaths in Palestine, so they must be on the right side,’” he said. “Well, there were more deaths in Nazi Germany too, but that didn’t put them on the right side of history.”

This same oversimplified, cultural dynamic has fueled Jew-hatred on elite college campuses, driven in part by biased professors and a broader, left-leaning bias within academia, according to Dr. Phil.

“If you see something happening in a pattern, I’ll promise you someone in authority is either eliciting, maintaining or allowing that behavior,” he told JNS. “There are a lot of students at Harvard and Princeton and Penn that are really working hard to get an education, but then you’ve got a small group, I call it the ‘tyranny of the fringe,’ that I think have been misled.”

‘No Quit In Them’

During his visit to Israel after Oct. 7, Dr. Phil was struck both by the trauma of war and the everyday strength of Israelis living under constant threat.

“The resilience of the people is absolutely astounding,” he told JNS. “People ask me about PTSD in Israel, and I say there’s nothing ‘post’ about it. This is something they live with every single day.” (PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder.)

McGraw described arriving in the Jewish state and heading out for a meal after a long flight, only to find himself in the middle of a children’s festival.

“There was music, crafts, games like you’d see in any American mall, and in the background, you could hear explosions in the distance,” he told JNS. “But the kids were laughing. The families were living. They’ve got no quit in them.”

That kind of emotional fortitude would surprise many Americans, who only see biased headlines about the Jewish state, according to Dr. Phil.

“These people wake up with missiles being lobbed at them, with suicide bombers, with people across the fence whose entire purpose in life is for them to be dead,” he said. “And yet they keep going. It’s humbling.”