Ask A Genius 1365: Ethics, Therapy, and Israel-Gaza: Bias, Counselling, and Cultural Reckonings

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/08

Rick Rosner discusses decades of couples counselling with his wife Carole, emphasizing the importance of therapist impartiality and ethical neutrality. He critiques political intrusion in therapy, sharing personal anecdotes and concerns about residual checks in the entertainment industry. Rosner also explores moral disorientation among American Jews regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza, drawing parallels with historical propaganda and current political dilemmas. The dialogue reflects on therapy’s role in navigating personal and societal challenges, from hearing loss to geopolitical crises. The conversation concludes with reflections on generational shifts, technology in education, and evolving cultural expectations around knowledge and responsibility. 

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, in your opinion, if you were to step into a therapeutic space—including marriage counselling—would you consider that space ethically intended to be impartial and apolitical, centred on the client’s narratives? Or should it allow the therapist to, implicitly or explicitly, impose their ideology or politics?

Rick Rosner: Carole and I have been in couples counselling for—I do not know—thirty-two years. Not because we have major problems. We have small things to work through, but mostly because we have good insurance and can do it. It is a helpful space to talk things over.

It also shows that we’re committed to the relationship. Anyway, I’ve had much experience with couples counselling. This is the fourth couple’s counsellor I’ve worked with. The first one was back in college, with a different girlfriend. He was terrible—he didn’t know what he was doing, and he was biased. It turned into three against one because the counsellor had an apprentice observing, and all three of them—my girlfriend, the counsellor, and the apprentice—sided against me.

I wasn’t the sole problem. Sure, I was part of the issue—both partners usually are. However, you’re not supposed to treat therapy as a blame game. It is about building communication skills and addressing issues constructively, which did not happen in that setting. Still, I learned a lot from that experience—even if it meant getting railroaded in those sessions.

When Carole and I went into counselling, we eventually left one of our therapists after a few years, because, frankly, I was “winning” the sessions. And you’re not supposed to “win” in therapy. But I knew how to approach it, and I started having more of my concerns addressed. So yes, a good therapist should remain unbiased and avoid taking sides.

Did I say this was the third therapist? It is the fourth. One was an older gentleman who had been practicing for over sixty years. He passed away during COVID. He was extraordinary—he may have started in the 1970s or earlier.

Our current therapist is solid, though we do not bring her major issues, mainly because we do not have any major ones.

We talk about politics in sessions now because politics has become part of our stressful landscape. She’s not immune to worrying about herself. Once you’ve been in therapy for as long as Carol and I have, over thirty years, you get comfortable enough to broaden the scope of what you talk about.

We’ll ask questions like, “Are your other clients worried about this or that?” Not about specific people, of course—just to understand how others might feel in the broader context.

For example, television and film production in Los Angeles is down by approximately 40% since the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. It is a rough time. Jobs are scarce, and people are under much stress. Have I told you about residual checks? 

So, you should receive residual payments when a show you worked on—whether as a writer, actor, director, or in any other union-covered role—is rebroadcast, streamed, or reused in specific ways. These are essentially royalties: a portion of the revenue generated from content reuse goes to the creators and performers who helped make the show. It’s a vital part of compensation for many professionals in the industry.

In the past, the show I worked on for network rebroadcasts was the most aired on ABC. If it reran on ABC, I’d get a check for a couple hundred bucks, sometimes more, just for the rerun. Lately, I’ve been getting stacks of checks for streaming rebroadcasts. In the past couple of months, I’ve probably received close to 700 or 800 checks—no exaggeration —but they’re for streaming platforms—Netflix, Hulu—I don’t even know where it’s airing anymore.

These checks are literally for 2 to 9 cents apiece. Carole looked at 42 of them. She goes through them, signs them for me, and takes them to the bank. She’s nice that way. But those 42 checks totalled exactly two dollars. Two actual fucking dollars.

If everyone is getting checks like that—and I assume they are—then people are screwed. You can’t survive on that. I was once able to pay off our house and cover our kids’ college tuition with residual checks. That’s no longer possible.

I worked on that show—a daily, nightly show—for nearly twelve years. We’re talking about 200 episodes yearly for around eleven and a half years. That’s roughly 2,300 episodes, all eligible for rebroadcast residuals. So, yeah, I’m getting a lot of checks.

But if you’re working on a sitcom or a drama where a season is 10 or 13 episodes, compared to my 2,300 episodes, you’re not getting 42 checks. You might get seven. And at a dime apiece, that’s 70 cents.

That is why we have heard about people with objectively reasonable, even enviable jobs, like writing for a television show, still needing to drive for Uber at night. Or the story of a TV writer, with an actual writing job, sleeping in his car.

Things are seriously messed up now. So yes, we talk about stuff like that with our counsellor. She acknowledges that people are generally worried, especially about what’s happening to production in Los Angeles.

We also share our political leanings with her, and she doesn’t go out of her way to hide hers, which is fine with us. Someone counselling beginners or someone new to therapy might feel the need to be more guarded, but we can handle that kind of transparency in the counselling space.

When people first start couples counselling, they tend to be defensive. Part of the work is simply getting them used to therapy so it can be productive. If you’re afraid you’re going to get screwed over in counseling—or feel like the therapist is helping your partner build a case against you—any of that dynamic makes counseling unproductive.

However, we’ve been doing this long enough to discuss issues without making rookie mistakes.

There’s one thing I plan to bring up soon. I already called Carol on it—she gets frustrated and snippy with me about my hearing loss, which honestly isn’t even that bad. You’ve dealt with my hearing loss.

You have seen its extent, right? I will tell you to talk louder. It is not terrible, right? When the heater’s running in the house, I’ll say, “The heater’s going—can you talk louder?” But she starts getting pissy with me. I’m like, “You can’t—” and I told her I would get a hearing aid in the next couple of months. I’ve already got the prescription for it.

But I said to her, “You can’t act like this. It is bullshit.” Part of what counselling allows is raising issues outside the session. So I could call her on it and say, “I’m feeling like you’re being short with me.”

You have to frame it like that—it’s on you, how you’re feeling. You can’t say, “You’re being mean to me.” No. You say, “I feel like you’re being snippy.” It must be phrased from your emotional experience, so it’s not accusatory. That way, it opens up a conversation about whether the feeling is grounded. Even then, it’s not about justification.

You’re having a feeling—what can we do about it? So I said, “I feel like you’re being snippy with me about my hearing loss.” I just turned 65. I don’t want to become some old guy who was debilitated for being debilitated. I have been lucky not to be debilitated, but that will not last forever.

I made my case. Carole agreed to try to be less outwardly frustrated. I’ll bring it up again in counselling so we can discuss it more because I didn’t get to make my second point. We were going through the airport, and Carole had a nasty piece of pizza on the plane—we think that is what did it. She started feeling sick. She’s had diarrhea since we got back. It’s been three days—nonstop. Terrible.

So I could not finish what I wanted to say, so instead of getting pissy about my hearing issues, just work with me. Speak louder. Do not yell from the other room. If the TV is on, give me a second to mute it. It is basic stuff. That is what counselling is for—among other things—to work through stuff like that.

As for politics—your counselor would have to be a real fucking asshole to try to convert you politically during counseling. That’s not what therapy is for. But I’m sure some counsellors are creeps or just bad at their jobs, and that kind of stuff might come up.

However, before we started rolling, this is especially relevant because you mentioned this was a counsellor in a Jewish setting.

Jacobsen: So there are two ways politicization can show up in an American, generic, general-public mindset.

One way is from the left: the counsellor could politicize the space by supporting what some would call a “radical lunatic left-wing cause”—say, Antifa or something like that.

On the other hand, from the right, politicization might involve the idea that “you have to decolonize the person,” therefore, the space cannot help but be political. And then you might hear that Jewish clients need to be confronted with their Zionism.

Rosner: So, okay—let us get to that point. Because this is a terrible fucking time for Jewish people trying to make moral sense of what is going on in Gaza and Israel.

I was born just fifteen years after World War II. We were always taught that Israel was the place of safety for Jews after Hitler slaughtered nearly all of European Jewry. I went to Sunday school for ten years—ten years—and we were taught nothing about the Palestinians.

Not that I was paying much attention.

We had to fucking drive to Denver—thirty miles to Denver—every Sunday. So that used up our one goddamn half-hour weekend on a Sunday. I was pretty checked out. But I honestly don’t remember any mention of Palestinians.

By the way, Israel did not look back then like it does now. It was not shaped like a dagger. It looked more like a pork chop because they had control of the entire Sinai Peninsula, which they had taken during the 1967 war.

At the time, Israel had about three times the land area it has now. After capturing it, following attacks from neighbouring countries, they returned much of that territory, like the Sinai. However, what we were taught was that Israel was always the victim of aggression, never the aggressor.

So yeah, we were heavily propagandized—or at least, just not given any real depth. I don’t know why, maybe because it was a Jewish Sunday school, perhaps because we were twelve-year-old kids, maybe because most of us were spoiled suburban Cherry Creek High School brats.

Not me, or at least, not as much as some of the others. I was not as big a dick as a lot of the Cherry Creek kids. However, I was still a product of that environment.

Anyway, now we are learning more. Palestine—and especially Gaza—has had horrendous leadership. Corrupt, ineffective leadership has existed since the founding of Israel in 1948. Hamas is a homicidal, terroristic organization that does no good for its people. They steal money, they drag Gazans into genocidal wars, they deliberately hide among civilians so that when Israel retaliates, civilians die.

And Israel—they’re being dicks, too. They’ve killed close to 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza, out of a population of around 2.2 million to 2.3 million people. That’s over 2% of the entire population.

That is comparable in percentage terms to the number of Germans killed during World War II. It is a staggering, horrific number. Nearly every family in Gaza has either lost someone or knows someone who has been killed.

And that does not even include the West Bank. Gaza is on Israel’s western border. The West Bank is to the east. Palestinians have lived there for generations, and now you’ve got far-right Israeli settlers coming in, stealing land, harassing families, sometimes even lynching people, with the complicity of the Israeli military.

Netanyahu—the Prime Minister of Israel—is Israel’s Trump—a corrupt politician, facing criminal charges, clinging to power by keeping the war going. As long as the Gaza war continues, he has political support. Ending the war could mean facing trial.

So to many Jews now, Israel looks less like a haven and more like the aggressor—a genocidal aggressor. We are starting to look like the Nazis. Moreover, that’s a horrifying comparison to make. However, look—Hitler killed 11 million people in the Holocaust: 6 million Jews, and 5 million others—gay people, Roma, disabled people, Poles, political prisoners.

It’s a tragedy we were taught never to forget. And now, a lot of us are asking: what the fuck are we doing? And in Israel’s case, yes, they’re going after Hamas, but in a particular way. So anyway, it’s a fucked-up situation.

Roughly three-quarters of American Jews are Democrats, and about one-quarter are Republicans. I’d say the majority of American Jews believe that Israel is being a dick right now—but I don’t have fresh survey data in front of me. Still, what seems clear is that many American Jews—especially those who aren’t politically extreme—are being forced, for the first time, to separate Jewishness and Judaism from Zionism.

Zionism, in its current expression, has become this unblinking defence of Israel, no matter what it does. Moreover, for many of us, especially in politics, this is the first time we have had to confront the idea that those identities are not synonymous.

Today, at Columbia University, a bunch of pro-Gaza protesters broke into the library during study week. Seventy-eight of them were arrested. Now, Trump is exploiting the Israel-Gaza conflict to go after elite universities, accusing them of fostering antisemitism, just because pro-Palestinian protests are happening on campus. That is horseshit. It is Trump’s way of fucking with the universities, plain and simple.

The whole Israel situation—look, it is not fair to call it a nightmare. The nightmare is what is happening to the innocent people in Gaza. However, it is a moral quagmire.

Jacobsen: How would you compare that with couples therapy?

Rosner: How would I compare it? Well, like I have said here, there’s a learning curve.

You learn how to do therapy. Moreover, for myself, and I think for millions of other American Jews, there’s been a learning curve around understanding what’s happening in Gaza and Israel.

I knew some of it before, but this has been different. The exposure and emotional reckoning have deepened. It has been about a year and a half now—since October 7, 2023—when Hamas attacked Israel.

American Jews expected it to be over within a few months. Gaza is only about 50 square miles. It is a 5-mile north to south and five to six miles east to West. It is a tiny strip of land. It should not take years to deal with a military operation there.

Israel has about 300,000 active-duty soldiers. Hamas, at the start, was estimated to have around 30,000 fighters, or terrorists, however you want to label them. So, Israel had a 10-to-1 advantage in numbers. However, here we are, 18 or 19 months later, and they are still blowing up buildings and neighbourhoods.

Maybe Hamas’s numbers have been replenished—maybe their ranks were reformed. I would guess that of the 50,000 or so people Israel has killed, maybe 20,000 were affiliated with Hamas. If that’s true, and Hamas started with 30,000, there should be about 10,000 left. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, probably because they’ve recruited more. And let’s be honest—it’s murky who counts as Hamas in a war zone like Gaza.

Moreover, I have not even mentioned the fucking hostages.

So yeah, as with couples counselling, many people don’t want to engage with this. It is a moral quagmire. There’s no way to talk about Israel and Gaza without sounding like an asshole to someone.

It is not something people want to think about—that members of their faith might be engaged in actions that resemble historical atrocities. That Israel might be doing things in the name of Jewish safety that end up dehumanizing or slaughtering innocent people.

Thus, people avoid it just like going to counselling because it is messy. Because it forces you to confront uncomfortable truths. Carole and I do not mind being in counselling because we are good at it. We are lucky enough not to have major issues. But fucking Israel-Gaza? That is a set of intractable issues that are never going to fucking go away.

What do you think about the whole situation there?

Jacobsen: The Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists, under its principle of Integrity in Relationships, states the need to “be as objective and unbiased as possible in their… service.” The British Psychological Society’s Code of Ethics and Conduct links reason—or rationality-to—impartiality. The International Union of Psychological Science, in its Universal Declaration of Ethical Principles for Psychologists, emphasizes a core principle of integrity, specifying the importance of “maximizing impartiality and minimizing bias.”

Finally, the American Psychological Association, in its Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, emphasizes Principle C—Integrity—which includes the avoidance of deception and misrepresentation. That could easily extend to refraining from using therapy as a platform for partisan persuasion.

So, across the West—in the major institutions of psychology and psychological science—the therapy and counselling space is explicitly expected to be impartial, with a minimization of bias and a maximization of objectivity in practice.

Rosner: Yes. But you can be an objective therapist and still say, “Politically, I lean this way. That can be true.

Jacobsen: Yes. You can also reference specific systemic issues. For example, men can feel objectified in some therapeutic contexts, especially when it comes to all-male military drafts or being overrepresented in dangerous occupations. That’s not political spin; that’s cultural and economic reality.

Likewise, women often feel objectified by being culturally expected to remain “barefoot and pregnant,” tied solely to domestic roles like cooking, cleaning, and raising children. If you are from a minority or Indigenous background, it is factual and responsible to acknowledge real disparities in health, education, and opportunity.

Acknowledging systemic disparities is objective. However, pushing a political framework as the therapeutic lens crosses the ethical lines we discussed. That would be using therapy as a platform for ideological persuasion, which is not what it’s meant for.

Rosner: That makes sense. I might bring up the Israel thing in our next counselling session. It could be interesting. Carole and I feel the emotional weight of the daily news. Israel is a big part of that. Our counsellor, who has been in the U.S. for decades, is a native-born German.

So, she understands what it means to come from a country with a dark history—one that’s had to carry the burden of collective responsibility. Maybe I will ask her: “What do we do about fucking Israel?”

It must be painful for her—and for all Germans. I mean, think about it: the youngest possible Nazi—the kid who was, say, 12 years old and thoroughly indoctrinated in 1945—would have been born in 1933. That means the youngest possible Nazi is now 92 years old.

The youngest possible Nazi who could have done bad shit would be almost a hundred by now. So the World War II Nazis—they are all fucking dead. The Germans who came after? In my experience, limited though it is, they have mostly been decent people. They are probably ashamed and understandably annoyed at this massive blot on their country’s history.

Rosner: The Germans I’ve met have certain German traits: orderly, not chaotic, and systematic. They go about their jobs in a structured, efficient way.

Jacobsen: Would you say almost machine-like? I am joking.

Rosner: What do you mean?

Jacobsen: The idea that Germans are highly industrious and fastidious. That kind of psychological profile.

Rosner: Yes, I would say that. To some extent, this contributed to their bad historical behaviour.

Jacobsen: There was a guy—back in 1945—it is suspected he died, but there’s no confirmation. He may have escaped. He was known never to take holidays. He was so pro-German, so devoted to nationalism, that he did not care if the politics were left-wing, centrist, or far-right. He just wanted Germany to succeed.

He was a nationalist-patriot above all else. 

Rosner: Are you talking about a guy who maybe fled to the jungles of Uruguay or Argentina? Does his name start with an “H”?

Jacobsen: Heinrich Müller?

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: Right—Heinrich Müller. He was meticulous, hard-working, and highly loyal to Germany. Did not take holidays. So yes, you could say “machine-like.” But also: a Nazi. Moreover, there’s an argument to be made—if we never definitively confirmed his death—that he may have escaped. That is why there’s this long-running joke about Argentinians saying things like, “Yes, I have a German grandfather,” with the unspoken implication that it’s that kind of German grandfather.

Rosner: It is one of those old jokes with a dark undertone. Let me suggest a topic for tomorrow. ChatGPT was trending on Twitter today. Many claim it is being used so extensively in high schools and colleges that students are no longer learning anything.

The argument is that we are turning out a generation of incompetence—kids who rely so heavily on ChatGPT to complete their assignments that they are not developing writing skills, building focus, or engaging with the material.

And then these kids graduate useless after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on education. Going to an Ivy League school now costs close to $400,000 when you factor in room and board. Moreover, you’re not learning shit because ChatGPT is doing all your work for you.

Do you concur? Is it a valid argument?

Jacobsen: But the thing is—we do not need that many blacksmiths anymore. You might need a farrier to work with horses or cattle, but that entire life genre is gone. So when people say, “What is wrong with kids today? They are not doing the things we used to do,” they apply that critique to a fundamentally shifting culture.

We have moved from a hands-on, labour-intensive society to a more literate and idea-driven one. Many of the old foundations of daily life were physical, communal, and manual. Now, we’re in the middle of a transitional phase.

Rosner: Isabella’s generation grew up with the Internet. They have never nothad it.

Jacobsen: So I’d frame it this way: the transition from physical labour to intellectual labour is no longer about who can lift the most—it’s about who can most effectively train others to use machines, build companies around that capacity, or simply operate the machines themselves.

Rosner: At the same time, you can argue the other side: we are going to have many dipshits. However, then again, we’ve alwayshad many dipshits. We will have a different flavor of dipshit now. Like that essay I keep referencing, there will be a blend of “smart-stupids.” People who are technically intelligent but completely oblivious in other areas.

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