Recent professional contributions & Articles

Quoted in world-renowned, autistic author and human rights activist Anne Borden King’s forthcoming book, The Informed Parent (2026)., one excerpt of which is below:

“As Boston-based, autistic parent and school psychologist Jenna Goldstein points out, disability accommodations are “not a favor. They’re a necessity.” Goldstein suggests parents invest time in “doing everything they can to convey their child's wholeness and humanity” to a potential school, “because schools are so used to understanding a child only through their [the school’s] neuronormative, or ‘one right way to be’ lens, and also not beyond what they see in front of them in the school environment.”

When Goldstein’s daughter, who is multiply neurodivergent, was young, the family would receive emails from her school with photos and reports on the day’s activities. (As a former school psychologist in public schools, Goldstein recommends requesting these.) Then one day it dawned on Goldstein to do the same, showing the school what her daughter was like--who her daughter was--outside of the school setting.

“I framed it around the pictures helping with writing prompts and communicating,” she told me. “But actually, I was also teaching them who my child was, how she lights up, and what she’s like as her most authentic self. I think school professionals become conditioned to seeing the person in front of them [at school] and assuming that's more or less who and what they are. And for so many neurodivergent and disabled kids that just couldn't be farther from their truth.”

Quoted at the 2023 US Autism Association World Conference by Dr. Marcia Eckerd in a piece about what getting identified as autistic meant to me. Excerpt below:

“Having an official autism diagnosis has been the most liberating achievement of my life. It has set me free to learn about and be my most authentic self. I've played the part of high-achieving-internally-floundering slim white girl for as long as I can remember. With my diagnosis, I can make sense of the internal struggle - why the struggle, and why it's so internalized, hidden deep so as to prevent inconvenience or rejection from the world. The sensory overwhelm, the fatigue, the compulsive self-soothing tendencies, the sensory attunement and reactivity, the hyper-empathy and emotional overwhelm, the permanent life station on a separate wavelength from so many of the people around me. I've always felt like a bird perched on a branch above, watching and learning and mimicking the squirrels on the ground, performing my most compelling squirrel act while retaining the bird-like things about me that others find valuable. It makes so much sense now. And it’s valid – it doesn’t just feel like I am a bird among squirrels: I very much am not one of the squirrels. I am a bird. 

But it's not only the stress and overwhelm that make sense. It's the hyper-verbal wiring that facilitated my writing this 2,000-word essay in about 20 minutes and which leaves my colleagues sometimes with their jaws physically on the floor after I speak in meetings. It's the ability to be a walking predictive text machine, anticipating everybody's next word and action based on my automatically-updating internal database of hundreds of thousands of stored actions and words of the people around me. It's my empathy for others that is both paralyzing and mobilizing, which allows me to detect subtle yet gripping internal experiences, understand people’s true selves, and change lives in real ways. It’s the tears that reliably come to my eyes and the chills on my arms when I hear a particular chord progression or 3-second harmony of a particular song, every time anew. It's my appreciation for the way light dances on the edges of leaves and the way the moon reflects in a puddle on the road. My thoughts, my feelings, my senses, my relationships - it all makes sense. It’s all autistic.

And not only does it make sense, but I'm proud. I could not be prouder to be autistic. To be in community with the people I admire most in the world. To know that I share something in common with people who are change agents, who have immovable moral compasses, whose hearts bleed for others' bleeding hearts, who catch and appreciate the most minute of details, and who savor the most unadulterated offerings of the glorious physical world around us. I am proud to be sensitive in a world that explicitly values and forces insensitivity. And I'm proud to have a name for that supremely sensitive, humane existence - autistic.”

This article by Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman, with contributions from Kory Andreas and Jenna Goldstein, outlines common PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance / Pervasive Drive for Autonomy) traits. It explains how PDA is a nervous system profile defined by heightened responses to loss of autonomy and offers a detailed list of behavioral patterns across fight, flight, freeze, flop, and fawn. The piece encourages families to view PDA as both a challenge and a strength, providing insight and validation for parents and children alike.

Read the full article here