Bring Back Generator Rex

The homogenization of vastly different histories into a grand narrative of Jewish trauma points to a desire to tell a palatable story about how Zionism became hegemonic in American Jewish life. Like the original deployment of the lachrymose conception of Jewish history, it relieves Jews of political agency while making historic trauma the focal point of Jewish identity. This time, what gets lost in the mythologized Jewish past is an understanding of the political, economic, and social forces that shaped what scholar Shaul Magid calls the “Zionization of American Jewish life,” like the centralization of financial and communal resources by Jewish communal leadership toward support for the State of Israel. Zionism was not simply adopted by a terrified rank-and-file American Jewry, nor is it a trauma response today; it was, and is, a political project, with specific and evolving strategies aimed at particular, and—it should be emphasized—violent aims.

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While individual trauma typically takes root in the family or a similarly “closed emotional field,” Friedländer noted, collective trauma comes about through the communal process of giving meaning to such an event, turning an “incomprehensible occurrence” into a coherent narrative. This resulting story serves a “social function,” providing an “empowering mandate for the community.”"

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"The trouble, though, is that “our values” are not a default set of righteous beliefs overshadowed by accumulated trauma—to the contrary, we can’t even agree on what “our values” are. By the same token, the people with whom these authors are most concerned—militant, reactionary Zionists—are unlikely to be compelled by the idea that their politics constitute a trauma response; they do not believe they are sick and have not asked to be healed."

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