I think people who aren’t Jewish don’t have any of the tools and training necessary to understand the depth and impact of the affect of 2,000 years of consistent hatred on a people.
People say they understand generational trauma, but they never discuss this specific aspect of it.
The Holocaust is a heinous and uniquely awful global event where Jewish people were the primary targets explicitly because of their Judaism, and that absolutely is a huge factor in Jewish generational trauma today. However, it is absolutely not the root of Jewish generational trauma by a long shot.
For 2,000+ years, Jews endured violence and discrimination without ever being accepted in any society anywhere. The best our ancestors were ever able to hope for was conditional acceptance as human beings (but never equal citizens) under threat of revocation and a government that kept their antisemitic laws and policies to a minimum.
I don’t even know if there’s a way to put into words the long-lasting impact that such a long history of abuse, mistreatment, dehumanization, ethnic cleansing, and genocide can have on a culture at large, let alone a lineage of descendants.
I am not a person who subscribes to persecution-focused Judaism (which is valid, just not my style), where everything must be framed in terms of Jewish persecution and survival—because I believe Judaism to be deeply joyous and serene, and I believe our actual faith and community and love and spirit transcends the horrors we have suffered. I don’t want to be thinking about how lucky we are to have survived all the time, because I just want to focus on how lucky I am to be alive now—to be Jewish now, to experience this wonderful community now.
If it were not such dire circumstances for Jews at this moment in history, I would not say the following aloud, because I don’t want this beautiful culture associated constantly with this degree of pain, but:
Being Jewish is culturally, practically/logistically, philosophically, historically, and (in the case of those whose Jewish lineage goes back a generation* or more) even physically shaped by the expectation and historical fact of our repeated abuse, pain, and loss.
Our childhoods have conversations and revelations that other cultures do not have as a result of not only the realization that people do, and always have, despised, tortured, and murdered us—but also the intimate knowledge of the means and reasons for this hatred and comprehensive data of what happened to both our people and our abusers afterwards.
We know how we survived, what excuses they gave for hating us, very often how many souls we lost, and too often that we have missed the people who are now lost to time and history.
I certainly hope that not every Jewish person had to be raised in the following manner, but I and every Jewish person I know was raised to know the words and actions that tend to precede our deaths and have at least a half formulated if not fully detailed plan for how to leave our entire lives behind and to escape to somewhere unknown. This is not a hypothetical situation to us. This is something that every generation of Jews has actually either had the lived experience of actually doing or have heard firsthand from a parent or grandparent who has done it. Because that is how constant goyische hatred of us has been and continues to be.
I was raised my entire life to understand that, at any given time, people who claim to love me, be my friends or otherwise care for me or even just treat me as human may suddenly turn into abusers who wish me dead.
This was always communicated to me with the encouragement of:
“…and love people anyway, regardless of whether or not they are Jewish. Fill your life with people of all backgrounds and love them. You cannot expect them to always be there for you or to even be trustworthy, but you can love them as deeply as your heart and soul allow. Never shun a community. Never retreat from the world. Never be the one to flee first or close off your heart or to abandon trust first. Just know that it is possible that in your lifetime—or your children or grandchildren’s lifetime—you will lose all of it. Do not ever become so complacent and trusting of your current home that you do not know how to leave it all behind for the sake of your and your family’s lives. Do not ever become so complacent and trusting in your sense of safety and community that you do not know how to cope with the loss of every ounce of it.”
People who frame Jewish oppression and pain and trauma as historical are fundamentally ignorant of the Jewish lives experience. Jewish people are many things—joyous, loving, devoted to education and community, funny, kind, and spiritual.
But we are also trauma, embodied. We are trauma and loss and pain made flesh. I think that is sometimes why other cultures cannot bear to look at us. They cannot bear to see what they have made us—raw and exposed nerves forced to touch the world around us while our souls scream in agony, broken legs forced to walk the earth, the ghosts of our ancestors’ dreams dressed up as the other (non-Jewish) people around us and told if we don’t behave just as expected, we will be punished.
Non-Jews seem incapable of understanding that our daily lived experience is that of an abused dog. Kicked and beaten and starved and left out in the cold repeatedly. We are given commands we don’t know how to follow. And if ever we do finally lash out and bite back, those same abusers call us the problem and threaten to put us down. You treat us as with disdain and then mock us when we cower at behaviors that echo the worst of what you’ve done to us.
We are not at home anywhere. Unlike other cultures exiled, we have never made a lasting home anywhere even after our initial exiles.
It drives me mad when people accuse Jews of having a superiority complex because of the term “chosen people,” when I’ve never met a Jew who interprets this as a phrase meant to make us superior to anyone.
Israel — the biblical name for G-d’s chosen people — means “to struggle with G-d.” It is for this that we are chosen. We are the ones chosen to struggle—with our faith, our place in the world, and with G-d themself.
What hurts most, to me, about the goyische ignorance of Judaism and Jewish culture is that we have learned. Over the past 2000+ years, we have learned. We have adapted. We have seen how we are treated repeatedly by those who claim to love us, by those who are indifferent to us, and by those who despise us enough to attempt to exterminate us. We teach our children how to live in this world while walking a tightrope of acceptance yet still have hearts open enough not to shun the rest of the world out of fear.
But in those same 2000+ years, people clearly have never learned about us. Your ignorance is itself a knife you use to stab us, even now.
After 2,000+ years of hate and murder and continuously inflicting trauma, those outside our community have never thought to actually strive to understand or, goodness forbid, listen to us. To gain any insight into how we think or feel or practice our faith. To care even the smallest bit about how we move through and experience the world.
You’ve had 2,000+ years of bad examples and evidence of what you’ve done to us. And instead of ever taking a single opportunity to break the cycle of trauma Jews experience, you always choose to perpetuate it en masse.
And then you have the audacity to cast us as inherently violent. You have the gall to cast our trauma and oppression as historical and long since past.
The best you have ever offered is assurance that you are not personally inclined to engage in or support violence against us right now. But you have no sense ownership of your role in our continuing trauma. It’s so familiar to you that you can’t even see it anymore. It’s like asking you to point out the air that surrounds us or like asking a fish to point out water.
My experience is, G-d-willing, not universal. But it is not even remotely uncommon.
There is a reason that out of the 15.2 million Jews in the world, 7 million of them live in Israel and 6 million live in the United States and only 2.2 million live scattered throughout the rest of the world. There is a reason there are only 15.2 million Jews in the world after all this time. It’s not because the people in any other location took care of us or loved us or welcomed us into their lives in any kind of meaningful way. It’s because you have consistently done the opposite.
And yes, gentile reader, I do mean you. It was your parents and grandparents who passed this hatred on to you. And to dismantle antisemitism, you must be willing to confront that. You must be willing to look at the people you love and trust most in the world, the ones you look up to most. And you must see that they posses flaws and have done harm. To acknowledge this does not mean you must see these same people as evil monsters. Jews do not see these people as evil monsters.
Again, to be Jewish is to struggle with G-d. It is to argue with the divine in the pursuit of greater goodness and kindness in the world. Jews believe that all things come from G-d, including evil things. And we, of course, do not believe that makes G-d evil. And that therein lies our struggle as a people. The struggle we are chosen to unravel.
I am begging you with all my heart: this moment is yet another opportunity to look at why you feel so comfortable condemning and vilifying the Jews with which you disagree—whether that is all of us or just the ones you call Zionists or Israelis—and choose to learn about us instead. Please. Take this opportunity to do what your ancestors never did.
Look upon the people who shaped you. Understand how they educated you in all the ways to torture my people. And love them anyway. Love them anyway, while committing to undoing the harm they’ve cause and while rejecting the antisemitism they taught you.
Love them like Jewish parents teach Jewish children to love the goyim around us. Love them like the Jewish faith teaches us to love G-d. Struggle with holding the love of these people in your heart while you simultaneously reject the hatred—and yes, it is hatred—that they taught you. Struggle with this as Jews struggle with G-d. Allow that struggle to change you. Allow that struggle to make you kinder. Allow that struggle to change you into someone who can love with clear eyes and an inquisitive mind.
Because if you cannot do that, then you are committing violence against me. You are committing this violence by choosing to remain ignorant and comfortable in your position of privilege. You are choosing to be the knife that continues to stab us. You will be the flawed parents and grandparents that my children and grandchildren beg yours to see for the violence they perpetuated. There is no passive route to dismantling antisemitism. And unless you take a direct role in undoing it, then you are perpetuating it.
You will be the reason my children and grandchildren ask the heavens in despair:
“After all this time, how do they still hate us so much without knowing anything about us?”
Please, for all our sakes, break the cycle.
* NOTE: those who converted to Judaism are 10000000000% Jews. The only reason I mentioned actual physical lineage at all is that the trauma has changed people of Jewish lineage at the epigenetic level of their DNA. We have literal physically inherited trauma. This does not negate trauma experienced by Jews who converted nor does it make them any less vital and included in the Jewish community.
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