jews try and explain how intergenerational trauma works and functions in our families + communities and white gentiles r still likeย โso you get intergenerational trauma when anything bad has previously happened to any group of people like you??โย
like i donโt know how to get yโall to stop wrapping your head around how these kinds of numbers affect a marginalized group:ย
a third of all Jews on the FACE OF THE EARTH died within a few yearsย
like thereโs just such a comprehensive failure to understand or empathize with what exactly that means. how many communities were destroyed, how many families were destroyed, how our languages were destroyed because most of the speakers were murdered, how many children grew up in the wake of this trauma, what itโs like to try and parent in the aftermath of a genocide that kills a third of your people (two thirds of all european Jews!), what itโs like to have the spectre of this hung over your head every single day from childhoodย
Even some Jewish families who escaped the holocaustโฆ
My grandmotherโs family got out of Poland in the 19th century. (Well, were chased out). My mother was born in the 1950s.
I grew up knowing in my bonesย that I would not exist if we hadnโt won World War II. Itโs not just hearing it, itโs knowing it. Itโs really hard to explain.
Intergenerational trauma is about stress and threat. And itโs why Jews and Roma canโt justย โget overโ the holocaust, why African-Americans canโt justย โget overโ slavery, why Native Americans canโt justย โget overโ what happened to their communities.
You canโt escape it. Itโs not just the sins ofย the fathers that get perpetuated. Itโs the sins againstย the fathers.
Iโm Hungarian. That 70% loss was in a year. A YEAR. The city of Szarvas had a sizeable Jewish population before the war. Members of only three families survived. And they were lucky, most places outside of Budapest lost their entire Jewish population. In. A. YEAR.
Please consider not only the significance of that loss to the communities it affected and the individuals in them, but that most of those people had to keep living in a country full of people who made it happen.
All of this, plus I feel itโs really important to note that while it compounds everything to an absolutely horrific degree, Jewish intergenerational trauma hardly begins or ends with the Holocaust. In fact, it outdates it by centuries. Jews have been the victims of violent attacks for thousands of years, in just as many places. Massacres of entire communities. Expulsions from numerous countries. Ghettoization. Even enslavement (not even joking, I once got an online ad that said something like โBook your tickets to the Colosseum in Rome! Built by 60,000 Jewish slaves!โ as if that was a perfectly cheerful selling point).
Youโll meet somebody and ask them where theyโre from, and theyโll be like โWell, my grandparents settled in France after they were expelled from Morocco, which was where their ancestors had settled after they were expelled from Spain, which was where their ancestors settled after they were expelled from Ancient Israel, but now weโre getting kind of worried about having to leave France because of more antisemitism.โ So many of us are from a place, from a place, from a place, never fully wanted, always fighting to survive. โWandering Jews,โ โRootless Cosmopolitans,โ Globalists,โ even โShapeshifting Lizard people from outer space.โ Wherever we go, they call us โguests,โ and you can always ask your guests to leave.
The Holocaust is of our greatest, most unspeakable tragedies. But itโs not the only one on the list; not the only reason why our trauma has been passed from generation to generation. It is a painful, horrible, inheritance, and I wish more people understood how much that hurts.
