Intergenerational trauma and jews2/19/2024 ![]() ![]() Yet, we must be able to investigate the dominant narratives driving our communal life. Holocaust denial, while it does not have significant mainstream support, is a thriving and terrifying subculture, and we rightly refuse to get anywhere near it. There were centuries of oppression, the Holocaust nearly destroyed the entirety of European Jewry and Judaism. Many people share a discomfort with this dominant narrative, but don’t know another way to tell what happened. There is growing acknowledgement that this narrative is Ashkenazi-centric, and when wielded by white-led and majority white Jewish organizations, constitutes racist harm against Jews of Color, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews. In this telling, our history is a single, direct, inevitable channel from past to future, shaped as much by anti-Jewish oppression as by Torah, Jewish culture and tradition. Thereafter, we focus almost exclusively on Jews’ experience in Europe, and in particular, on the Crusades massacres, the Inquisition and Expulsion from Spain, and pogroms, flowing seemingly inevitably to the Holocaust. After the destruction of the Second Temple, we are thrust into exile. The Temples are built and destroyed, the second and third foundational anti-Jewish destruction events in our story. The river originates during our biblical origin story and flows from slavery, our formative collective narrative of oppression, through the Exodus to the settling of the land. In this essay I will ask, and begin to answer: how can we understand Jewish history and the historical trauma our ancestors survived, in ways that serve healing from experiences of violence, oppression, and harm?Īn analogy for the way Jewish history and Jewish historical trauma are often talked about and taught is a river. We must widen our views and learn about harm and violence that has impacted non-Jewish communities. We must get more specific and nuanced when talking about trauma. How? We must broaden our knowledge of what happened to Jews, recognizing the varied histories of traumas within Jewish communities. We need to tell the stories of our survival and grieve our losses in ways that allow us to live in the present. To heal from past centuries of violence, we must develop new understandings of what happened to Jews. As I will explore in this essay, the dominant narrative of Jewish history does not serve us in the goals of integrating and healing Jewish historical traumas. ![]() I believe that the dominant story and framing of Jews and our historical trauma is part of our collective trauma response. But after years of studying Jewish history and trauma studies, my most important learning has been: before we get to healing as Jews, we have to understand our trauma differently, in ways that will allow us to heal. If there is so much consensus on the Jewish history of trauma, we should be able to focus on healing it. The National Museum of the American Indian opened in 2004 and the National Museum of African American History and Culture was only established in 2016. Holocaust Memorial and Museum was built in D.C. Native American Indigenous communities and African American communities and people, including Jews, have had to fight to have their experiences of genocide recognized. In the wider American context, the Nazi Holocaust’s genocide of Jews is the model around which most studies of collective and intergenerational trauma in the last 50 years have been formed. The history of anti-Jewish violence is by and large accepted in the institutions of American life, in contrast with most other oppressed groups in our time. It is well articulated that we are making choices in response to centuries of and continued threats of violence. ![]() The prevailing communal understanding is that we have been targeted by centuries of violence. Jewish collective wounding from centuries of harm is not up for debate in Jewish life. ![]()
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