[id; a tweet by nathan bernhardt @jonberhardt: “why do marvel movies do so much stuff in CGI surely they could have just had wardrobe-” makeup and wardrobe is a union crew. the CGI animation sweatshop is not. it really is that simple. end id/]
jews try and explain how intergenerational trauma works and functions in our families + communities and white gentiles r still like “so you get intergenerational trauma when anything bad has previously happened to any group of people like you??”
like i don’t know how to get y’all to stop wrapping your head around how these kinds of numbers affect a marginalized group:
a third of all Jews on the FACE OF THE EARTH died within a few years
like there’s 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 it’s 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 it’s like to have the spectre of this hung over your head every single day from childhood
Even some Jewish families who escaped the holocaust…
My grandmother’s 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 bones that I would not exist if we hadn’t won World War II. It’s not just hearing it, it’s knowing it. It’s really hard to explain.
Intergenerational trauma is about stress and threat. And it’s why Jews and Roma can’t just “get over” the holocaust, why African-Americans can’t just “get over” slavery, why Native Americans can’t just “get over” what happened to their communities.
You can’t escape it. It’s not just the sins of the fathers that get perpetuated. It’s the sins against the fathers.
I’m 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 it’s 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 “Book your tickets to the Colosseum in Rome! Built by 60,000 Jewish slaves!” as if that was a perfectly cheerful selling point).
You’ll meet somebody and ask them where they’re from, and they’ll be like “Well, 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 we’re getting kind of worried about having to leave France because of more antisemitism.” So many of us are from a place, from a place, from a place, never fully wanted, always fighting to survive. “Wandering Jews,” “Rootless Cosmopolitans,” Globalists,“ even ”Shapeshifting Lizard people from outer space.“ Wherever we go, they call us “guests,” and you can always ask your guests to leave.
The Holocaust is of our greatest, most unspeakable tragedies. But it’s 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.
