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chirikli:
gaymilesedgeworth:
gaymilesedgeworth:
gaymilesedgeworth:
gaymilesedgeworth:
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
There’s this complete disconnect that a lot of non-Jewish gadje have about exactly what the Samudaripen (Holocaust) DID to our two populations. Like, there are entire subgroups that just don’t exist anymore… Seeing these numbers makes my heart hurt.
[ID: table of pre- and post-“Final Solution” Jewish populations of European countries. it is arranged in descending order of percent killed, from 90% to 60%. it’s a screenshot of the text table on this page: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/estimated-number-of-jews-killed-in-the-final-solution /end ID]
Jewish intergenerational pogrom trauma is complicated, and there are a few things I want to talk about in relation to it.
first is the fact that it isn’t just the trauma of the holocaust. it’s the trauma of, most directly, all of the pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th century. if your recent ancestors didn’t survive the holocaust, they survived something else. my grandmother was a holocaust survivor. when she was dying, she was in terrible fear of the persecution she suffered as a child. my other grandmother’s grandmother was a survivor of earlier pogroms in, oh, Lithuania? she died the same way. in terror of her youth. the same thing keeps happening, generation after generation. so, anyway: “it”’s not just something that happened to a group of people like you, it happened to various members of your family and/or community
more expansively, a sidenote: in 2096, Germany will celebrate 1000 years since the Rhineland massacres, a bunch of outbreaks of murderous antisemitic violence that took place as part of the First Crusade. Jewish history is disaster piled upon disaster.
second, I think it’s important to talk about the roles of popular media and ongoing antisemitism in fostering this trauma. Jewish people are generally educated young about the horrors of the holocaust, both in intrafamilial storytelling and in whatever religious education we recieve. eventually, we also learn about it alongside non-Jewish children in school. additionally, World War Two and the holocaust are popular subjects for fiction, bringing the horrors of the holocaust to life onscreen again and again. if you want to read books about Jews and being Jewish, you’re… you’re basically fucked, okay? I once saw a reclist of “Jewish books that aren’t about the holocaust” that got about five recs in before veering into “touches on the Holocaust but not really about it” and ended with “WWII historical fiction but not set in a concentration camp.” basically, if you’re into fiction, you’re going to be repeatedly exposed to a bunch of stories about the government deciding everyone like you should die, and then implementing that plan. a lot of those stories get really popular, and then you get the situation where every time you read a captain america fanfic about Bucky recovering after getting experimented on by the red skull, you spend the next couple of hours intermittently thinking about how that really happened. like, not like that, but that really happened.
the ongoing nature of antisemitism contributes to a feeling, as a Jew, of being surrounded by doom: there is doom in your past, there is doom in your future. your ancestors escaped, that is, some of them, and at some point, you’re going to have to find out if you will too. when you see, for example, a neonazi, your thought isn’t just of an immediate danger that person may pose to you. it’s another grain of weight on a scale in your mind, tipping a small amount further toward “it’s going to happen again soon”. so, anyway: “it”’s not just something that happened previously, it’s something you’re reminded of it every single day.
chirikli:
gaymilesedgeworth:
gaymilesedgeworth:
gaymilesedgeworth:
gaymilesedgeworth:
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
There’s this complete disconnect that a lot of non-Jewish gadje have about exactly what the Samudaripen (Holocaust) DID to our two populations. Like, there are entire subgroups that just don’t exist anymore… Seeing these numbers makes my heart hurt.
[ID: table of pre- and post-“Final Solution” Jewish populations of European countries. it is arranged in descending order of percent killed, from 90% to 60%. it’s a screenshot of the text table on this page: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/estimated-number-of-jews-killed-in-the-final-solution /end ID]
Jewish intergenerational pogrom trauma is complicated, and there are a few things I want to talk about in relation to it.
first is the fact that it isn’t just the trauma of the holocaust. it’s the trauma of, most directly, all of the pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th century. if your recent ancestors didn’t survive the holocaust, they survived something else. my grandmother was a holocaust survivor. when she was dying, she was in terrible fear of the persecution she suffered as a child. my other grandmother’s grandmother was a survivor of earlier pogroms in, oh, Lithuania? she died the same way. in terror of her youth. the same thing keeps happening, generation after generation. so, anyway: “it”’s not just something that happened to a group of people like you, it happened to various members of your family and/or community
more expansively, a sidenote: in 2096, Germany will celebrate 1000 years since the Rhineland massacres, a bunch of outbreaks of murderous antisemitic violence that took place as part of the First Crusade. Jewish history is disaster piled upon disaster.
second, I think it’s important to talk about the roles of popular media and ongoing antisemitism in fostering this trauma. Jewish people are generally educated young about the horrors of the holocaust, both in intrafamilial storytelling and in whatever religious education we recieve. eventually, we also learn about it alongside non-Jewish children in school. additionally, World War Two and the holocaust are popular subjects for fiction, bringing the horrors of the holocaust to life onscreen again and again. if you want to read books about Jews and being Jewish, you’re… you’re basically fucked, okay? I once saw a reclist of “Jewish books that aren’t about the holocaust” that got about five recs in before veering into “touches on the Holocaust but not really about it” and ended with “WWII historical fiction but not set in a concentration camp.” basically, if you’re into fiction, you’re going to be repeatedly exposed to a bunch of stories about the government deciding everyone like you should die, and then implementing that plan. a lot of those stories get really popular, and then you get the situation where every time you read a captain america fanfic about Bucky recovering after getting experimented on by the red skull, you spend the next couple of hours intermittently thinking about how that really happened. like, not like that, but that really happened.
the ongoing nature of antisemitism contributes to a feeling, as a Jew, of being surrounded by doom: there is doom in your past, there is doom in your future. your ancestors escaped, that is, some of them, and at some point, you’re going to have to find out if you will too. when you see, for example, a neonazi, your thought isn’t just of an immediate danger that person may pose to you. it’s another grain of weight on a scale in your mind, tipping a small amount further toward “it’s going to happen again soon”. so, anyway: “it”’s not just something that happened previously, it’s something you’re reminded of it every single day.
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