A few years ago my wife Natalie and I were sitting in the kitchen, chatting. Our car was getting old and it was time to buy a new one. And I mentioned, “You know, I’d really like to get an electric car this time.” And I said it for all the same reasons you’ve probably heard: they’re better for the environment, and in the long run they’re cheaper to maintain than gas cars. Seemed like an obvious win to me.
“No way,” she said.
Surprised, I asked why, and the reason she gave left me speechless. She said,“Because when the Nazis come back, I don’t want to have to figure out where there’s a charging station in Wisconsin on our way to the Canadian border.”
Now anyone who knows Natalie knows that she said this partially in jest and… partially because it’s genuinely what she feels. And she comes by it honestly: Natalie’s grandparents were all survivors of severe antisemitism perpetrated by both the German and Russian governments. Most of her extended family were wiped out in the Shoah, and her own father was born in the Ukrainian forest during the war while his parents fought the Nazis as members of the Partisans. (If you’ve seen the Daniel Craig movie “Defiance,” that’s basically their story.) And Natalie spends a lot of her free time researching her family history and trying to recover the stories of her family members who were murdered by Hitler’s war machine.
All of that means that we have a kind of joke/not-joke in our family: It’s a rare day that we make it to 8:00 a.m. without mentioning the Holocaust.
So while it may have sounded to you like her answer about the electric car came out of left field, to me it was perfectly understandable. Of course it’s about the Nazis. Isn’t everything?
This episode is the first in a five-episode miniseries on using Jewish mindfulness tools to respond to antisemitism. This is some heavy stuff—but it’s stuff I think many folks need right now, because the world definitely feels like it’s giving us a lot to work with in the antisemitism department. People are struggling. I, Josh, am struggling. And maybe you are too. So we’re going to talk about triggers and reactivity, creating space between stimulus and response, overcoming victimhood narratives, and more.
And while I’m going to try to do this with our regular balance of seriousness and a lighter touch, I also want to share my regular caveat: If anything here feels like too much for you, a) you can always turn it off and come back when you’re ready; and b) particularly if you find some of the things we’re talking about to be too overwhelming, I want to encourage you to seek counseling from a mental health professional.
My conversation with Natalie at the breakfast table might evoke something in your own life. I know so many Jews who have similar stories: People who always back their cars into their driveways so that they can leave right away in case something happens. People who—here in North America, far from the Gaza or Lebanon borders—have hiding spots in their homes. People who always check where the exits are in a restaurant—because what if the antisemites arrive and we have to flee? You may chuckle a little (I will admit I do), but the chuckle reflects an unease that many folks feel about being Jewish.
In many cases, it also reflects some ingrained attitudes and beliefs that have been passed down to us from folks who, generations ago, experienced legit, seriously traumatic things. A lot of Jewish humor reflects this. There’s the old joke about the classic Jewish telegram: Start worrying, details to follow. Or the Jewish blessing for meals at holidays: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.”
Rabbi and psychologist Tirzah Firestone puts this best in her book Wounds Into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma. I think everyone should read this book, and I’m going to quote from it now and a lot more in this miniseries. Rabbi Dr. Firestone puts it succinctly: quote, “No matter what a Jew’s ancestry or where Jews have hailed from, Jewish identity today is bound up with some facet of victimhood.” end quote. We experience that over and over and over again—not just in those jokes we tell, but in those ways that a grandparent or an uncle or a friend or some other role model behaved or talked, probably without even being conscious of it. That stuff gets passed on to us—not just culturally, but, according to the latest epigenetic research, it can even get encoded in our DNA. (True facts—see the work of Dr. Rachel Yehuda.)
But here’s the thing, and come on, you already know what I’m about to say. Thinking of our identity as victims is not a healthy or sustainable way to live. Victimhood as an organizing principle isn’t a formula for long-term success—as an individual or as a collective. That’s precisely why we’re doing this miniseries, to help counteract that.
We’ll get to much more in the coming weeks, but for this week, I want to invite you into a practice of simply noticing. Because awareness—giving something a name or a label—is often the very first step on the road to a more mindful response. This week, make a kavvana, an intention, to notice when some of these kinds of embedded victim behaviors might be present—in your own life, or in the lives of ancestors, loved ones, or friends. You don’t have to do anything about them, just notice them.
Perhaps, with this new language of intergenerational trauma, a lightbulb goes off for you: “Oh, maybe that’s why my grandma used to always stuff cash in my hand when I went to visit her.” Or, “Huh, there’s a pain in my body I experience whenever I hear about Jews being attacked—I wonder if it’s related to anything in my history.” This kind of stuff can manifest in all sorts of ways. The practice this week is just to bring some mindful awareness to your experience. We’re not seeking to solve anything, only to recognize that something may be happening here. Because that’s the first step on the road to responding to antisemitism with less reactivity and more mindfulness.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.