You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
How do we come to recognize that terrible, overpowering feelings in the present are an outgrowth of unconscious traumatic intergenerational transmission? This is the story of how deeply buried parental trauma became activated in me in 2018.
My identification as Jew is culturally embodied, but non-observant. In the world in which antisemitism resides, I am just a Jew, like all other Jews. But my own experience has me sitting in an in-between place. I pay it no mind unless something happens to tweak my awareness. Here is my understanding of my status in the spectrum of Jewish observance and of my being more jolted in its recognition than I ever expected.
I recently attended a Shiva only to find I didn’t know the proper things to do. I had no familiarity with the attending Rabbi’s guidance for the accepted norms. I had to go home with my tail between my legs and Google the rules. It turned out that my wearing yellow wasn’t a shanda (shame, disgrace), but my bringing home a bagel, which I did, is customarily not done. I was stunned with all I didn’t know. I have a strong identification with a specific subset of Jews: the non-observant, atheist, leftist, culturally identified Ashkenazic. My identity is based on a multilayered, complex history.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, living in the ethnically diverse suburban town of Morristown, New Jersey, antisemitism seemed to me to be a distant, horrific part of history. It was not talked about in my family. Activities of peace, protest, and civil rights were foremost. Feelings about the oppression of the Jews were funneled into working in the civil rights movement. Nothing derogatory about my being Jewish was directed at me growing up.