Is Judaism Trauma Bound to Israel?

Why I think my peers support Jewish statehood even though they don't identify as religiously or culturally Jewish.

Photo by Saifee Art on Unsplash

Over the past few weeks I’ve read a number of essays by my contemporaries, fellow Gen X American Jews who have a complicated relationship with Judaism. These are people I deeply admire. I also have some very different thoughts which you can read about in my essay, Do I Look Jewish?

But there’s so much more.

Before my husband died, the connection I had to my Jewish heritage was a lot more straightforward: I rejected it. All the credit (or blame, depending on your pov) goes to my mother. She died in 2018, but back in the 1970s and 1980s she was a badass freedom-fighting activist.

Her commitment to social justice started at home when she realized that her older brother was given preferential treatment just because he was a boy. Patriarchy became her nemesis and she fought against it relentlessly.

She was raised in a Jewish household, but I think of it as “Judaism Light” — celebrating Hanukkah, lighting the menorah, temple on high holidays, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, but they were not Kosher and didn’t observe the Sabbath.

I’m sure my uncle was bar mitzvahed in the traditional coming-of-age ceremony; boys become “men” at the age of thirteen when called to read a portion of the Torah in synagogue. Today, bat mitzvahs for girls are the norm, but it was still an emerging practice in 1950s Chicago. To a young girl with a keen sense of fairness, being overlooked in this way must have been infuriating.

My mother found elements of misogyny within every religion, and eventually rejected them all. She reasoned that as part of human evolution, when men could no longer control women by brute force alone, they created political and religious hierarchies to maintain their leadership positions.

I idolized her, but it wasn’t until I was much older that I realized she wasn’t perfect. It was easier for her to see the world in black and white, right and wrong, than to grapple with uncertainty. This is true for most who haven’t suffered a traumatic loss, but grief has taught me that opposite feelings often coexist.

When my husband died, my sense of certainty, security and safety were shattered. Bad things not only could happen, but they did happen. I became acutely aware that there was nothing I could do to stop them from happening again.

At first, dissociating from grief held my fear at bay. When that was no longer possible, I began to isolate myself. When that didn’t work I distracted myself with research projects that led nowhere. I am still not healed, but I am healing. I am learning to meet myself where I am rather than try to get back to who I used to be.

Lately I’ve sought guidance about living with grief, fear and trauma from ancestors on my father’s side, the ones taken from their homes in Poland and murdered in concentration camps. Great aunts and uncles that I never had the chance to meet warn that isolation only provides the illusion of security. They caution that cutting myself off from the rest of the world won’t keep me safe. They remind me that the Jewish diaspora is still an important way to share our history, culture, and love of learning with people around the world.

Less often I hear my mother, who repeats the same thing she said in life, “Your enemies become your friends when you make them as rich as you are.” She says that disenfranchising your neighbors, draining resources and hoarding wealth creates a desperate population, one without hope for the future. With nothing left to lose, revenge becomes a lightening-rod, a mass call to action.

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I think it’s worth noting that throughout history, the winners of conflict and competition shape the narrative. Their stories are recorded for the history books and retold as absolute truth. What gets left out can be just as telling.

I recently re-watched Anand Giridharadas’ interview (on his Substack, The Ink) with Dr. Omer Bartov, Brown University. The topic was Dr. Bartov’s guest essay, published in the New York Times on July 15, 2025, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

Dr. Bartov draws a line between the genocide in Gaza today with his experience growing up as the first born in the newly established state of Israel. Although his mother had escaped before the Holocaust, most of his peers lived with survivors.

I imagine his childhood surrounded by traumatized adults as he describes his upbringing. He and his peers were raised under a “strict Zionist ethos” meant to counter the perceived vulnerability of Jews in the European diaspora, the ones who died at the hands of Nazis.

For the first time I understand what it’s like to live with my own level of trauma and grief, and I am just one person surviving one loss. They were children living with a generation whose collective loss was six million. Human understanding of trauma was negligible, there were no grief counselors, no therapeutic modalities targeting post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD didn’t even exist.

Instead, there was, (and still is) stigma attached to mental illness of any kind. No one talked about processing grief and integrating loss. Survivors, and subsequent generations, were told to move forward, not think about it, leave the collective’s historical trauma of persecution in the past.

Hyper-vigilance, a symptom of PTSD, fueled a culture fixated on protection at all costs. Service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was more than just civic responsibility, it was training to become “protectors of the state,” a military force that could guarantee “never again” — not to Jews. Empathy is incompatible with the role they were meant to fill, so they learned to ignore the real human cost of their violence against Palestinians, and its effects on their own humanity.

Was this just an early iteration of Zionism or is violence inherent within the movement? According to the Jewish Center for Justice, “Supporting Zionism today means promoting the continued existence of a Jewish state and upholding the right of Jews to live freely in their historic homeland.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that sentence:

1. Having been raised in a country founded on the separation between church and state, I don’t think any nation should be tied to one faith. There’s also the widespread and continued history of religious misogyny. I think it’s fine to think of one’s religious heritage as a buffet, picking and choosing which parts to accept and which to reject. At the same time I feel it’s important to acknowledge that as a whole, religious systems always penalize women for being women.

2. While I’m on board with the “right to live freely,” I take issue with “in their historic homeland.” Land ownership and borders are constructs of colonialism. Indigenous people were stewards of the land. They respected the natural world, and did not exploit it for their own gain. This is the opposite of colonialism, which has always been motivated by greed and white supremacy. Land is violently taken through warfare, and “to the winner goes the spoils.”

3. The Sanctity of Life: In Judaism, human life is considered infinitely precious and sacred, as all humans are created in the divine image. The Talmud teaches that every individual life is equivalent to an entire world. The only way this belief is compatible with war is if one sees their victims as less than human. Dehumanization made the Holocaust possible, it makes all wars possible.

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A ChatGPT summary, the one I didn’t ask for when I did a Google search for reputable source material, tried to convince me that the West’s involvement in the creation of Israel wasn’t strategically motivated. However, given the covert connections revealed in the Epstein files between Israeli, Russian (Soviet), American and British intelligence agencies, that seems disingenuous.

I’ve put together a brief timeline of events leading to the declaration of Israeli statehood in 1948 in the footnotes¹. At every turn there was support from the West in guns and money. Additionally, it’s not without consequence that antisemitism necessitated another Jewish exodus to begin with.

I take no issue with any group or individual who wants to feel safe. That’s a universal human desire that should be attainable by all. What I do not support is war. I’ve seen too much harm done by the bastardization of religious doctrine to further political agenda. On the surface it appears that money is the bottom line, but on a deeper level, fear of death is the driving factor.

Perhaps being changed so profoundly by my husband’s death, combined with a boat-load of therapy, grief support and medication, have given me a different perspective. Maybe it’s my mother’s early influence or the wisdom I understand from my ancestors that have opened my eyes to the duality in grief. Whatever the reason, I’ve felt the yearning to get back what I had, knowing that if I want a meaningful life, I must go forward.

1. Antisemitism in the U.S. and the UK: Led to strict immigration policies at the end of World War II, stranding up to 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, including 50,000 who were liberated from concentration camps and too sick to travel.

The British Mandate & Post-WWII Crisis: Britain controlled Palestine, but fearing Arab unrest, Britain restricted Jewish immigration, turning away Holocaust survivors seeking refuge. Thousands were turned away.

The 1947 UN Partition Plan: Divide the territory into separate independent Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem under international administration.

Declaration of Independence (1948): British Mandate expires, Jewish Agency leader David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel.

The United States and the Soviet Union: Promptly recognize the new nation.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War: The declaration of statehood immediately triggered war. By 1949, Israel held roughly 78% of the land (more than the original UN proposal), while Jordan took the West Bank and Egypt took the Gaza Strip.

Although the total population of the invading Arab nations was much larger, they only deployed a small fraction of their armies to Palestine. Israel, facing an existential threat, initiated a total societal mobilization.

Between 1934 and 1948: Clandestine smuggling of Jewish refugees into British Mandatory Palestine, called Aliyah Bet, successfully moved over 100,000 people, most Holocaust survivors. Led by a secret branch of the Jewish underground army (Mossad LeAliyah Bet), this massive logistical operation was primarily funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the JDC).