As you hardly need me to tell you, we are now in a political climate in which slanderous accusations against Israel have led to intimidation and violence on Britain’s streets. In 2025, 3,700 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the UK alone and the government has now called antisemitism in this country an emergency.
But as a psychologist, as well as a mother and the granddaughter of survivors, I want to tell you that you, the Jewish people, have the wherewithal to cope with this. We come from people who survived the unsurvivable and they bequeathed us resources we are only beginning to understand.
In 2019, I completed doctoral research on the experience of being a grandchild of survivors. But I didn’t come to it as a researcher first. I came to it as a granddaughter who had always felt something she couldn’t quite name – a fearful expectation of catastrophe, a hypervigilance that seemed to live in my body before it ever reached my mind. I brought together four other third-generation survivors living in the UK and asked them not, “how traumatised are you?” but "how do you make sense of who you are?”
What I found by talking to those four people, was a sense that we carried something which felt like a weight but also a gift. Science has helped me understand my field. A field called epigenetics – from the Greek “epi”, meaning “above” – studies how our experiences change the way genes are expressed without altering the genes themselves. Think of a dimmer switch as opposed to an on/off switch. And those settings, depending on what life brings us, can be passed to the next generation.
The researcher Rachel Yehuda has spent decades studying Holocaust descendants and found that children and grandchildren of survivors are born with an altered stress response. Before they take their first breath, they are biologically primed for a world that might not be safe. And, crucially, these biological changes are not damage, they are adaptations. Yehuda calls it “environmental resilience”: the body’s ability to prepare the next generation for the conditions their parents survived.
Put another way, if you are finding it hard to sleep, if you scan a room before you walk in or if you’re watching your children at the school gate with a hypervigilance, you aren’t being weak or overreacting. Your body is picking up signals, honed over generations.
My thesis ended with the conclusion that it is not trauma itself that passes between generations, it’s the adaptive strategies too, taught by one generation to the next as a way to prepare future families for potential threat.
If you are finding it hard to sleep, if you scan a room before you walk in, you aren’t being weak or overreacting
One of my case studies – let’s call him Raphael – described how his father had taught him to be “afraid, and alert to the ways in which others might take advantage of you”. They are the loving words of a father trying to protect his son with tools forged in persecution.
Alongside the fear and the grief, something else emerged consistently in my research: a strong sense of purpose and what I would describe as bone-deep awareness of what matters and what does not.
I now think of myself as both a worrier and a warrior and see them as two sides of the same coin. The alertness that often exhausts me is the same alertness that makes me a better therapist. And it’s the same alertness that is keeping people safe in Golders Green and Kenton and Manchester, right now.
The Shomrim who apprehended the attacker that Wednesday morning in Golders Green did not decide to be brave in that moment. They were prepared.
Acknowledging the antisemitism crisis, the government spoke of “a day-to-day acceptance of poisonous words that has seen Jewish people hiding their identities in fear of abuse”. We know all about that, don’t we? It’s a Jewish woman dyeing her hair blonde to cross the Alps. It is a man concealing his Jewish name from his comrades in 1930s Poland. And today it describes Jewish students at British universities, three-quarters of whom reported in a survey, in 2025, that they hide their identity on campus to avoid harassment.
My research also revealed that the people who are best able to manage the burden of Jewish history are those most connected to their community. This is because a group does something that is very hard to do alone: it reassures you that what you are feeling is not a figment of your imagination and gives you cultural solidarity. Social psychology tells us that strong identification with a cultural group can actively mitigate the harmful effects of being targeted by society. In other words: your Jewishness is not just what is being attacked. In a very real sense, it is also part of what will protect you.
For youngsters at university, the Jewish Society is not a luxury – it’s a sort of protection. And going to shul in this antisemitic moment performs a similar function.
After the arson attack on Kenton United Synagogue, Rabbi Yehuda Black invited the congregation to his home to daven. “We must not be deterred,” he said. “It must not in any way affect who we are as Jews.” That is the right way to respond to terror.
Community also means something beyond gathering in crisis. It can mean feeling Jewish joy. You might think this frivolous or even disloyal to our grief, but I would say you are wrong. Another of my case studies, let’s call her Karen, relayed a memory from her grandparents’ garden that has stayed with me.
Her father, as a boy, had planted a conker in the back garden of the family home. When Karen was a child, it had grown into a tree, five metres tall, and each autumn it shed conkers across the lawn. She and her siblings would collect them and have conker fights behind the shed he’d built. A seed planted by one generation became a source of laughter and play for the next. This is more than charming detail: the capacity to allow new life and vitality to emerge within families shaped by catastrophic loss is one of the positive impacts of a Holocaust family background.
Developmental research supports this thesis: attachment is built, and nervous systems regulated, through shared experiences of play and joy. In other words, go to the simchah, dance at the wedding and light the Shabbat candles with your children – and make it feel like a pleasure, not a duty.
Put another way, I want my sons to know where they come from. I want them to feel the pride and the weight of their history because pride and a sense of belonging are the antidotes to shame and fear.
We come from people who hid in forests, who crossed the Alps on foot, who built a new life from nothing in new countries. And this what my research shows me again and again: we are not just carrying the weight of what happened to our families. We are carrying their capacity for survival.
The researcher Rena Pelt has written that "we all carry history in our bones. But if it remains only in our bones, we are more likely doomed to repeat it.” I believe the opposite is also true: when we know our history, when we speak it and share it and place it within a community that holds it alongside us, it becomes not only weight but foundation.
So, trust your responses and the anxiety you feel, and the anger that rises when someone says something that feels wrong. You are not imagining anything. You are reading the room accurately, with tools your grandparents paid a terrible price to forge.
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