half-sassed:

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.

There was an article I saw recently by a Jewish woman about how she’s a grandmother now and struggling to figure out what is or isn’t normal for a grandparent to do because she’s the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and never had grandparents, nor did any of her friends growing up. Relatives older than her parents just weren’t a thing anyone in her community had. So not only did the Holocaust rob her generation of seeing grandparent-grandchild interactions, but that theft is directly impacting her grandchildren today. In 2018.

Knowing that people similar to you were murdered in the past and having a “that could have been me” reaction is not the same as knowing that entire segments of your family tree were wiped out within living memory and having that loss directly impact the makeup and behavior of your family even in the present day. Jewish and Roma people have that experience, other groups don’t. It’s a stark difference.