Why Does Everybody Hate Us?

Great question.

“I’ve never been able to figure out why everybody hates the Jews."

Last Sunday at brunch, I sat with my boyfriend’s family in a bacon-scented pub. I swallowed the citrus sting of my orange slice and began to feel faint. This was the second time his mother was asking me why the world hates Jewish people and for the second time I didn’t have an adequate answer.

It's not a bad question. But, as a Jewish writer, I'm often asked about "the Jews" and the pressure to represent my ancestry makes the lights twinkle and the ambient sound slur and the bacon-scent of brunch turn to a burnt toast barf-mosphere.

Darwinist rule of thumb: Avoid being alone in a group of others.

And yet, it happens all the time.

Still, it's rare to encounter such a shameless request for a quick summary of “why hate?”

Later that night, when I told my boyfriend that I preferred to never explain antisemitism at brunch ever again, he suggested, “She’s just asking because she knows about your book project.”

I am currently writing and researching a book about the epigenetics of Holocaust trauma. 

All four of my grandparents survived the Holocaust and I’m interested in how their survival has provoked future generations of mental illness in my family.

I began my research in 2020 after my paternal Bubie passed away. I moved into her house shortly after she died and, living among her things I realized I didn’t know her very well.

Within the many cupboards of her sizeable home she seemed to be hiding multiples of the strangest junk: scales from the sixties, golf bags from the eighties, hats from every year post-1950.

I began thinking about my family's history of hiding which brought me to considering whether or not concealment was a particularly Jewish strategy.

On my father’s side, my Zeidy and his brother hid among dead bodies in Auschwitz. On my mother’s side, my Bubie and her family survived the war by hiding underground beneath their neighbour’s kitchen while Nazi soldiers paced above them.

Miraculously, they survived but then their hiding continued.  Upon immigrating, many survivors suppressed their survival stories from anti-Semitic Canadians and judgmental Canadian Jews. As they worked, without much language or money, to establish themselves, to start families, to resurrect Yiddish life, to move on, beneath their assimilationist movement, they were hiding.

And they were good at it. Jewish people had been hiding long before Hitler.

For an incredible read, take a look at William W. Hagen's paper, "Before the "Final Solution": Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland." His paper describes the interwar years in Poland as "more anti-Semitic than Germany," and his first-hand witnesses give some pretty shocking testimony.

In recent studies, chronic oppression has been proven to change the social and physical health of marginalized communities. Likewise, chronic stress has a newfound demonstrable effect on our epigenetics.

Epigenetics is the study of environmental changes that affect the behaviour of our DNA.  For a beginner's course in epigenetics, I've leaned heavily on Dr. Nessa Carey. She has written my favorite book about the topic. You might also get a kick out of this article about Bryan Johnson, wacky bajillionaire of Paypal fame who is currently using epigenetics to avoid aging (it is freaky and awesome).

The queen bee of researching epigenetic changes in the stress systems of Holocaust survivors and their descendants is Dr. Rachel Yehuda. I can't say enough about what her research has done for me and I think some of her work is required reading. Through her work I’ve come to understand, though we can not definitively state that chronic stress and anxiety is endemic to Jewish populations, some patterns suggest that living under threat for a prolonged period produced epigenetic change surrounding the genes that influence our stress system.

In other words, genocide changed us at a molecular level and it influenced our parenting, our coping, our mental health. That’s what my book is about. That’s also what this newsletter is about. I’m writing about the consequences of survival.

"I can't figure out why everybody hates the Jews."

"It's because we're all nuts," I should have answered. “We are inherently selfish and sometimes we can’t find any other answer but to hate the people we don’t understand.”

Another Darwinist rule of thumb: Altruism is for losers.

They had to hate somebody.

Jewish people are far from the only group of people who have been marginalized and slaughtered. But, we are a group of people who eventually stopped hiding. We wrote about the Holocaust. We’ve provided our testimony. Now Holocaust study and memorialization is essential for understanding hate, violence and its consequences worldwide.

“If  we stay here, we’ll be slaughtered,” Leon Thorne quotes his father in his 1961 memoir entitled, It Will Yet be Heard. The scene takes place in 1941 just as the Judenrat have been instructed to make a list of Jewish people to be deported by the Nazis that evening. The statement is horrific for its pressured reality: They couldn’t trust non-Jews, they couldn’t trust Jews, all they could trust was that, judging by the rotting bodies in the streets, the threat of sudden death was exacerbated. Love became a tragic flaw. Even life was regrettable. “People behaved like chickens,” writes Issac Beshevis Singer. “One group was slaughtered, the other pecked out grain from the trash. An animal optimism and senselessness kept the sacrificial victims alive until it was their turn.”

I was wrong about Jewish hiding.

“I’ve never been able to figure out why everybody hates the Jews."

People hate the Jews because we refuse to hide.

I really wonder about my responsibility to the past, especially in the face of strange questions about present pressures.

There are places in the world, in this very moment, undergoing genocide. Survivors may not share a language with us and so we may never know their stories. But, maybe when we look at each other, we shouldn't hesitate to assume that everyone is hiding a historic trauma of some kind. I am at least trying to remember that everything is molecular  and therefore constantly changing.

Consider how many people are involved in a hate doctrine, in a political movement, in a war, in a Holocaust. Now, consider the molecular and social complexity of each individual involved. How can we explain anything at all?

In honor of that question and in dedication to my family, on the first Sunday of every month, I will deliver book titles, stories and articles about the history of hate and the way science is proving it effects us.

Please subscribe to this newsletter and be sure to tell your friends.

The topic may be Jewish but the science is universal.

I will also update you on any new work I have published. If you’re curious, I most recently was part of the reporting team on a Toronto Life feature about the challenges of renting in the city. And, a personal piece can be found on She Does the City.

Last thing, next month I am running 10 km for Achilles Canada, an organization that supports runners with disabilities. They are, for example, helping me find a guide to run with in my neighbourhood because I am legally blind but I don’t want to stop running since it is my prime defender against chronic panic. If you’d like to support my run and the wonderful work Achilles Canada does for athletes like me, please consider a small donation. You can contribute here.

Thanks so much. Signing off until next time,

-Rachel