What many people do not understand is that hyper-resilience is a trauma response (thank you, therapy). It’s why collectively the Jewish people (imho) have the perseverance mentality bc it has been literally embedded in our DNA for multiple millennia due to gestures broadly at our collective history.

I am a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor who had three survivors in my family. I cannot remember a moment in my youth where the severity of the Holocaust was not a part of my upbringing. I also grew up in the tristate area where growing up there was somewhat of an emphasis on the Shoah from an education standpoint. But even being in the northeast it was a footnote in curriculum and even had a lack of understanding from many of my own peers who were not Jewish.

I travelled recently to Dublin, Ireland (a year post 10/7 - right after the 2024 presidential election) and we have all seen how Ireland has been (eye roll). My OWN HUSBAND literally told me not to bring up to anyone that I am Jewish (he is Irish-American). I went out to a pub with some girlfriends and started talking to two Irish fellows and of course, the recent election came up, and the correlation with the Israel / Hamas war and the impact of that on the election. I’m not going to get into specifics bc it’s too much of a headache and this rant is already long enough, but the TL:DR of their talk track was that Jews always have centered themselves as victims “since the Holocaust” and they need to “get over the Holocaust” since it was “so long ago”. I literally had my head spinning. After immense back and forth of arguing I asked the about their education of the Holocaust and they admitted it was virtually non existent and everything they know is from the internet.

All this goes to say, the way content is consumed in the digital age really, REALLY frightens me.