Weeks have passed since the New York City primary, and I’m still trying to name what I feel.
While these past few years, being a Jew with a deep connection to the land and people of Israel has carried tremendous purpose, meaning, heartache, and love all at once, the recent June primary election cycle feels different.
Watching three Democratic Socialists become the Democratic nominees for Congress in the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, set against the rhetoric coming from our Republican president and vice president, I feel exhausted, despondent, and a new kind of scared.
According to the Horseshoe theory, the far left and the far right, rather than sitting at opposite ends of a straight line, curve toward one another like the two tips of a horseshoe, converging in their authoritarian instincts, their taste for conspiracy, and, too often, their hostility toward Jews. Today, the horseshoe theory feels accurate and real. And it feels like the walls are closing in on me, on us. I know the theory is contested among political scientists. I know the two ends are not the same. But from where I stand, the distance between them has rarely felt so small, and here we are, stuck in the middle.
This is where I want to slow down, because I work in mental health, and I recognize what is happening in my own body.
When a person, or a people, perceives danger, the nervous system reaches for one of a handful of ancient strategies. We tend to know two of them by name. Fight: confront the threat. Flight: escape it.
But there are two more that get far less attention and explain a great deal about Jewish life right now.
Freeze: go still, go numb, become unable to act.
The exhaustion and despondency I described, the doomscroll that ends in paralysis rather than information. Or, the felt need to bury our heads in the sand & pretend all is fine so we aren’t overcome by anxiety.
Fawn: appease the threat, make yourself smaller and more palatable.
We perform the disclaimers (“As a Jew, I renounce my ties to Israel…”) you hope will buy you safety. We distance ourselves from other Jews before someone else can accuse us of being too tribal, too Zionist, too emotional, too much.
Each of these is doing the same job. Each is trying to keep us alive.
I come by my vigilance honestly.
I grew up on stories of my grandparents’ loss and their resilience, adolescents who survived Auschwitz and then, improbably, found the strength and the desire to rebuild Jewish life through love, joy, and tradition, even while locked inside the Soviet Union for nearly thirty years after their liberation.
Those stories were my inheritance. So, it turns out, it was something quieter and more biological.
We are learning that trauma does not stop with the person who endured it. Researchers like Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai have documented markers of stress regulation altered in the children of Holocaust survivors. The evidence is still emerging and still debated, that catastrophe can leave a fingerprint that outlasts a single life. I don’t need a laboratory to feel it. It lives in the reflex I have carried since childhood: the constant, low question: Would I recognize the signs in time?
That is the question I have carried since childhood.
I used to wonder whether my ancestors, across centuries and not only in the last one, saw society changing around them. Did they notice the small shifts, and the large ones, before the old bottle of antisemitism was uncorked again? Did they sense when resentment was hardening into accusation, and accusation into permission, and permission into violence? Did they see it coming, the exile or the forced conversion or the slaughter, before it arrived?
Did they know when it was time to leave a place they had always called home?
And like so many Jews raised on the memory, I made myself a promise.
I would fight like hell to protect my people.
I would not go to my death like “sheep to the slaughter.”
I want to sit with that phrase for a moment, because it shaped me, and because it is not quite fair.
Historians have long pushed back on the image of European Jews as passive victims. There was resistance, in ghettos, forests and camps, far more than the phrase allows.
But the phrase endures because it encodes a fear, not a fact. It is the terror of being acted upon. Of going still when it counts. Of making disbelief for safety.
It is, in the end, a vow against freezing.
It is a promise to stay in the fight.
But what does it actually mean to fight like hell?
Is it advocating? Praying? Teaching? Studying? Voting? Fundraising? Showing up at synagogues, rallies, campus events, community briefings, and difficult family tables?
And, the question that keeps me up: How do we know when our efforts are no longer working?
Here is what the trauma framework has given me. Not a tidy answer, but a more honest one.
The point is not that the fight is noble and the other three are failures. Flight is sometimes the wisest thing a person can do. The question of when to leave is not cowardice. It is one of the most serious questions a Jew can ask. History has rewarded some who asked it early and punished others who could not have known.
Freezing is not a weakness. It is the nervous system shielding us from more than it can metabolize.
Even fawning, at its root, is an attempt to survive. It can be a way of reducing danger by appeasing those with power. But when fawning is praised, rewarded, or held up as the “right” response, it can become tokenized. The person who accommodates is treated as proof that the harming of their people is not so bad. While the Jews who resist, grieve, or speak plainly are cast as difficult, unreasonable, or deserving of further attack.
The problem is not which response we have. The problem is when the response has us. When we are no longer choosing, only reacting on autopilot. When we confuse panic with clarity. When our advocacy becomes compulsion. When our silence becomes self-erasure. When our exhaustion convinces us that despair is realism.
So the work, for me, is to move from reaction to choice.
A few practices help.
The first is naming. Simply asking, which one am I in right now — fight, flight, freeze, or fawn? restores a sliver of agency. We cannot choose a response we cannot see.
The second is regulation before action. A flooded nervous system makes poor decisions. It confuses the urgent with the important and the loud with the true. Whatever returns us to ourselves, whether breath, movement, prayer, Shabbat, study, exercise, music, therapy or stepping away from the feed, is not a luxury. It is the precondition for acting wisely.
The third is community. Trauma loves isolation. Freeze and fawn both thrive in private. Showing up in rooms where we are known, where we do not have to translate our fear before it is believed, is itself a form of fighting.
The fourth is meaning, which my grandparents understood better than any textbook. They rebuilt through love, joy, and tradition. They answered annihilation with continuity. That, too, is resistance. Perhaps the most stubborn kind.
And the last is honesty about effectiveness. I don’t think there is a single alarm that tells us whether our efforts have failed. But I have come to believe the measure is not whether the fear disappears. It will not. The measure is whether our actions are chosen rather than compelled, sustainable rather than scorching, connected rather than solitary.
When my fighting starts to look like freezing dressed in adrenaline, when advocacy curdles into despair, that is my signal to regulate. Not to quit. To return.
I still don’t know whether I would recognize the moment to leave. Maybe none of us really knows that in advance.
But I know this: my grandparents survived, and then they chose Jewish life. They chose joy. They chose love. They chose continuity. They refused both the slaughter and the surrender. The least I can do is meet this frightening time the way they met theirs, with my eyes open, my people close, and my response, my own.