The evidence? A few Instagram posts I made soon after the October 7th attacks, where I sought to explore the internal dissonance one must integrate when one is Jewish and pro-human rights and also has family in Israel, implicating the people they love most in the violence. Ironically, my intended message was about building a foundation of empathy for vital discourse about these subjects.

I have long felt that I should carry around a sign that reads, “Yes, Israel. Yes, that’s my real name. Yes, I am indeed Jewish. No, I am not *from* Israel, just my last name. No, I do not speak Hebrew.” As a perpetual traveler (or outsider, or immigrant, or expat—you decide), the questions are a near-daily occurrence.

Now I would add to my sign: “No, I do not support or endorse genocide. Yes, I realize it is happening in my literal name. No, I do not consent.”

Yes, Toby Israel is my real name. I travel regularly to Israel to visit my brother, sister-in-law, and little niece and nephew. On my most recent trip, the immigration officer looked at my passport, looked back at me, and said, “Wow, that’s a very … patriotic name.” She meant it as a compliment, and it’s Israeli immigration, so I kept my face neutral.

However, every time I introduce myself with the “patriotic” name I have carried my entire life, I question what it means to belong to a nation, to belong to a people. I wonder if we can ever truly disown that—or if we should.

I know there are people close to me and many more like them who care about human rights and justice, but perhaps feel that their safety must trump someone else’s. That their survival depends on another’s destruction.

It doesn’t work that way.

As “Jewish Currents” editor-at-large Peter Beinart put it last week on The Daily Show, “Palestinians and Israeli Jews, and in some ways Jews around the world, are bound up in a single garment of destiny. […] In the long term, Israeli Jews are only going to be safe if Palestinians are going to be safe. And Palestinians can’t be safe unless they’re free.”

On October 7th, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking more than 240 hostages.

Since October 7th, 2023, as B’Tselem’s new report confirms, “Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives.

“The evidence shows a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare system and other vital systems necessary for the population’s survival,” in other words, genocide.

There is no excuse or justification for genocide. Ever. The actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank are unconscionable; this has been true for a long time.

The actions of Hamas on October 7th were also unconscionable.

To be clear, these are not equivalent situations. Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack has killed over 60,000 Palestinians and displaced over 90% of Gaza residents—a disproportionate use of force enabled by decades of military occupation.

When I call both situations unconscionable, I seek to reiterate the simple truth that every life lost is a tragedy.

Certainly, antisemitism is on the rise. The Anti-Defamation League reported a 360% rise in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. since the events of October 7th. The world seems to be regressing; in 2024, ADL reported that “younger Americans are more likely to endorse anti-Jewish tropes” than previous generations. Similarly worrisome trends have been observed with anti-Muslim sentiment.

Certainly, I worry about my family’s safety every day, and I ruminate constantly on the world that my niece and nephew are growing up in and into; it is not the world I want for them or anyone.

However, a genocide will not make me or my family safer. It is time to put that rhetoric to rest.

And, spreading disinformation—about Jews or Palestinians, or anyone else for that matter—or directing our outrage at individuals is not a useful strategy when it is our governments that make, sell, and drop bombs.

I am telling these stories about my name because I think they are indicative of the deepening trend of polarization and flattening of discourse.

A title is not the whole story of an article; a name is not the whole story of a person. In both cases, the content probably didn’t choose its labeling, but rather an editor or a parent. I think we know this, yet how many of us have read an article title and immediately jumped to outrage, or disinterest, or solidarity? We do the same to people. We see their name and decide we know who they are: Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, friend or foe, for or against, victim or aggressor.

A name is an inheritance. So is, for many of us, our religion, culture, history, and trauma. We do not choose these things, and yet, they so often define us—unless we decide to define them.

I grew up hearing my mother on every phone call to the bank, doctor’s office, or school spelling out our family name: “Israel-like-the-country? I-S-R-A-E-L.”

Nowadays, what could I say that is not fraught? “Israel-like-the… well, you know.”

I have considered leaving out my last name in introductions or meetings to avoid discomfort, so heavy it is to carry this inadvertent endorsement in my Zoom calls, my byline, and my daily interactions. Yet, that feels like a cop-out.

No, I am not my government. I can—and I do—denounce the government of the United States for its direct responsibility in Israel’s ongoing assault on Palestinian life and safety as the largest purveyor of arms to Israel. I can and do denounce the Israeli government for its ongoing genocide, as well as its decades-long practice of settler colonialism.

Still, Israel enacts that violence quite literally in my name. They claim me—they claim us, Jews, descendants of survivors—as the justification for their actions.

The truth is, hiding my name would only obscure the most public face of the issue. My inheritance as a Jew and as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors is woven into my DNA, my heart, and my worldview. I cannot change that with the flick of a pen—nor would I want to.

It is precisely that inheritance that informs my sense of social justice, my passion for peace, my deep-seated belief in the sanctity of every human life. Why would I ever want to change that?

We don’t choose our inheritance. We choose what we do with it.

As a Jew born and raised in the diaspora, I believe that “never again” means never again for anyone—or it means nothing at all.

As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I reject the callous and cynical use of my story and my trauma to justify war, apartheid, and genocide.

As the great-granddaughter of Jewish refugees who chose the name “Israel” to begin their new life in the U.S., I decide what my name will represent today.

I am by no means a religious scholar, but in my Judaism, there are many ways to interpret a story, and even a word, not all of them literal.

In Jewish tradition, names carry profound weight. “Israel” was the name Jacob received after wrestling with an angel, literally meaning ‘one who wrestles with God.’

When I refuse to let the Israeli government’s actions speak in my name, I’m not (only) playing with words. I’m engaging in the centuries-old Jewish practice of wrestling meaning from inheritance.

What if the promised land were the safe, hallowed ground where we came together in community—anywhere in the world—to break bread, laugh and cry and pray together, and remind ourselves that we belong to one another?

What if the promised land were not a place, but a state of being: peace and safety for all of us, each of us sacred, whole, and worthy of life and dignity?

We are so far from that land today, but my name reminds me of my ancestors’ hope:

One day, we will arrive.

It may be a luxury to play with words while some are dying, but I believe we must expand our imagination of what is possible if we ever hope to build a different reality.

And, if it reminds me—or you—of our shared responsibility to be a voice for peace, then it has been of benefit.

I hope you remember to read beyond the titles and labels around you. Remember that much of the most important work—listening, educating ourselves, deconstructing the identities we inherited, and having difficult conversations—may be invisible, but it is the foundation of sustained social change.

I stand by my words from nearly two years ago: I do not pretend to know about solutions, but I know empathy has to be part of the puzzle, if not the table the puzzle is assembled on.

From the time I was very young, too young to understand, my grandmother decided that I was the one who should carry her stories. I remember being five or six years old and sitting on the couch in her suburban Detroit home, semi-dissociating as she told me her entire story of survival, start to finish.

Her story begins in the Warsaw ghetto and follows her “escape” to a work camp in the Black Forest under the false identity of a Polish girl. It charts her return five years later to her family farm, quickly followed by her departure, chased away by neighbors who wanted the land. It covers the years spent jumping from one country to the next until she finally receives her visa and crosses to the United States to reunite with the last of her family — my namesake, her Aunt Toby.

We would repeat the ritual of story once or twice a year, every time I came to visit, until her death 20 years later. For two decades, I received the privilege and burden of my grandmother’s transmission.

Lately, I find myself thinking often about how stories like hers have driven the discourse of an entire population. I come from a generation of American Jews raised on a steady diet of “never again.” We carry our grandparents’ stories in our hearts and minds, in our bones, and if epigenetic research is to be believed, in our DNA.

The first time I came across the concept of intergenerational trauma and epigenetics was in my senior year of college in an Anthropology & Religion seminar. As I read citations of a landmark study on holocaust survivors and intergenerational trauma, so many things clicked into place about my own family, myself, and my grandmother. The study talked about the children of holocaust survivors, but I saw my own nightmares and anxiety implicit in the same results.

Since that class, I have continued to investigate these ideas in my personal healing journey during the last 10 years, and professionally as a credentialed Empowerment Self-Defense (ESD) instructor over the last six years. When we teach women to fight back, say “no,” and protect themselves from abuse and attack, we don’t just prevent future episodes of violence; we also create space for healing a lineage of sexual and domestic violence, which countless women carry.

I ask myself and my students to consider, How do we pass trauma from one generation to the next? And even more compelling, how might we develop resilience and pass that along in our genetic code alongside it? I suspect the answer (as is so often the case in ESD and in therapeutic processes) begins with self-awareness and reflection.

***

It is only recently that I began to understand the role that trauma—intergenerational, collective trauma—has played in twisting that “never again” of my Jewish education into something hierarchical, blinding us to the inherent interconnectedness of all struggles for justice and freedom. I cannot help but draw parallels between this selective, hierarchical “never again” and the now infamous “white feminism,” which gives precedence to the oppression, and thus liberation, of some women over others.

When someone’s trauma response is activated, their limbic system, sometimes referred to as the “lizard brain,” switches on. They are not thinking “rationally,” using their neocortex to process complex ideas, but rather reacting based on instinctive, fear-based, survival mechanisms stored in the amygdala.

In the animal brain, survival is selfish: me over you. Or, us over them.

As has been laid out in detail in foundational works such as “The Body Keeps the Score” and “Trauma and Recovery,” when a person’s trauma response is activated, that person defaults to the survival mechanisms, also called adaptive strategies, they developed as a child: Fight or flight. Freeze or dissociate. It is a pattern I have witnessed again and again since Oct. 7—when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking more than 240 hostages—amongst family, friends and community members carrying what I believe to be intergenerational trauma and its accompanying adaptive strategies. When we default to these adaptive responses, we are not acting with our greatest human potential for compassion and empathy, but rather reacting with the cold, survival-driven instinct of the amygdala.

The body does not necessarily know the difference between immediate danger, such as an imminent car crash, imagined danger, such as a plate shattering to the ground, and existential danger, such as the fear of the annihilation of one’s entire community. For Jews raised and educated on the coattails of the Holocaust, many things can activate a sense of imminent danger.

***

My grandmother had 10 aunts and uncles. None of them were there when she tried to go home after the war. There are dozens of great aunts and uncles, second and third cousins, a whole family tree that I will never know, because their line was cut before they could come into this world.

The thought is almost too big to comprehend. Usually, when I try to think about it, the dissociative skills I developed on my grandmother’s couch as a young girl kick in, and I do not feel the pain. I am unable to fully feel my family’s loss — my loss.

It is the healing work of a lifetime, both as individuals and as communities, to learn to hold and honor our grief without usurping the rights of others to hold theirs, too. As Pema Chödrön writes,

“This is the real work of the peacemaker, to find the soft spot and the tenderness in that very uneasy place and stay with it. If we can stay with the soft spot and stay with the tender heart, then we are cultivating the seeds of peace.”

If we do not do this work, it is inevitable that the cycle of violence will continue at the family, community, and global level. I am far from qualified to offer any political analysis of our current global crisis. However, I do not need to be an expert on International Relations in order to speak to the very real impact of trauma that I have witnessed in my own circles since the latest iteration of conflict ignited in Israel and Palestine.

***

Recently, I found myself lying on the wood floor of a yoga studio in the jungle in Costa Rica with tears streaming down my face. Rhythmic music pulsed in the background as the facilitator invited us to connect with our roots, with our ancestors.

Holotropic breathing was developed in the late 1960s by Stanislav Grof as a substance-free alternative to psychedelic therapy. Its potential to create change at the epigenetic level has not yet been studied, but the results in official and unofficial therapeutic applications are incredibly promising.

Lying on that wood floor, eyes wet, electricity humming in my palms and jaw, I revisited that scene in my grandmother’s living room. From the vantage point of over 25 years of life and learning and healing into my future, I was able to acknowledge both my grandmother’s pain and trauma, and my 6-year-old self’s bewildered, overwhelmed secondhand grief. And I was able to hold space for them both, without anger. For a few moments, I was able to feel the overwhelming grief at the death of more than a thousand people in Israel and nearly 30,000 people in Gaza, from which I have largely dissociated since October 7th — my personal adaptive strategy, or default trauma response.

When we do not process trauma, it becomes illness in the body and mind. It can manifest as chronic pain, as anxiety, and as cyclical violence in the home and beyond it. Epigenetics, however, offer hope for another path — a path of resilience and recovery.

If we can pass on nightmares to the next generation, then we can pass on dreams, too. If we can pass our wounds, then we can also pass our healing.

I am determined to do something else with my family’s trauma and grief. I am determined not to forget it, not to minimize it, but to transform it through my life and my work into something meaningful.

I invite others carrying their family, community or intergenerational trauma to hold space for both their grief and their humanity. We are not responsible for the actions of governments, but our narratives matter. We must not leave our raw and angry wounds open to manipulation; we must choose to tell a story of healing.

There is another path. There must be, or we have carried our grandparents’ stories for nothing. The way forward begins with each of us finding enough space in our hearts to hold empathy and justice alongside our own loss.