Weeks have passed since the New York City primaries, and I’m still trying to name what I feel.
Watching three violently anti-Israel socialists become the Democratic nominees for Congress in the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel—set against a newfound burst of anti-Israel rhetoric coming from our Republican president and vice president—I feel exhausted, despondent and a new kind of frightened.
According to the “horseshoe theory,” the far-left and the far-right curve toward one another, converging in their authoritarian instincts, their taste for conspiracy, and, all too often, their hostility toward Jews.
These days, that theory feels very real. I know it is contested among political scientists, and I realize that the two ends are not the same. But from where I stand, the distance between them has rarely felt so small.
This is where I want to slow down because I work in mental health, and I recognize what is happening. 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. This is the exhaustion and despondency I described, the doomscroll that ends in paralysis rather than information, the felt need to bury our heads in the sand and pretend everything is fine so we aren’t overcome by anxiety.
Fawn: Appease the threat, make yourself smaller and more palatable. Thus, we perform the disclaimers (“As a Jew, I renounce my ties to Israel … ”) and hope it will buy us 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 responses is doing the same job: trying to keep us alive.
I came by my vigilance honestly. I grew up on stories of my grandparents’ loss and resilience. They were 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 30 years after their liberation. Those stories were my inheritance.
Trauma doesn’t end with the person who endured it; researchers have documented altered stress regulation markers in the children of Holocaust survivors. While the evidence is still emerging and subject to debate, it suggests that catastrophic events can leave a lasting impact that outlasts a single life.
I don’t need a laboratory to feel it. It lives in the reflex I have carried since childhood. It is the constant question: Would I recognize the signs in time?
I used to wonder whether my ancestors, across centuries, saw society changing around them. Did they notice the small and large shifts that preceded the uncorking of the old bottle of antisemitism? Did they sense when resentment was hardening into accusation, accusation into permission and permission into violence? Did they see it coming: the exile, the forced conversion or the slaughter? Did they know when it was time to leave a place they called home?
As so many Jews raised on those memories, I made myself a promise: I would fight like hell to protect my people. I would not go to my death like a “sheep to the slaughter.”
I want to sit with that phrase for a moment, both because it shaped me and because it is not quite fair.
Today, the horseshoe theory feels very real. And it feels like the walls are closing in on me, on us.
Historians have long pushed back on the image of European Jews as passive victims. There was far more resistance—in ghettos, forests and camps—than the phrase “sheep to the slaughter” allows. But it endures because it encodes a fear, not a fact. It is the terror of being acted upon. Of going still when it counts. Of mistaking 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?
The question that keeps me up: How do we know when our efforts no longer work?
Here is what the trauma framework has given me: The point is not that the fight is noble and that 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 those who dealt with this issue early and punished others who did not.
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.
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. 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, for once, my own.
