Colb: Fresh Waves of Hate Hit Jews in Oct. 7 Aftermath

I am an American Jew, and the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. Like so many Jews in this country, I was raised on stories of unthinkable horror. My grandfather’s parents were rounded up with other Jews from their town and shot dead. His brother was tortured and killed by SS officers. His sister, her husband, and baby were killed.  My grandmother’s parents and four brothers were murdered, leaving her the sole surviving member of her family. When news of the atrocities Hamas committed on Oct. 7 began trickling in – the door-to-door slaughter of men, women, children, babies, entire families – my family’s stories flooded my mind.

While I had been lucky enough before Oct. 7 to have experienced only the subtler forms of antisemitism, I was raised on the darkest of what can come of Jew hatred.  The unfathomable loss suffered by my grandparents, and the miracle of my own existence by extension of their unlikely survival. These stories are in our blood. Embedded trauma, ready to be activated. It is difficult to describe the experience of hearing what Hamas did that day –  unthinkable atrocities not from the past, but here and now, and in the one place that exists so Jews can be safe. But I could barely begin to process that trauma before other feelings took hold – dread and fear. Of the surge in antisemitism that I knew in my bones would follow the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.  And of course, it did.

A year has passed since our lives changed forever on Oct. 7, 2023. And while we can never go back to before that horrific day, neither can we move on. We cannot move on while 100+ of our people, including women and children, grandfathers and grandmothers, are held hostage in dark tunnels underground. While the world may have forgotten them, we have not. We wait anxiously for news of the remaining hostages every day. Neither can we move on while the death toll rises in Gaza. We cannot move on until this brutal war ends, and our hostages are released and back home with their families.