The Three Layers of Jewish Trauma After October 7

Last week, Israel and Jews around the world commemorated the third anniversary of October 7, the day Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups launched an assault across southern Israel that killed approximately 1,200 people and abducted 251 others. As I stood alongside my fellow Jews at my local community’s memorial event, I was struck by how fresh and profound our grief remained. But I also realized that our grief may not be for the reasons some people might think.

As I have observed the emotional state of members of my community and reflected on my own trauma and grief over the past three years, I have come to believe that there is something fundamentally different about what October 7 and its aftermath represent for us. October 7 was more than another terrorist attack in which Israelis and Jews were killed. It was a profoundly traumatic collective experience, one that unfolded across multiple, overlapping layers that need to be understood if we are to create a pathway toward healing.

The first layer was the immediate exposure to the violence itself—and where that violence occurred.

I have taken several tours of southern Israel and heard countless stories from survivors about what happened that day. What I saw and heard was not simply “violence.” I saw the remains of homes where families had been deliberately burned alive. I saw bullet holes in the corners of shelters where Israelis had sought refuge, suggesting that their attackers pursued them into the very places where they were ultimately found and killed. I heard the story of a young Israeli woman hiding at the Nova music festival who cried out “Why?” when she was found and then executed.

In other words, many Israelis were not simply exposed to violence on October 7, 2023. They were exposed to a particularly horrific form of violence.

Yet the horror of these acts was not limited to the people who experienced them firsthand. It reverberated throughout Israeli society and, to a certain extent, through Jewish communities across the Diaspora.

Israelis across the country watched the events unfold, worried about family members and friends, and feared that the attack might reach their own homes. Jews outside Israel watched the attacks from thousands of miles away, worrying about loved ones, friends, and communities in Israel.

The location of the attack also mattered enormously.

October 7 did not occur in some distant war zone or in the Palestinian Territories. It occurred inside Israel, in communities that Israelis—and many Jews throughout the world—understood to be part of the country that was supposed to serve as their safe haven. For many Israelis, and for many Jews in the Diaspora who see Israel as the Jewish people’s national homeland, the attack therefore represented more than the loss of innocent life. It shattered a fundamental assumption: that there was a place where Jews could finally be safe.

That is why, for many of us, October 7 was not simply an encounter with horrific violence. It was a collective trauma that challenged our sense of where—and whether—we could be safe. And for many Jews, that existential fear was not new. It was rooted in historical experiences of persecution that long predated the attack.

The second layer of trauma was the historical suffering that October 7 may have reactivated: memories and fears rooted in generations of Jewish persecution and carried forward through family narratives, collective memory, and potentially, intergenerational effects.

For Ashkenazi Jews—and, to a certain extent, Jews more broadly—the collective memory of the Holocaust is deeply embedded in Jewish communities and has been passed down through generations. For some, October 7 may have reactivated longstanding fears associated with the Holocaust, bringing historical memories of persecution into the experience of a new and devastating attack.

Psychological research has explored how severe trauma may affect subsequent generations, including possible biological associations with vulnerability to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among the offspring of survivors. For example, Rachel Yehuda and colleagues (2000) found that adult children of Holocaust survivors exhibited biological differences associated with vulnerability to PTSD, including lower cortisol levels, compared with individuals whose parents had not experienced the Holocaust. Subsequent research by Yehuda and colleagues (2007) also found associations between parental PTSD among Holocaust survivors and PTSD-related vulnerability in their offspring.

For many Israelis and Jews, October 7 may have reactivated some of these longstanding fears and vulnerabilities.

Although October 7 was not the Holocaust, it saw the largest number of Jews killed in a single day since the Holocaust. Some of the methods used to kill and terrorize Israelis also evoked memories of Nazi atrocities, including the burning of people alive, the use of grenades in shelters where people were hiding, the mutilation of bodies, and people hiding among piles of corpses. For Israelis and Jews around the world who experienced or witnessed an attack containing elements reminiscent of the Holocaust, these parallels may have reactivated memories, fears, and traumatic responses associated with those atrocities, particularly against the backdrop of historical trauma transmitted through family narratives and across generations.

October 7 may also have reactivated a distinct set of historical traumas among another Jewish community: Mizrahi Jews, whose roots lie in the Middle East and North Africa. While the Holocaust occupies a central place in Ashkenazi Jewish collective memory, many Mizrahi Jews carry memories of generations of persecution across Arab and Islamic lands.

My own family, for instance, experienced antisemitism in Iran, which intensified around the 1979 Islamic Revolution. During that period, my grandparents had their property confiscated and had no choice but to flee to Israel.

My family’s experience in Iran reflects a broader Mizrahi history in which Jews faced persecution, including under Islamist regimes and movements, leading many to view Israel as a safe haven. Again, October 7 was not simply another terrorist attack committed by an extremist group in some distant location. It was carried out by Hamas, a radical Islamist organization, inside Israel—a country that many Jewish refugees and their descendants had come to see as a refuge from that persecution. For some Mizrahi Jews in Israel and throughout the world, this may have reactivated intergenerational fears rooted in their families’ experiences of persecution and the threat of radical Islamism.

Indeed, when I saw videos of Israelis being killed and dragged through the streets of Gaza by Hamas militants chanting “Allahu Akbar,” I felt fears that I suspect were connected to my grandparents’ experiences in Iran.

Yet, despite the atrocities Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed on October 7, 2023, and the historical traumas they may have reactivated, many Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora felt that they did not receive the compassion they needed from their non-Jewish friends, peers, and colleagues. Instead, they encountered silence, attempts to explain or contextualize the attacks, and, in some cases, even celebrations of the violence. These responses introduced another source of suffering: the trauma of invalidation.

This third layer of trauma may be less visible than the violence itself or the historical memories it reawakened, but it is no less important. Known as “traumatic invalidation,” it refers to the additional suffering that can arise when a person’s grief, trauma, identity, or emotional responses are dismissed, minimized, or even justified away by others.

These responses matter because their impact extends beyond simply “hurt feelings.” For people already grappling with the immediate violence of October 7 and the historical traumas it may have reactivated, the absence of compassion—and, in some cases, the active justification or celebration of their suffering—could compound their distress and undermine their sense of safety, belonging, and trust.

Building on Marsha Linehan’s work, Melanie Harned (2022) described traumatic invalidation as the extreme or repeated dismissal of a person’s significant experiences, identity, or emotional responses. She developed a framework for understanding traumatic invalidation and its application to racial and ethnic minority groups. Under this framework, interactions in which peers, friends, coworkers, or authority figures ignore, neglect, criticize, discriminate against, control, exclude, or misinterpret members of minority groups—or blame them or deny the reality of their experiences—may constitute forms of traumatic invalidation, with potentially negative implications for mental health.

In their 2025 article, psychologists Drs. Miri Bar-Halpern and Jaclyn Wolfman applied the traumatic invalidation framework to Jewish experiences after October 7. They documented cases in which Jewish students and coworkers experienced invalidation of their identities and the trauma they described following the attacks, through one or more of the nine forms outlined in the framework. They explained how denial, blame, exclusion, and other invalidating responses can compound distress and undermine safety, belonging, and trust.

The mental health effects associated with traumatic invalidation may have compounded the suffering caused by the violence of October 7 and the historical traumas it reactivated. Addressing this suffering therefore requires more than acknowledging the attacks themselves.

As Bar-Halpern and Wolfman suggest, raising awareness of the atrocities committed on October 7 is an important first step. A more comprehensive approach to healing, however, should acknowledge all three dimensions of this experience: the immediate violence of October 7, the historical traumas it may have reactivated among Jews from different backgrounds, and the additional suffering caused when their experiences were dismissed or minimized.

Universities, community organizations, mental health professionals, and individuals all have a role to play in creating spaces where Jewish experiences can be heard and validated without requiring others to abandon their own perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such efforts would not eliminate disagreement, but they could help ensure that disagreement does not come at the expense of empathy, recognition, and compassion.