Edits from an article I'm writing...

"Anecdotally, people have told me that this trauma-identity is used to solidify the Jewish community outside of Israel, both for security reasons and to strengthen Jewish identity. Of the 1400 religion-based hate crimes in the United States which were reported to the FBI in 2007, 969 were anti-Jewish, (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2007), making an effective argument for safety concerns (though the circle-the-wagons approach may be both counter-productive and ineffective in the long-term (Somer et al., 2008)). Intermarriage and assimilation increases are also borne out in various surveys (e.g. National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01, 2001), showing greater intermarriage and fewer children being raised Jewish in these marriages when compared to families with two Jewish parents."


"There are even high school programs that allow the students to volunteer with Magen David Adom (the Israeli Red Cross) and work on ambulances. While these under-18s are barred from responding to mass casualty incidents, they still are regular witnesses to car accidents and various other types of trauma that high schoolers in other countries may not be. While the point isn’t to purposefully expose these students to trauma, there is also less shying away from it."


"However, this seems to be more a phenomena of the diaspora than of Israel. My own experiences with discrimination as a non-Jew have come solely from non-Israeli-borne Jews, all of whom were of Ashkenazi/European descent. I don’t wonder if my blatant German-Catholic heritage (I don’t appear Jewish at all) doesn’t play some part in that. This is aside from the Israeli governmental favouring of Jews over non-Jews, which not necessarily discrimination but is clearly unequal."


"Yet this feeling also becomes somewhat normalized. As a researcher who studies trauma and emergency response, I was interested in learning how Israel coped with the attacks on it. I learned that every house has a reinforced safe-room and that bomb shelters are a part of every public building; I learned that security guards check your bag at the entrance to every mall, bus station, and most restaurants; I got used to seeing soldiers with guns on public buses. The necessity of adaptation required that you adjusted your thinking to the situation."


Federal Bureau of Investigation (2007). Hate crime statistics, Table 1. Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2007/table_01.htm on 8 December, 2008.

Somer, E., Maguen, S., Moin, V., Boehm, A., Metzler, T. J., & Litz, B. T. (2008). The effects of perceived community cohesion on stress symptoms following a terrorist attack. Journal of Psychological Trauma, 7(2), 73-90.