CAA marks Mental Health Awareness Week with podcast about impact of antisemitism on Jewish mental health

To mark Mental Health Awareness Week 2023, CAA has released a new episode of Podcast Against Antisemitism which looks at the impact of antisemitism on Jewish mental health.

We spoke with Asher M. Seruya and Laur Plawker, the hosts of Kvetching on the Couch, a podcast that looks at Jewish mental health.

Ms Seruya is a social worker and psychotherapist specialising in trauma-informed care, weight stigma, and eating disorder recovery, while Ms Plawker is a Suicide Prevention Specialist who works at the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit organisation that protects emotional health and prevents suicide for teenagers and young adults in the United States.

The pair discussed the ways in which antisemitism can contribute towards anxiety in Jews, during which time topics such as intergenerational trauma, news reports of violent antisemitism, and hate on social media were raised.

Ms Seruya said: “When you see people like you being attacked, you’re going to feel anxious about it. You’re gonna be scared and nervous, because how could you not be?”

Ms Plawker noted that “we experience so much [antisemitism] now via social media and the internet, and that means that whether or not you are experiencing antisemitism when you walk down the street, you are constantly exposed to antisemitism.”

“With that being true,” they added, “it’s important to give yourself some grace in experiencing feelings of anxiety as it pertains to antisemitism. It’s everywhere, it’s pervasive, it’s in the palms of our hands, in our phones, it’s a part of online rhetoric and discourse, it’s in the news.”

Ms Seruya spoke of the anxiety associated with antisemitism occurring in unexpected spaces.

Directing the conversation to spaces that promote progressive and inclusive values, in which the pair both spend time, Ms Seruya said: “You think Jews would be included in that, and yet, a lot of times they’re not, and in fact, we are the villains in the story. And that’s really complicated when maybe the one space that you thought could be welcoming to you, isn’t, so where can you go? That’s extremely anxiety-inducing.”

When asked about what effects someone may experience when they come across a piece of antisemitic social media content, Ms Seruya spoke of the physiological symptoms of anxiety.

“Mine are getting very warm, flushed cheeks, that really intense panic in your chest,” she said. 

“I also experience anxiety somatically,” Ms Plawker said, “I feel a heaviness. It often feels like a fatigue overcomes me and it quite literally feels like a physical weight in my bones that seeps over me, and often, it leads to the feeling of paralysis, not necessarily in a literal sense but that I don’t know what to do next, I don’t know the move…I find myself very still in a way I find very uncomfortable…frozen in fear, in anxiety.”

Ms Plawker, speaking on her own experience, added: “I’ve posted a picture of a challah that I made, and it’s just a picture of a challah…and in the comments, I’ll get something hateful from people who know it’s a Jewish bread. It really doesn’t need to be an antisemitic post with antisemitic content. So often, it just catches you fully by surprise, and how anxiety-inducing is that? 

“You might have been looking at a challah-braiding video, like ‘I’m so excited to try this out, that looks like something I can do,’ and then in the comments, you might see ‘I wish you were dead.’ And that’s a horrible experience.”

Speaking on the issue of intergenerational trauma, Ms Seruya described it as trauma that is “passed down physiologically and psychologically from each generation, and for Jewish people, this can look a lot of different ways, just like with many other people who are parts of communities that have also been systematically and historically marginalised and traumatised, including mental health issues like anxiety, which also extends to OCD, nightmares about things you’ve never personally experienced. That’s actually one there’s a lot of evidence for.” 

The psychotherapist added: “I should note, a lot of the intergenerational trauma research is actually focused on Holocaust survivors, and on the children of Holocaust survivors. We are in no way, shape or form the only community that experiences it but a lot of the research comes from that, so we do actually have a lot of research that suggests that children of Holocaust survivors, and also not of Holocaust survivors, have a lot of nightmares about fires. It’s just a very common trope within nightmares for Jewish people, statistically.” 

They described how another manifestation of intergenerational trauma among Jews is the perception of food scarcity due to such historical experiences within the Jewish community. 

“Even when we may not have literal food scarcity in our present, we can still feel perceived food scarcity because of the genetic aspects of trauma, and how that can live within you, even if its not your personal lived experience,” they explained.

Ms Plawker, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust, revealed how through conversations with her sister about their childhood, they realised that they had both been experiencing intergenerational trauma.

“Something we both came to the, frankly horrific, realisation of is that we had both identified hiding spaces in our childhood home in case the Nazis came,” she said. “No one told us to do that. Our parents certainly hadn’t told us to do that. Our grandmother had never had that conversation with us. We just, independently of one another, had identified those spaces. I can tell you now where every single exit of the synagogue I grew up in is. Again, no one told me to do that. There weren’t safety trainings for that. It’s just something I carry with me and when I go into spaces, where I am gathering with other Jewish people, I make sure I know where the exits are, and it’s instinctual. It’s immediate. And that’s both an anxiety response and a trauma response. 

“I’m sharing a piece of me, and a piece of my experience, but I don’t think that’s isolated to being my own experience. I think a lot of Jewish people have similar experiences.”

This podcast can be listened to here, or watched here.

Podcast Against Antisemitism, produced by Campaign Against Antisemitism, talks to a different guest about antisemitism each week. It streams every Thursday and is available through all major podcast apps and YouTube. You can also subscribe to have new episodes sent straight to your inbox.

Previous guests have included comedian David Baddiel, television personality Robert Rinder, writer Eve Barlow, Grammy-Award-winning singer-songwriter Autumn Rowe, and actor Eddie Marsan.