We Are Still In It: Diaspora Jews & the Grief that Changed Shape

For many Jews in the diaspora, the world has moved on faster than our nervous systems have. The headlines have shifted. The public outrage has been redistributed. The language has changed. But for many of us, the rupture has not healed. It has simply taken on a new form.

What began as acute communal trauma has become something broader, more chronic, and harder to name: the grief of watching antisemitism surge around us while much of the world insists we are misreading it.

It is the grief of seeing Jewish students harassed as “Zionists,” synagogues and Jewish institutions targeted over events thousands of miles away, Jewish symbols treated as political provocations, and Jewish pain framed as something that must be qualified, contextualized, or apologized for before it can be acknowledged. It is the grief of realizing that anti-Zionism has become, in many spaces, a socially acceptable container for antisemitism.

That distinction matters.

Criticism of Israeli policy is not inherently antisemitic. Jews themselves hold a wide range of views about Israel, the Israeli government, and the future. But when “Zionist” becomes a stand-in for “Jew,” when Jewish students are treated as representatives of a foreign government, when Jewish institutions become proxy targets for rage at Israel, and when hostility toward Jews is rationalized as political expression, we are no longer talking about ordinary disagreement. We are talking about antisemitism finding a new vocabulary.

This is why so many Jews remain emotionally braced.

We are not simply looking back at a trauma that ended. We are living with its aftershocks, even as the public conversation has moved elsewhere. The numbers bear this out.

In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States, the highest number since it began tracking incidents in 1979. For the first time in the history of its audit, most of those incidents, 58%, included elements related to Israel or Zionism.

In 2025, the total number of incidents decreased but remained the third-highest year on record, with physical assaults reaching record levels and Israel- or Zionism-related incidents still accounting for 45% of all antisemitic incidents.

Other data points in the same direction.

Pew Research found that nine in ten American Jews believed discrimination against Jews had risen in the United States in the period following October 2023, and that many Jews reported sadness, anger, exhaustion, and fear. The American Jewish Committee’s 2025 State of Antisemitism in America report found that more than half of American Jews had changed their behavior in the past year out of fear of antisemitism, and nearly one-third reported being targeted in person or online.

A joint report by ADL and the Jewish Federations of North America found that more than half of Jewish Americans surveyed had experienced some form of antisemitism in the past year, and that direct or witnessed antisemitic harm was associated with higher rates of symptoms used to screen for anxiety and depression.

This is not only an American phenomenon. In the United Kingdom, the Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest annual total it has ever reported. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research found that 35% of British Jews reported feeling unsafe as Jews in Britain in 2025, compared with 9% before the attacks.

Among young people, the psychological toll is especially visible. A Brandeis study of Jewish undergraduates in the 2025-26 academic year found that nearly half of Jewish students surveyed had experienced prejudice on campus because of their Jewish identity.

At Gesher Community Care, where we connect Jewish individuals with culturally safe, trauma-informed mental-health support, we have seen this distress firsthand. In our own survey of almost 450 Jewish teens and college students, nearly 75% reported experiencing antisemitism since 10/7.

That number is not abstract.

It reflects what we hear from students and families every day: young Jews wondering whether to hide their Jewish identity, whether peers will turn on them, whether professors will understand them, and whether campus spaces that claim to be inclusive are actually safe for them. For many, the anxiety is not only about isolated incidents. It is about the emotional exhaustion of constantly assessing whether being visibly Jewish will come with social, academic, or physical consequences.

These statistics matter because they challenge the idea that Jewish distress is simply political discomfort, hypersensitivity, or an inability to “move on.” For many Jews, this has become a sustained identity-based stressor. It affects how people move through the world, what they wear, what they say, where they gather, and how safe they feel being fully visible.

As a clinician, I hear this often. A college student wonders whether wearing a Jewish star will make her a target. A parent feels anxious before sending a child to a Jewish event. A young adult realizes that friends who posted passionately about every other social justice issue had little or nothing to say when Jews were threatened, harassed, or attacked. A patient feels guilty for grieving, because the world seems to demand that Jewish pain be defended before it is allowed to exist.

That last piece is its own wound.

Many Jews have not only experienced fear. They have experienced invalidation. When they tried to express grief, they were met not with care, but with debate. Their mourning was scrutinized. Their fear was reframed as privilege. Their pain was treated as politically inconvenient. Dr. Marsha Linehan has described this phenomenon as traumatic invalidation: the denial, dismissal, or distortion of a person’s significant lived experience in a way that deepens the original wound. Trauma scholar Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern subsequently developed a framework based on this model to understand the psychological impact of the rise in antisemitism on the Jewish community post-10/7.

For many diaspora Jews, this is the grief underneath the grief.

It is not only grief over violence, fear, or the rise in hate crimes. It is grief over what happened afterward in our own communities, campuses, workplaces, professional networks, social circles, and public culture.

It is the grief of discovering that Jewish fear is often treated as excessive until it becomes undeniable. It is the grief of seeing antisemitism clearly and then being told we are imagining it, exaggerating it, or weaponizing it. It is the grief of realizing that spaces built around inclusion do not always know how to include Jews when Jewish vulnerability complicates the preferred narrative.

Clinically, one useful framework for this is ambiguous loss. Pauline Boss, who developed the concept, describes ambiguous loss as loss without clear resolution or closure. It is the kind of grief that remains suspended because the loss is unclear, ongoing, or not fully recognized by others. That is part of what makes this moment so painful. Jews are grieving losses that are real but not always visible. The loss of assumed safety. The loss of uncomplicated belonging. The loss of trust in people and institutions we thought would understand Jewish pain. The loss of a world in which being openly Jewish felt less fraught.

These are real losses, even when there is no funeral for them.

And because the threat has not fully receded, the grief does not resolve in the usual way. We are grieving safety while still trying to stay safe. We are grieving belonging while still trying to belong. We are grieving trust while still having to walk into schools, workplaces, universities, professional spaces, and social settings that no longer feel the same.

So the question is not, “Why haven’t Jews moved on?” The better question is: How do we live with dignity, connection, and emotional health while we are still carrying so much?

First, we must name the reality clearly.

Antisemitism does not become harmless because it uses the word “Zionist” instead of “Jew.” Naming this helps people stop gaslighting themselves. It gives language to what many Jews are already feeling in their bodies: the tightness, vigilance, anger, exhaustion, and sadness that come from living with a threat others keep minimizing.

Second, we need boundaries around exposure.

Staying informed matters, but constant consumption of headlines, antisemitic comments, campus videos, inflammatory social media, and arguments with strangers can keep the nervous system in a state of threat. Stepping away is not indifference. It is regulation. It is what allows us to remain engaged without becoming consumed.

Third, we need Jewish connection that is not only organized around crisis.

Security briefings, advocacy, and vigilance are necessary. But Jewish life cannot become only a trauma response. We also need Shabbat meals, music, learning, holidays, humor, ritual, friendship, and joy. A Jewish life built only around fear is not sustainable. A Jewish life that includes joy is not a betrayal of grief. It is part of survival.

Fourth, we need culturally competent mental-health support.

At Gesher Community Care, we have seen how powerful it can be when Jewish clients do not have to spend the first half of a session explaining why antisemitism is real, why anti-Zionist hostility can feel personally threatening, or why Jewish grief in this period is not simply “political.” Many Jews seeking therapy right now are not only dealing with anxiety or grief in a general sense. They need spaces where Jewish identity, antisemitism, Israel-related distress, family history, communal fear, and intergenerational trauma are understood rather than minimized or politicized.

A therapist does not need to share every belief or identity of a client, but they do need to be able to hold Jewish pain with seriousness, humility, and care.

Fifth, we need agency.

Ambiguous loss creates helplessness because so much remains unresolved. Small acts of agency help restore dignity: checking on a student, volunteering, giving tzedakah, showing up for Jewish institutions, writing, creating art, advocating for safer campuses, or refusing to hide visible Jewish identity when it feels safe to be seen.

Finally, we need permission for emotional complexity. We can grieve Jewish suffering and care about the suffering of others. We can criticize policies and still reject antisemitism. We can feel afraid and still feel proud. We can rest and remain engaged. We can laugh at dinner and cry in the car on the way home. Humor, joy, grief, fear, anger, love, and hope are not contradictions. They are signs that we are still fully alive.

The goal is not to “move on.”

Some grief does not move in a straight line. Some losses do not close neatly. The goal is to keep living without disappearing.

Diaspora Jews are carrying a grief that is both ancient and new: ancient because antisemitism is not new, and new because its current language, platforms, and social permissions have changed. We are watching old hatred adapt itself to modern vocabulary. We are watching it travel through campuses, protests, workplaces, social media feeds, and public discourse. And we are trying to remain whole while doing so.

We are still carrying it.

But carrying it does not mean we must live forever in survival mode. Jewish life has always known how to mourn and how to build. Our task now is to do both: to tell the truth about the pain, to seek help when we need it, to protect our children and communities, and to return, slowly, and together, to joy without forgetting why it matters.

This was an article by Dr. Jessica Zmood, originally posted on The Times of Israel. Read the original article.