We need to talk about Jewish mental health.

The psychological wounds of October 7th and its aftermath shattered Jewish trust and exposed a new era of vulnerability, but from that fracture emerged a profound, elemental resilience.

photo: Ben Kupke/Unsplash

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

---

Trauma can fracture the body or the mind’s architecture.

The October 7th pogrom did both: It reopened wounds Jews thought had scarred over, and the aftermath (Westerners’ euphoria, the media’s evasions, the establishment’s collapse) deepened the toll. Israelis suffered a massacre, Diaspora Jews an unveiling.

While I have had a long career in journalism, I am also a licensed psychotherapist who spends unhealthy amounts of time ruminating about these things. For months, clinicians have told me that Diaspora Jews have been struggling under the mental health toll of it all, so I decided to take a deeper dive to see if the evidence bore this out. Sadly, it did.

A 2024 American Jewish Committee survey found that 63 percent of American Jews felt less safe after October 7th. An Anti-Defamation League survey showed that 74 percent of Jews were worried about their personal safety, and 60 percent avoided wearing or hid Jewish symbols in public. These are manifestations of what is known as “avoidance behavior.”

The Community Security Trust in the UK recorded the highest levels of antisemitism ever documented in Britain, with 4,103 incidents in 2023 (a 147-percent rise), most of them occurring in the three months after the massacre.

Clinicians across the United States, Canada, the UK, France, and Australia have reported sharp rises in Jewish patients presenting with anxiety disorders, panic attacks, intrusive thoughts, and trauma symptoms. A 2024 paper presented to the European Congress of Psychiatry noted that Jews reported a 25-percent increase in baseline anxiety, a 30-percent increase in sleep disturbances, and significant spikes in hypervigilance and avoidance behavior.

Even therapists who rarely treat Jewish-specific trauma were suddenly managing what are termed “collective trauma responses,” a phenomenon more commonly associated with refugee populations and survivors of mass political violence. A major challenge is that there is a double trauma at play: The October 7th massacre and its aftermath, which included the worst antisemitism most Jews alive today have experienced.

October 7th was a massacre. What followed was a revelation — and a psychic aftershock.

It was not only October 7th’s brutality that destabilized Jews (the beheadings, the incinerated children, the gang rapes, the mass abductions), but the way the West’s moral reflexes buckled on contact with Jewish suffering. Protesters in London, Sydney, New York, and Paris flooded the streets celebrating and chanting “resistance,” “glory to the martyrs,” and openly praising Hamas.

Polling from YouGov revealed that nearly a third of British 18 to 24-year-olds viewed Hamas positively after the attacks. In the United States, a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that 51 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds believed Israel was committing “genocide,” even as Israeli civilians were still being identified from heaps of burned bone fragments. Jews were not simply frightened; they were gaslit.

The technical term for this is “epistemic trauma,” or its close cousin betrayal trauma — the psychological injury that occurs when the community you rely on for safety reveals it will not protect you. Many Jews found this betrayal more unsettling than the attack itself.

October 7th was beyond horrifying, but I was aware that people did terrible things to each other; it was the response that bothered me. This also manifests as “secondary trauma” and “vicarious trauma,” which occur when we feel trauma from witnessing or hearing about another person’s trauma.

Jews in specific situations faced specific problems, such as those on Western university campuses and in Western cities more broadly. For example, the Anti-Defamation League and Hillel International recorded over 1,500 antisemitic incidents on U.S. campuses between October 2023 and October 2024, the highest on record. The mental health consequences were immediate: 41 percent of Jewish students avoided campus spaces, 46 percent hid their Jewish identity, and 32 percent changed their daily routines for safety. One in five reported clinical anxiety symptoms linked directly to campus hostility.

Such symptoms are more common among communities facing chronic ethnic persecution in low-trust societies, not middle-class students paying $50,000 a year to be told their existence is an imperial crime.

A core psychological injury many Jews suffered was a weakening of “cognitive trust,” which is just a fancy way of describing the basic belief that the people and systems around you see what you see, understand what you are experiencing, and acknowledge it as real. As an illustration of this trust’s weakening, on October 7th Jews saw a pogrom, genocidal intent, and victims. Western intellectuals and the international media saw a provocation, anti-colonial pageantry, and competing narratives.

Such moral disorientation has clinical consequences. Jews have faced persistent discrimination, hatred, and societal invalidation of their trauma, making them at heightened risk of:

• Acute Stress Disorder: a short-term trauma response marked by anxiety, dissociation, and re-experiencing symptoms that occur within the first month after a traumatic event.

• Panic-Spectrum Symptoms: intense physical and psychological sensations, such as rapid heartbeat, dizziness, and fear of losing control, that arise during or around panic attacks.

• Somaticized Anxiety: anxiety expressed through physical symptoms such as chest tightness, gastrointestinal discomfort, headaches, or tremors without a medical cause.

• Intrusive Re-Experiencing Phenomena: unwanted, distressing intrusive memories, flashbacks, or sensory fragments of a traumatic event — a common feature of post-traumatic stress disorder.

• Sleep Fragmentation and Nightmares: repeated awakenings and trauma-related dreams that disrupt healthy sleep cycles and impair restfulness.

• Derealization: dissociative moments in which the external world feels unreal, distant, or distorted despite knowing it is real.

• Identity Destabilization: the erosion or disruption of one’s sense of self, leading to confusion, insecurity, or fragmentation in how one understands oneself.

• Impaired Emotional Regulation: difficulty or inability to manage, modulate, or recover from emotional responses in a steady and adaptively productive way.

• Complex Grief: a prolonged, intense, and disruptive mourning response in which emotional pain, longing, and preoccupation with the loss persist and impair functioning far beyond the typical grieving process.

• Chronic Hypervigilance: a persistent state of heightened threat awareness in which the nervous system remains continuously on alert, even in the absence of actual danger.

Diaspora Jews have long imagined themselves integral to the Western project, so this surge in antisemitism has eroded their sense of belonging. Jews have led universities, developed vaccines, built financial systems, designed pop culture, managed hospitals, run charities, funded political campaigns, won Nobel Prizes, and believed that these contributions had yielded societal and cultural acceptance.

Yet, when Jews saw mobs outside synagogues chanting “Globalize the intifada!” and “From the River to the Sea…” they realized their contribution had not bought acceptance, that their sense of belonging was an illusion, and that their citizenship was conditional.

Polls show the psychological impact of this realization. Some 82 percent of French Jews feared for their safety; 70 percent of British Jews considered emigrating; 28 percent of Australian Jews reported depressive symptoms linked specifically to rising antisemitism; and more than 50 percent said they avoided appearing Jewish or identifying as Jewish in public. These are more than statistics; they are markers of “collective hypervigilance activation,” which is a sustained state of sympathetic nervous system arousal typically seen in populations exposed to dangerous environments.

Diaspora Jews rediscovered the ancestral dread that their grandparents and parents carried through Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East — a dread their generation believed belonged to history. This is termed “intergenerational trauma” or “transgenerational trauma.” And it awakened an ancient fear in the Jewish psyche. Even the most assimilated Jews, those for whom Jewishness was a sentimental accessory rather than an identity, found themselves in the grip of an involuntary, historical fear. Psychologically, the following were aroused:

• Ancestral Memory: inherited emotional and psychological patterns that shape a person’s reactions and fears despite not being consciously learned or personally experienced.

• Attachment Rupture (Latent Identity Attachment): a dormant but enduring emotional bond to an identity or group that becomes activated when under threat, stress, or societal hostility.

• Existential Unease: a persistent, underlying sense of anxiety or disquiet about one’s safety, purpose, or place in the world, often triggered when previously stable assumptions about life feel threatened.

• Watchfulness: a state of heightened, persistent vigilance that often develops in groups who have historically faced state-sponsored persecution, where survival depended on constantly scanning for danger, reading subtle threats, and never assuming safety. This differs from chronic hypervigilance in that watchfulness is a heightened but controlled alertness to potential danger, while hypervigilance is an involuntary, chronic, and physiologically intense state of constant threat scanning that disrupts daily functioning.

Jewish parents in New York, Toronto, Paris, Melbourne, and London report giving their children instructions eerily similar to those whispered in Europe eight decades ago: not to draw attention to themselves, being careful what they say in and out of class, removing their Stars of David or other Jewish symbols, and always sit near the exit. This is not cultural neurosis; it is statistical prudence. In the United States, antisemitic incidents in 2023 and 2024 increased 361 percent, according to the Anti-Defamation League. In France, they tripled. In Australia, they quadrupled.

Yet trauma, especially in collective forms, has a paradoxical capacity: It can consolidate identity as well as fracture it. “Identity consolidation” is a psychological adaptation in which individuals deepen their commitment to group belonging as a buffer against existential and external threats.

Indeed, a 2024 Pew Research Center survey noted that more than half of American Jews felt “more connected to Jewish identity” after October 7th. Donations to Jewish causes, security funds, and Israel-related causes surged. Jewish day schools and Hebrew classes filled. Synagogue attendance rose. Young Jews who once kept a distance from Jewish communal life are now showing up in search of belonging and clarity.

Concurrent with the trauma and people hiding their identity, there has been a spike in Jews becoming more publicly Jewish, not less. Trauma, when directed outward rather than inward, can harden identity. The Diaspora Jew of 2025 is not the Diaspora Jew of 2023. The innocence is gone, the trust is eroded, the vigilance is awakened, and the identity is sharpened. The Jewish People’s many enemies may believe they have frightened Jews into silence, but for many, it has done the opposite and reminded them who they are.

The psychological toll is terrible and undeniable, but there has also been a psychological awakening. Diaspora Jews now understand that their safety was never guaranteed, their acceptance never unconditional, and their place in the West never permanent. In this understanding, Jews have unearthed a new resilience: a refusal to apologize, hide, diminish, or negotiate our identity ever again.

---