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- Apr 20, 2025
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I’m hoping perhaps someone here has some insight for me. I’m a Jewish man in his late 20’s. My whole life people who know and people who don’t know I’m Jewish have frequently made jokes about the shoah. It happened again to me today, in a meme group chat I’m part of for my DnD group, a friend sent a meme about the shoah. It wasn’t the worst he could have sent but it still shocked me and genuinely caused me to feel pain.
Throughout my life I thought most people know about what happened to us (and many other people who didn’t conform to N@zi ideals). I thought people understood how deeply painful it is for us even to this day. How it wasn’t that long ago and for many of us it was parents, grandparents and even great grandparents who either survived, escaped or didn’t. That making “light jokes” of it was not funny or even acceptable.
So why, why have so many non-Jews throughout my life found the attempts of systematic extermination of our people so funny?
I want to believe that it’s ignorance, I really really do but where I live they’re educated on the Shoah, they’re educated on WWII and the horrific crimes against humanity that occurred. So I can’t believe it’s ignorance, that they “don’t mean it”.
It’s happening more and more and I’m fairly certain we can all guess why, but it’s becoming overwhelming for me. Incidents were something that would happen maybe once or twice in a year and now it’s happening once or twice in a week. I’m not used to hurting this much this frequently and I feel so lonely and isolated.
I’ve tried speaking to my partner about it (he’s not Jewish) but I’ve felt like he’s really dismissive when I express that I don’t feel safe in our country anymore, that I worry it’s only going to get worse and that people have already targeted Jewish homes, businesses, widows and shuls in our city. His approach is it’s an overreaction, it’s disproportionate, that my concern over whether or not he’d leave the country with me if things get really bad is “alarmist”.
Please please, can someone tell me I’m not crazy? Or at least another Jew here tell me that in the UK there’s nothing to be worrying about.
Throughout my life I thought most people know about what happened to us (and many other people who didn’t conform to N@zi ideals). I thought people understood how deeply painful it is for us even to this day. How it wasn’t that long ago and for many of us it was parents, grandparents and even great grandparents who either survived, escaped or didn’t. That making “light jokes” of it was not funny or even acceptable.
So why, why have so many non-Jews throughout my life found the attempts of systematic extermination of our people so funny?
I want to believe that it’s ignorance, I really really do but where I live they’re educated on the Shoah, they’re educated on WWII and the horrific crimes against humanity that occurred. So I can’t believe it’s ignorance, that they “don’t mean it”.
It’s happening more and more and I’m fairly certain we can all guess why, but it’s becoming overwhelming for me. Incidents were something that would happen maybe once or twice in a year and now it’s happening once or twice in a week. I’m not used to hurting this much this frequently and I feel so lonely and isolated.
I’ve tried speaking to my partner about it (he’s not Jewish) but I’ve felt like he’s really dismissive when I express that I don’t feel safe in our country anymore, that I worry it’s only going to get worse and that people have already targeted Jewish homes, businesses, widows and shuls in our city. His approach is it’s an overreaction, it’s disproportionate, that my concern over whether or not he’d leave the country with me if things get really bad is “alarmist”.
Please please, can someone tell me I’m not crazy? Or at least another Jew here tell me that in the UK there’s nothing to be worrying about.
