“For you are a peculiar people…” – Deuteronomy 14:2
I keep coming back to this phrase, maybe because I grew up feeling very much on the outside, marked for reasons those doing the marking did not understand. To be “peculiar” in this scriptural sense isn’t only to be unique, chosen, or set apart; it is also, as history so often reminds us, to be vulnerable—to carry a badge of difference that the world keeps finding new ways to see, misunderstand, or weaponize.
But what does it mean, really, to remember? How do we pass on the weight of catastrophe—the traumas, the warnings—without transmitting only grief, only wounds? How do we tell stories that bind us together, not break us apart?
I. The Fragile Transmission of Memory
In my conversation with Willie Handler, a child of Holocaust survivors, the question of memory’s fragility wasn’t academic. “My parents never told the whole story,” he told me. Love may have shaped their home, but silence ruled it, too. He described growing up in the shadow of events too terrible to recount—memories that leaked out only in fragments, impossible to stitch into a coherent whole.
What struck me is how familiar this is, even outside the extraordinary horrors of the Camps. We inherit the unfinished business of those who raised us, often as silence, as absence, as rules we never quite understand. Sometimes, as Willie learned, decades pass before we realize what was left out—before we find the documents, or the missing names, or finally allow ourselves the questions that, as children, we dared not ask.
There is a difference, he reminds us, between “never again” and “never forget.” “Never again” is a promise the world rarely keeps. “Never forget” is something we try to do, awkwardly, imperfectly—sometimes by telling the story badly, or incompletely, but telling it all the same. Sharing, even inarticulately, is an act of healing, a kind of resistance against both oblivion and repetition.
Yet, the burden of inherited trauma is precisely this: we inherit both memory and its gaps; we stand in the echo of screams we never heard, but which shaped the rooms we live in. And while we can try to spare our children the full weight, silence itself is never neutral—the shadow finds new ways to seep in.
II. Identity and the Unwanted Mark
Willie reflects with gentle candor on what it is to be “a peculiar people,” chosen and rejected, assimilated and always, in the final tally, conspicuous. In the Germany of the 1930s, it made little difference whether you cherished your Jewish heritage or shunned it: the mark was there, assigned by others, and it was inescapable.
It’s universal to carry an identity you did not choose, but for some that identity is thrust upon them by histories and hatreds they didn’t author. This is not only a Jewish story. Whether for the child of immigrants who hears, “Where are you really from?,” the Black person on the wrong side of a traffic stop, or the white boy in a critical race theory context, the “peculiar mark” finds us in new and ancient ways.
Assimilation, as both myth and failed project, is always at once hope and heartbreak. “When things go bad,” Willie noted, “it does not matter if you’re assimilated.” The story gets written onto your skin, your name, your mere existence.
And so the dignity of difference remains double-edged: a source of intimacy, meaning, and connection, to something important but also a kind of lifelong vulnerability. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to walk through the world without this double vision—to feel belonging as a given, not a prize or a question. Maybe this is part of being “in the image of God”—not some bland sameness, but the dignity of standing in the crosshairs, refusing to disappear, and calling others to stand beside you. To understand why God tenderly asked Adam and Eve - “Who told you that you were naked”?
III. The Virus That Never Dies
If there’s a chill in these recollections, it’s there for good reason. Willie put it starkly: antisemitism is “not like other kinds of hate.” It mutates, adapts, persists—as conspiracy, as scapegoat, endlessly returning with new faces and rationales. Historian Deborah Lipstadt has called it “the longest hatred”; scholars trace its sweep from ancient slanders, through the blood libel and the Protocols of Zion, to today’s social media, where old lies spread faster than facts (see: Pew Research, 2023).
What worries me most, right now, isn’t only the resurgence of these grotesque old stories, but the way forgetting creeps in: curriculum stripped of context, Holocaust education diluted or skipped, teachers unable—or unwilling—to hold the line. A recent UNESCO report found that, worldwide, only 54 countries have mandatory Holocaust education—and even fewer teach it robustly.
What happens to a society’s soul when history is denied, when hate sets the terms of public life once more? Willie described teaching Holocaust denial in the digital age—how, if you reach even one mind, it matters. But it can feel like swimming upstream against a tsunami of erasure and distortion.
There is a temptation, always, to see this as “just a Jewish problem.” That is the oldest dodge. Every group marked as “other,” every identity once under the boot, inherits the peril of social forgetting. When we allow the story to be suppressed, or rewritten, or rendered unspeakable, the stage is set for it to repeat.
The Courage To Tell, The Fragility Of Healing
Telling the story—awkwardly, incompletely, through tears or confusion—is its own act of resistance. Willie’s memoir, “Out from the Shadows,” was born of pain but offers community and catharsis for others. Every time someone unearths buried family history, or names aloud the wounds, some piece of the cycle gets broken—some chance of healing opens, however uncertain.
But this isn’t the kind of trauma you heal from, tidy and whole. We are tasked, instead, with tending the flickering lamp of memory, with refusing the comforts of both silence and denial.
I think about my own journey—40 years in a wilderness followed by 10 years of writing a Trilogy that tried to both make sense of it and convey it to others. We do not get to choose the wounds our histories deal us, but maybe we can choose how we carry them—whether as walls, or as invitations to solidarity and witness.
An Unfinished Commandment
Perhaps the best we can do is to hold each other in the struggle to remember—to insist that our peculiarities, our stories, our wounds, are not aberrations but the common fabric of what it is to be human. “Never forget” is not for the dead only, but for the living—for what we might yet build, together, if we refuse to let the story die.
So this is for everyone who dares to tell their story, who risks being peculiar, who keeps the lamp burning against the night: Your story—awkward, broken, incomplete—matters. It is needed. Will we, together, grant ourselves permission to remember, and to speak?
