When Colette Ghunim’s parents first met in 1978, they quickly learned they had something in common: They both were forced to leave their homelands.

In her documentary Traces of Home, Ghunim travels with her immediate family back to her parents’ home cities. Hosni, Ghunim’s father, was expelled with his family from Safed, Mandatory Palestine, in 1948, when he was four years old. Ghunim’s mother Iza left Mexico City as a child to escape her abusive father. The film uses archival footage from Ghunim’s childhood, photos from her parents’ past, and animation to portray the harrowing journeys both her parents took. It’s a moving study of how trauma is inherited, but skirts some of the geopolitical issues at its core.

Ghunim, director of The People’s Girls, a documentary about sexual harassment in Egypt, explains in Traces that she never felt truly connected to either of her ethnic backgrounds, Mexican or Palesitnian. Her parents’ goal, she says, was to “make my life simple, safe, and American.”

It was also supposed to be tidy and unemotional. Archival footage shows Ghunim at five years old reading a letter from “Santa” reminding her of her promise to her mom: “No more crying.” Such a display of unpleasant feeling would disrupt the image of a perfect household.

The film unpacks how these expectations were in part the way Ghunim’s parents responded to their traumatic pasts — but these restrictions had unintentional consequences for their children: Ramsey developed an abusive relationship with alcohol in college; Ghunim turned to binge eating as a coping mechanism.

The trickling down of emotional damage from Ghunim’s parents to her feels like an apt metaphor for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Jews that came to Israel were carrying pain of their own, fleeing persecutions and pogroms in Europe. The resulting conflict has further harmed both Israelis and Palestinians.

Although the parallels between how the region and Ghunim have inherited burdens feels apparent, it’s not part of the film. Hosni summarizes the founding of Israel as Britain supporting Jewish European settlers by giving them Palestine. For some, the broader context of why Jews were fleeing Europe may seem irrelevant, but within the context of a film about transitory trauma, its absence feels striking.

We do see how badly trust has broken down in the Middle East. While trying to find Hosni’s old home in Safed, Hosni approaches a local man, telling him “I could tell from your face you are Arab.” The man turns out to be a Syrian Jew who has lived in Safed a long time. While trying to help them locate Hosni’s house, he grows visibly agitated thinking about what Hosni has lost. He rushes to assure the group that he feels bad for Hosni, telling them “Don’t think that I’m a bad Israeli.”

As their search starts to prove futile, Ghunim begins to cry.

“It’s OK,” her father assures her as he hugs her. Maybe worried about her breaking the promise she made to her mom when she was five, he tells her “Calm down.”

But keeping our feelings inside is often easier said than done. And, as Traces shows, it rarely is the right thing to do.

Traces of Home is premiering at DOC NYC on November 14, with a subsequent screening on November 15.

The post Her parents fled Mexico and Mandatory Palestine, taking their traumas with them appeared first on The Forward.

A few weekends ago I went upstate for a wedding, and briefly lived like a Victorian gentleman with a problematic taste in interior design.

Staying in a historic mansion (h/t Airbnb) in Newburgh, New York, I felt transported into a game of Clue, minus the murder. Was it me in the study with a sandwich? The parlor had a marble bust redolent of antiquity. From my top floor room there were panoramic views of the Hudson hills bursting with fall foliage. And then there was, at the corner of the landing … well, as I told my girlfriend, it’s more of a visual.

“Please do not be alarmed, but there are sauvastikas (more commonly known as swastikas) inlaid in the corners of the floors dating back to 1866, before Hitler was born,” the extensive house instructions said.

I wasn’t alarmed, more amused. (For context, the guests were almost entirely Asian with a couple of Ashkenazi Jews — and a miniature poodle.)

Of course I knew the Eastern origins of the motif. And I noted, as did our hosts, that these swastikas faced the opposite direction of the hooked cross favored by the Third Reich. The owners were right to say in their literature that the symbol “was stolen.”

Nazis really do ruin everything.

The architect, Frederick Withers, could only really be faulted for orientalism, which at the time wasn’t a dirty word. In any case, this was a landmark building registered with the historical society, and as such the swastikas couldn’t be altered. (“On a positive note,” our hosts added, “the original Tiffany stained glass window is well preserved up in the dining room.”)

At the wedding, I made the possible faux pas of mentioning the floors to friends of ours, one of whom grew up in India. It had just been Diwali, and he said kids draw swastikas everywhere during the festival.

“You’re taking it back,” I joked.

On the contrary, he said, they never really let it get taken away. Indians still use the swastika to signify peace and prosperity — its original meaning.

Maybe there’s a lesson there. Not really about ancient Indian symbols, but about what we feel comfortable letting Nazis get away with.

It’s long been a pet peeve of mine that so much of Jewish culture is boiled down to a period of about 12 years in a history that stretches back millennia. That public figures caught saying something antisemitic are immediately dispatched to the nearest Holocaust museum, rather than a Shabbat dinner or a museum of Jewish art.

When people online get defensive about their views on the Jews, they often mention how moved they were by Anne Frank’s diary, as if that was the answer key for understanding our peoplehood, and not just assigned reading. (In most schools in the U.S., the only time students hear anything about Jews is in a unit on the Holocaust.)

Members of the tribe are far from immune to this phenomenon. To be an educated, secular Jew, for many, is to have endured a screening of Schindler’s List — or, if you’re more ambitious, the more than 9 hours of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. You don’t see the Talmud in every Jewish home (granted, it takes up a lot of shelf space), but you can probably find a copy of William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Jewish identity has been shaped by our persecution — and remembrance is an important Jewish imperative — but as I’m far from the first to point out, when we take history and memory culture to extremes, we end up ceding our own narrative to those who wanted to erase us.

As scholar Miriam Udel put it in her recent book, “The Holocaust is, in a profound sense, not a Jewish story.” This stopped me when I first read it, but the more I considered it, the more I saw her point. The way the Shoah is typically related, it’s not a story where Jews have a great deal of agency. Jews weren’t passive. Tales of resistance abound — and should be emphasized — but it’s still primarily a story in which something was done to the Jews, and for reasons the Jews had no real control over.

Indians don’t let Nazis have a monopoly on the swastika — why should Jews allow them to define Jewishness?

I am not advocating for the return of parquet-inlaid swastikas in Western homes, whatever their direction. I’m not even for a revival of the Hitler mustache that Michael Jordan once attempted to resuscitate in a Hanes undershirt commercial. But I do think there’s a wisdom in not permitting our enemies to distort our much older tradition.

In Yiddish, we say “mir veln zey iberlebn,” we will outlive them — them being Nazis, antisemites and the various Hamans that rise up in every generation. While today that seems aspirational, we must remember we were here first, and there’s far more to Jewish life than death.

The post So, there was a swastika at my Airbnb appeared first on The Forward.

Wes Streeting, the British secretary of state for health and social care, is seen in Westminster as he appears on Sunday politics shows, London, England, United Kingdom, Oct. 26, 2025. Photo: Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect

UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting called it “chilling” that some members of the Jewish community fear discrimination within the country’s National Health Service (NHS), as reports of antisemitism in Britain’s health-care system continue to rise.

In an interview with the local LBC radio show on Friday, Streeting was asked about the recent case of Dr. Martin Whyte, a pediatrician and former executive member of the British Medical Association (BMA), who received only a formal warning but was allowed to continue working despite several of his antisemitic posts going viral.

“My immediate gut reaction was unrepeatable on the radio at this time of the morning,” the British official said. 

“This has been such a big story because we’ve seen undeniable, outrageous examples of vile antisemitism by people who clearly identify as NHS doctors,” Streeting continued. 

“Those people have forgotten not only basic humanity, but also their professional responsibility to patients. No one entering the NHS should feel afraid or question whether they will be treated fairly because of their race or religion,” he said during the radio show. 

On Monday, the UK’s top medical regulatory body, the General Medical Council (GMC), cleared Whyte to continue working as a pediatrician despite spreading hateful and antisemitic messages online, including references to “Jew banker goblins” and “gas the Jews.”

In the course of its investigation, the medical regulator concluded that Whyte did not hold bigoted beliefs and that his actions “fall just short of that which would be considered serious enough to pose a risk to public protection.”

This latest incident has sparked outrage among the local Jewish community and public officials, fueling broader concerns across the UK as rising antisemitism in health-care settings in recent months has left Jewish communities feeling unsafe and marginalized.

During the interview, Streeting recognized that many Jewish people hold a negative perception of the NHS.

“In my own constituency, which is very diverse and includes a significant Jewish community, people are afraid,” he said. 

“People in the Jewish community fear they’re going to be treated unfairly or discriminated against because they are Jewish in our National Health Service. I think that’s chilling,” Streeting continued. 

Amid a rising climate of hostility, Jewish expectant mothers are hiring doulas — a non-medical professional who supports women during childbirth — to shield themselves and their babies from bias, antisemitic attitudes, and the looming threat of inadequate medical care.

In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, London-based doula Shoshana Maurer said that nearly every pregnant Jewish woman who has hired her since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel feared encountering antisemitism from medical staff.

“There is no question that nearly every Jewish client I’ve had since Oct. 7 has had the same anxiety about antisemitism in hospitals: are they going to be treated the same way as everyone else, will they be treated badly?” Maurer said, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.

According to media reports, many South African Jewish emigrants in the UK have also encountered — or fear encountering — antisemitism within the NHS.

In one instance, a South African-born radiographer working in a diagnostic breast-cancer unit outside London told the South African Jewish Report that the period after Oct. 7 left her “scared and unsafe” at work, ultimately prompting her to resign after management failed to take steps to make her feel protected.

Last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer unveiled a new plan to address what he described as “just too many examples, clear examples, of antisemitism that have not been dealt with adequately or effectively” in the NHS.

One notable case drawing attention involved Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan, a trainee trauma and orthopedic surgeon, who local police arrested on Oct. 21, charging her with four offenses related to malicious communications and inciting racial hatred.

Aladwan was arrested after the GMC allowed her to continue treating patients, despite several of her antisemitic social media posts going viral, including claims that the Royal Free Hospital in London is “a Jewish supremacy cesspit” and that “over 90% of the world’s Jews are genocidal.”

In a separate incident two months ago, a North London hospital suspended a physician who was under investigation for publicly claiming that all Jews have “feelings of supremacy” and downplaying antisemitism.