It’s not all about trauma

In this conversation, Gabriel of Hebrew Tattoos speaks with Anna Shraer about identity as something lived and carried in the body rather than formed only through thought or ideology. Starting from the idea of intergenerational trauma, Gabriel reflects on how Jewish history, memory, and experience are transmitted not only through stories or education but through bodily reactions, habits, sounds, rituals, and language. He discusses epigenetics, collective memory, and the limits of identity politics when identity is reduced to trauma alone, emphasizing that love, care, and positive communal experiences are also passed on across generations.

Through personal examples such as Yiddish music, prayer, Tallis and Tfillin, Gabriel describes moments where identity bypasses intellect and is felt directly as a sense of home. Drawing on philosophy, especially phenomenology and thinkers like Merleau Ponty, as well as Jewish mysticism and Hasidic thought, the conversation explores identity as something uncovered rather than invented. The discussion naturally leads to Gabriel’s artistic practice, explaining why tattooing the body is central to his work. For him, tattoos are a place where embodied identity, personal story, and collective Jewish experience meet, making the body not just a surface, but the living site where identity actually happens.

Anna: Anna! How are you today?

Gabriel: Good. Yeah? Good, good. I slept enough.

Anna: You slept enough!

Gabriel: I slept enough.

Anna:How much is enough?

Gabriel: Like, almost seven hours.

Anna: Wow. That’s good.

Gabriel: That is good.

Anna: With little kids at home, seven hours is a lot.

Gabriel: Yeah. Yeah, that’s.

Anna: I would’ve thought you would say like five hours.

Gabriel: That’s good. I didn’t say in one piece, in one go, but still seven hours in total.

Anna: Not bad. Not bad. So we’re here today to talk about the text that you wrote that I found very interesting. And of course, it’s very relevant for the work that we do. And it’s a text where you talk about how identity is something that we carry in our bodies. And in this text you also talk about intergenerational trauma among other things. And maybe this is a point where I would like to start and ask you, because intergenerational trauma is something that people talk about a lot nowadays. Could you maybe tell us what is your view on this term and how you understand it?

Gabriel: Yes, absolutely. So I feel that over the last few decades, intergenerational trauma has become consensus in kind of the public discourse. In 2025, I don’t think there is a single person, or there aren’t a lot of people, who would say that we are born clean slates. Nobody would claim that the traumas that have happened to my grandfather have absolutely nothing to do with the way I live life, the way I experience life, with my own behavior, etc. And then there’s the question about nature versus nurture. There’s the question of is this a genetic thing? Is the transmission genetic or is it cultural? But the understanding that our history, our ancestors live within us is commonplace these days.

Anna: You write about identity politics also as something that brought this idea into awareness, into the conversation, and I wonder if or how is it different for Jews.

Gabriel: Yeah. Definitely identity politics, as you mentioned, pushed this understanding of intergenerational trauma or intergenerational connection to the forefront of the public discourse. But I feel that us Jews, we didn’t really need fancy terms to understand that to get over Auschwitz will take longer than one lifespan. There is epigenetic research that shows how genetic expression changes in descendants of Holocaust survivors in the second and the third generation. And there’s developmental psychological research showing the same thing. And of course, there’s mainly our experiences as Jews. We know that even a grandfather whom we didn’t know who came out of Auschwitz has a lot of influence on how we behave. But it’s not even just Auschwitz. It’s generations over generations of oppression and violence and so on. We are very much aware of how that influences us directly. And when I say it influences us, it does influence us on a rational or cognitive level. But in many cases it’s much more bodily. It’s much more on the level of an immediate reaction, a bodily reaction, to situations. It’s questions of how my body trusts or doesn’t trust certain things. And again, we didn’t need identity politics to come along and explain this.

Anna: And when we talk about this bodily experience and something that is transferred genetically, we talk about trauma, oppression, things that hurt. In your view, are there things that are overlooked when we only focus on that?

Gabriel: Yes. Again, I come back to identity politics. Within identity politics, we gain symbolic capital by hardship, by oppression, that we endured or our ancestors endured. But the same pathway, the same mechanics of transmitting experiences from one generation to the other, works with non traumatic or positive experiences as well. Epigenetic research shows that while a trauma endured will show up in the genetic expression of two generations later, the same goes for motherly care and positive community experiences. So it’s not only the bad things. It’s not only the negative experiences that are passed on intergenerationally. It’s anything. We carry the history of our people, we carry our ancestry in our body. Again, this question of where it is. Is it in our thoughts? Is it cognitive? Or is it bodily? Because when I experience that connection, when I experience my ancestry showing up within me, it is a bodily experience. It’s not something I could have read in a book. It happens within my body.

Anna: So when you go deeper into this body of research, it seems that it shifts your whole understanding of what identity is.

Gabriel: Yeah. I would be careful with claiming that reading books changed that. To me, reading books is most of the time an attempt to understand something I already experience. It’s less about reading it in a book and then finding it in my body. It’s more finding it in my body and then trying to find that experience in books so I can process it. When I think about identity, the shift goes to something much more embodied and therefore less open to my own influence. If identity is cognitive, something that can be verbalized, it can be influenced more easily. But something bodily is something I have to uncover rather than invent. I can’t necessarily influence it.

Anna: Can you ground this in a personal experience of what you mean when you say bodily identity?

Gabriel: Absolutely. I grew up in a surrounding where there was some Yiddish around me. It’s not a language I speak. It’s a language I understand a little. I didn’t know my grandparents, the last generation in my family who spoke Yiddish. And yet, whenever I listen to Yiddish music, it enters my body in a way nothing else does. It feels like home. I don’t care if it’s genetic or cultural transmission. When I hear Yiddish, the experience of home is bodily.

Anna: It bypasses the intellectual completely.

Gabriel: Exactly. The same goes for prayer. I read prayers and think I don’t believe in them, but my body says this is home. Tallis, Tfillin, Kaddish. My body knows. This is what my great grandfather did. This is what his great grandfather did. So my body knows.

Anna: Over the years, you spoke with thousands of Jews about their identities. Do you see this bodily layer in others?

Gabriel: Yes, absolutely. Across all backgrounds, people have things they feel at home in. Prayer, music, shuckeling, liturgical texts. They bypass the conscious and echo in the body.

Anna: Have philosophies helped you articulate this?

Gabriel: Yes. Phenomenology, Merleau Ponty, Husserl, Heidegger, Bourdieu. They all point to identity as something lived through the body.

Anna: And this leads directly to your work with tattoos.

Gabriel: Exactly. My work is about identity. And identity lives on the body. That’s why tattooing makes sense. The body is where identity happens.

Anna: Would you like to recommend something to read?

Gabriel: Merleau Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. And Rabbi Nachman. Because mysticism brings knowledge back into the body.

Anna: Thank you. That was very interesting. Thank you, Gabriel.