But over four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation—and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever paid for it.

How do these generational traumas, and so many like them, impact the racial narrative we live in today? Might they have something to do with how we have become either desensitized or overly sensitive to racial harm? How might it help us understand the criminalization and mass incarceration of dark bodies in the United States and Australia?

The specifics of Freud’s reconstruction have not found much favor with Egyptologists, but his arguments about memory and history have been very influential. Freud suggested that, much like individuals who have suffered trauma, societies repress the memory of horrific events in their past because these are too painful to confront or document