When the Past Does Not Feel Past

Trauma is usually described as something that happened. Psychologically, however, the decisive question is not only when an event occurred, but where it is experienced as being in relation to the present. A wound may be chronologically distant while remaining subjectively near.

This distinction matters at the collective level. Communities do not literally transmit an episodic memory of events that later generations never experienced. They transmit representations: family narratives, public rituals, education, monuments, political language, cultural symbols, and accounts of who suffered, who threatened the group, and what the past means now. These representations can keep historical violence socially and psychologically consequential without requiring the stronger claim that an entire population has inherited a clinical trauma state.

Research on subjective temporal distance gives this intuition a more precise foundation. Li and colleagues found that people can experience past intergroup violence as subjectively closer or farther away even when its chronological date is fixed. Across Bosniak-Serb and U.S.-Iran contexts, temporal distance was related to justice, reconciliation, and outgroup empathy; importantly, an experimental study also showed that manipulating temporal distance could affect intergroup responses. The direction of those effects depended on victim-perpetrator position and ingroup glorification.¹Mengyao Li, Bernhard Leidner, Nebojša Petrović, and Nedim Prelić, “Close or Distant Past? The Role of Temporal Distance in Responses to Intergroup Violence From Victim and Perpetrator Perspectives,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 47, no. 4 (2021): 517-532, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220945890.

That qualification is crucial. A past that feels close does not automatically produce hostility, prejudice, or reconciliation. Temporal proximity is better understood as a feature of how history is represented – one that may change the interpretive weight the past receives in the present.

From “Frozen Time” to a Testable Claim

My earlier formulation described trauma as “frozen time”: the past does not simply recede but can continue to organize perception as though it remains unfinished. The metaphor is useful, but it must be disciplined.

The empirical claim should not be that collective trauma literally freezes a society’s psychological clock. Nor should antisemitism be reduced to trauma. Antisemitism has political, religious, ideological, economic, cultural, and conspiratorial histories that cannot be explained by a single psychological mechanism.

A narrower proposition is more defensible: under some conditions, representations of collective injury may become subjectively temporally close, and that closeness may increase the relevance of historical threat narratives when people interpret contemporary uncertainty.

Even here, temporal closeness cannot simply be assumed to be a new mechanism. An event may feel close because it is frequently recalled. It may feel close because the group is understood as continuously victimized. Or it may feel close because people perceive strong continuity between historical and contemporary members of the group. Research on perpetual ingroup victimhood orientation (PIVO), for example, shows that a generalized sense of enduring group victimization is associated with categorizing more outgroups as hostile and with attributing more malevolent and fewer neutral intentions in ambiguous situations.²Noa Schori-Eyal, Yechiel Klar, and Yarden Ben-Ami, “Perpetual Ingroup Victimhood as a Distorted Lens: Effects on Attribution and Categorization,” European Journal of Social Psychology 47, no. 2 (2017): 180-194, https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2250. Perceived collective continuity (PCC) likewise captures the extent to which an ingroup is experienced as persisting through time, through both cultural continuity and historical continuity.³Fabio Sani, Mhairi Bowe, Marina Herrera, Cristian Manna, Tiziana Cossa, Xiulou Miao, and Yuefang Zhou, “Perceived Collective Continuity: Seeing Groups as Entities That Move Through Time,” European Journal of Social Psychology 37, no. 6 (2007): 1118-1134, https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.430.

These neighboring processes matter because they prevent “frozen time” from becoming an all-purpose explanation. If subjective temporal proximity adds nothing beyond memory accessibility, generalized victimhood orientation, and collective continuity, then those established constructs should carry the explanatory burden. If it contributes distinct information, however, temporal positioning may help explain one way in which historical narratives remain active in contemporary judgment.

Why Antisemitic Narratives Are Especially Relevant

This framework becomes particularly important when applied to antisemitism because antisemitic narratives frequently do more than express dislike of an outgroup. They can function as totalizing explanations: complex social changes are compressed into a story of hidden agency, coordinated control, betrayal, or manipulation.

There is direct psychological evidence for this explanatory function. Kofta, Soral, and Bilewicz examined conspiracy antisemitism across four studies and found that perceived political uncontrollability – more consistently than political uncertainty itself – predicted belief in Jewish conspiracy narratives. Their experiments further showed that inducing a lack of control increased conspiracy beliefs about Jews and other groups.⁴Mirosław Kofta, Wiktor Soral, and Michał Bilewicz, “What Breeds Conspiracy Antisemitism? The Role of Political Uncontrollability and Uncertainty in the Belief in Jewish Conspiracy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 118, no. 5 (2020): 900-918, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000183. This finding requires a correction to an overly simple “uncertainty produces antisemitism” account. The more defensible mechanism concerns threatened control and the appeal of explanations that restore apparent causal order.

That helps clarify why antisemitic narratives can be remarkably adaptable. The surface allegation can change while the explanatory architecture survives. Jews have historically been cast in contradictory roles – capitalist and communist, cosmopolitan and clannish, excessively powerful and socially contaminating. The contradictions do not necessarily weaken a conspiratorial worldview because its function is not ordinary hypothesis testing. It supplies a stable causal agent through which complexity can be rendered intelligible.

Temporal positioning may interact with this process. When historical threat narratives are experienced not merely as known but as unfinished or psychologically near, new crises can be interpreted through old symbolic templates. The past then does not mechanically cause prejudice; it supplies a repertoire of meanings whose contemporary relevance can be intensified by perceived continuity, victimhood narratives, commemorative environments, political rhetoric, and present-day loss of control.

This distinction also guards against a serious analytical mistake: explaining antisemitism by pathologizing the groups among whom it appears. The claim is not that people who hold antisemitic beliefs are simply traumatized, nor that collective suffering excuses hatred. Psychological explanation does not remove moral or political responsibility. It asks why certain narratives become cognitively useful, emotionally durable, and resistant to correction.

When Memory Becomes an Interpretive Frame

The key transition occurs when remembrance becomes interpretation.

A historical event can be highly accessible without dominating contemporary judgment. Historians, educators, or descendants may think frequently about a past catastrophe while still experiencing it as belonging to a completed historical period. Conversely, a person may encounter an event less frequently but experience it, when activated, as strikingly connected to the present.

This is why subjective temporal positioning should be distinguished from memory accessibility. Accessibility asks how readily an event comes to mind. Temporal positioning asks how far from the present it feels.

The distinction has practical consequences. In an ambiguous contemporary situation, people must decide which prior information is relevant. A historical narrative experienced as remote may remain background knowledge. The same narrative experienced as temporally near may receive greater interpretive weight: “this is happening again,” “the same forces are operating,” or “the old threat never ended.”

Such language can collapse historical distance. It can also be politically cultivated. Commemorations, education, family narratives, media, and political rhetoric do not merely determine whether a society remembers; they can influence how the relationship between then and now is framed. This is not inherently harmful. Temporal proximity can sustain moral responsibility, solidarity, vigilance, or resistance to forgetting. But when proximity combines with conspiratorial explanation, generalized victimhood, or hostile attribution, the same temporal structure may help old prejudicial narratives colonize new events.

What This Changes About Counter-Antisemitism

Security measures, law enforcement, education, historical documentation, and factual correction remain indispensable responses to antisemitism. Nothing in a temporal framework replaces them.

But factual correction alone can fail when the disputed claim is embedded in a broader system that restores control, identity, and causal coherence. A conspiratorial narrative can absorb disconfirming information by reinterpreting the correction itself as evidence of concealment. The problem is therefore not simply a shortage of facts.

A more psychologically informed strategy would work on several levels at once. It would correct false claims while also exposing the explanatory structure that makes them attractive. It would teach people to distinguish historical analogy from historical identity: resemblance does not mean recurrence, and present actors are not automatically equivalent to actors from the past. It would cultivate tolerance for complex causality rather than offering a competing monocausal story. And it would preserve collective memory without requiring that every contemporary ambiguity be read through the most threatening historical template.

In this sense, “unfreezing time” should not mean forgetting, minimizing historical suffering, or forcing reconciliation. It means restoring differentiation: then and now can be connected without becoming identical; memory can remain morally urgent without becoming the only available map of the present; identity can retain continuity without requiring an eternal enemy.

The strongest counter-antisemitism interventions may therefore be those that combine historical literacy with cognitive and narrative flexibility. They do not merely tell people that a conspiracy claim is false. They make visible how the claim converts complexity into agency, uncertainty into certainty, and historical symbolism into a present-tense explanation.

A Research Agenda for Frozen Time

The “frozen time” hypothesis should ultimately be judged empirically rather than rhetorically.

A rigorous programme would measure the subjective temporal proximity of a specific historical collective event separately from how accessible that event is, from PIVO, and from perceived collective continuity. It would then ask whether temporal proximity explains additional variation in the interpretation of ambiguous contemporary events. The framework should be allowed to fail: if temporal proximity collapses into these neighboring constructs or adds negligible predictive information, it should not be treated as an independent mechanism.

The same discipline is necessary in research on antisemitism. Studies should distinguish generalized prejudice, conspiracy antisemitism, political attitudes, historical knowledge, perceived control, and event-specific temporal positioning rather than treating them as interchangeable. Experimental work could then test whether making historical events feel psychologically nearer or farther changes the use of antisemitic explanatory frames, and under what conditions.

This would move the idea of frozen time from metaphor toward a falsifiable psychological account.

Conclusion

Historical wounds do not persist simply because societies remember them. What matters is also how the remembered past is positioned relative to the present, which meanings are attached to it, and what explanatory work those meanings perform.

Antisemitism cannot be reduced to trauma, and temporal proximity cannot be assumed to produce hostility. But research on subjective temporal distance, enduring victimhood orientations, collective continuity, and conspiracy antisemitism suggests a more precise possibility: when historical threat is experienced as psychologically near and contemporary control feels weak, inherited narratives may become especially powerful tools for organizing ambiguity.

The policy implication is therefore subtler than “correct the belief” or “forget the past.” The task is to preserve historical memory while preventing historical time from collapsing into the present. A society can remember without repeating; connect generations without reproducing enemies; and acknowledge unresolved wounds without allowing those wounds to dictate every new interpretation.

That is what it should mean to unfreeze time.