(Mirror.)

Dr. Arline Geronimus, professor of Behavioral Health and Health Education at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, proposed the concept of “weathering” to explain why people of color in the United States experience deteriorating health at earlier stages of the life course and premature aging at higher rates than white Americans.

According to Geronimus, “weathering” is “a process that encompasses the physiological effects of living in marginalized communities that bear the brunt of racial, ethnic, religious, and class discrimination […]. Weathering afflicts human bodies—all the way down to the cellular level—as they grow, develop, and age in a racist, classist society […]. Weathering is about hopeful, hardworking, responsible, skilled, and resilient people dying from the physical toll of constant stress on their bodies, paying with their health because they live in a rigged, degrading, and exploitative system” (Geronimus 2023, pp. 20–21).

Human bodies naturally produce stress hormones in response to instances of oppression. Continual exposure to such instances of racial oppression results in prolonged elevated stress levels and has detrimental effects on the body, including muscle atrophy, immunosuppression, and premature aging. Geronimus’ research suggests that while the broad spectrum of coping mechanisms exact a protective function for individuals in the short term, in the long term, such strategies ultimately hasten physical senescence (Geronimus 1992).

When Geronimus first introduced her hypothesis in 1992, challenging traditionally accepted explanations for observable deterioration among marginalized populations, it was met with skepticism. However, subsequent research has produced compelling evidence in support of the theory.¹

Historical evidence from the Łódź ghetto lends further credence to the idea that prolonged exposure to a racist society and violence produces a weathering effect in individuals. Widespread individual weathering in the Łódź ghetto, particularly after 1941, culminated in a process of collective weathering that decimated the Jewish community. The historical case study presented below suggests that a broader application of weathering theory could be instructive for understanding the effects of racism on marginalized communities in contemporary contexts.

[…]

Death became a routine part of daily life. And those left behind suffered from accelerated aging and failing health no matter their age. Łódź ghetto survivor Sarah Selver‐Urbach remembered how her father’s death in the fall of 1941 hastened the decline of her paternal grandfather.

In a postwar memoir, Selver‐Urbach wrote: “Following father’s death, my tall, stately grandfather grew stooped; his hair, which had turned grey by father’s grave, became whiter and whiter till his head and long beard looked snow‐white. The permanent pain etched on his face augments further his naturally dignified appearance; it was sad to see him wasting away, he who had been so hale and so tough” (Selver‐Urbach 1984, p. 75). The cumulative effects of starvation, fear, and death were manifest in the greying of the population.

In the Łódź ghetto, physical weathering emerged as a widespread phenomenon that often occurred at a shocking pace. Among the most vulnerable to accelerated aging were the 20,000 German‐speaking Jews from cities in the Reich who were deported from their native lands and forcibly integrated into the Polish‐ and Yiddish‐speaking native Jewish community of the ghetto.

For the newcomers, the reality of occupied Poland was wholly disorienting. Still used to home‐cooked food and other creature comforts from their former lives, in the beginning, they scoffed at the meager portions of thin, watery soup that passed as food in the ghetto. The deportees from the West quickly realized that the material conditions they had left behind in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague were far superior to those they faced in the Łódź ghetto.

Fellow residents of the ghetto observed that the rate of decline among “foreign” Jews outpaced even the most vulnerable within the native Polish community. In a report for the Daily Chronicle, a collective effort to document [Fascist] injustices against the Jews of Łódź spearheaded by Rumkoswki’s administration, Jozef Klementynowski noted the speed with which Jews from Hamburg, Germany, succumbed to the process of weathering upon arrival in the ghetto.

Klementynowski reported: “Events outpaced time; people changed visibly, at first outwardly, then physically, and finally, if they had not vanished altogether, they moved through the ghetto like ghosts. […] And indeed, it was only half a year, only six months, that had proven to be an eternity for them! Some of the metamorphoses could not be imagined, even in a dream…Ghosts, skeletons with swollen faces and extremities, ragged and impoverished […]” (Dobroszycki 1984, p. 166). Mortality rates among the “foreign” population in the ghetto corroborate anecdotal evidence.

In addition to physical weathering, ghetto residents also reported psychological impacts. Oskar Rosenfeld arrived in the Łódź ghetto in the fall of 1941, a spry and healthy 57‐year‐old. Within just a few months, Rosenfeld noted disturbing changes in his mental faculties in his diary:

I am myself in the grip of the most widespread ghetto disease: dimming of the memory…not being able to remember things just heard, the names just read. There is a flicker in front of the eyes, a drying in the ears, one hits one’s forehead, racks one’s brain, and attempts to conjure up the past. To no avail. (Rosenfeld 1994, p. 93)

“Ghetto disease” became shorthand for the brain fog experienced by so many ghetto inhabitants due to severe, prolonged caloric deficit. Insufficient caloric intake was just part of the problem. Foodstuffs in the ghetto lacked the most basic nutritional value. Jewish doctors working at medical facilities in the ghetto noted with dismay the emergence of “little‐known or disregarded illnesses” in the malnourished ghetto inhabitants, including scurvy, pellagra, and famine edema, which they linked to lack of essential vitamins and minerals in ghetto rations (Ibid., 177–178).

(Emphasis added.)

Aside from showing us how Łódź’s Jews suffered under Fascism, this paper should also be useful for predicting how hundreds of thousands of their Palestinian kin must be suffering under neoimperialism right now: with food, potable water, shelter, sanitation, and healthcare in short supply, it is unfortunately reasonable to suspect that many Palestinians are suffering from the same complications as the inhabitants in the Axis’s ghetti did.

On a minor note, here in Imperial America the word ‘ghetto’ is something that we typically associate with black communities, not Jews. I was almost surprised that the author did not explicitly mention this, but—as Herman ‘Hesh’ Rabkin crudely indicated to us in an early episode of The Sopranos—the at times eerie historic parallels between the experiences of Jews and black gentiles are already well known.