Hello anon,

I wouldn’t say ‘most’. Most Jews get along perfectly fine with their non-Jewish neighbors. But it is more of a defense-mechanism so-to-say. To always be cautious of anyone. WWII might be over for 67 years now. But as you can read here it still effects today’s generation of Jews.

To give you another example. My great-grandparents (my grandmother’s parents) managed to survive the war. When the war was over they went back to the town where they came from.

One evening, not long after they’d returned, my great-grandfather told his wife he was going to take a walk to get some fresh air. He never returned. The only thing they found of him was his cane laying in a pool of blood. Even though the war was over, the hatred surely wasn’t. And this is something Jews have been living with for roughly 2000 years.

One of my rabbi’s told me of how, as a little kid, his mother totally freaked out when he came back home later than usual. It was in some town in Poland before the war, and it was Easter Eve. A day on which Christians would beat up, sometimes even kill, any Jew they would see in the street.

The people who lived through these things are still alive. And even if they aren’t, their children are, so this defense-mechanism is still working. If it’s the right thing, I don’t know.

But I do know that our sages teach us: “In every generation they rise up to destroy us. And the Holy One Blessed Be He rescues us from their hands.”