With generation WE, author and visual artist Abby Kamen presents a bold and compassionate new vision for the future thriving of humanity, centered on healing our collective generational traumas. All humans alive today carry the legacy of the oppressive ideological hierarchies that have shaped our history, says Kamen. Left unaddressed, the toxic residue of this conditioning manifests in the shame, fear, and divisiveness that is decimating both individual and societal well-being. 

We see this playing out in every area of modern life; from political extremism, to the rolling back of women’s and queer rights, to surging hate crimes, to record numbers of depression and anxiety. Issues that Kamen sees as all related—literally. The familial grid is where we learn who we are and how to be, and tracing the lineage of our pain is key to uprooting the thoughts and behaviors that perpetuate outdated survivalist narratives. “We can create better, but WE will have to create it together,” she writes.

Pointing the finger squarely at white supremacist pain-triarchy, Kamen mines her own history—both with her mother, as a mother, and as a Jewish American—to illustrate what is required of us to break free. The result is a teaching memoir that deftly weaves the personal with the metaphysical, offering fresh and sometimes startling insights on the nature of both our healing and our humanity.