ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

 River of Tears was developed by Ellis Cohen- a synthesis of lived experience, intergenerational trauma, and four decades of technical expertise.

 PERSONAL FOUNDATION

I grew up in Manchester, England, attending Jewish school while facing frequent antisemitic harassment outside its walls. My father served as a fireman in the RAF during World War II, enduring antisemitism even while defending Britain. My mother made bullets in a Manchester factory during the war. Both lost cousins and uncles in the Holocaust. At 18, with a newborn baby, I moved to Los Angeles and married into a family carrying the deepest scars of that history. My mother-in-law survived Auschwitz. My father-in-law survived both Gross-Rosen and Dachau. My wife was born in Israel and came to America at age 7. I have watched the biological echoes of their trauma ripple through generations - in ways I couldn't name or measure but always felt.

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE

 For 16 years, I worked in entertainment as a costume designer and supervisor, earning two Emmy nominations for period pieces. This work taught me how to research historical trauma and understand how identity shapes human experience. For the past 25 years, I served as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer for hedge funds and financial services firms. I orchestrated technology development partnerships with Bloomberg and Advent Geneva, specializing in complex systems analysis, pattern recognition in massive datasets, and threat assessment.

THE INTERSECTION

After October 7th, watching antisemitism surge globally while seeing its impact on my family and community, I realized: the same analytical frameworks I used to protect financial systems from persistent threats could illuminate how chronic hate attacks human biological systems. I am not a biologist or physician. I am a systems analyst who has lived inside intergenerational trauma and witnessed its biological footprint across three generations. This research framework synthesizes decades of peer-reviewed research from leading scientists - Dr. Rachel Yehuda's groundbreaking work on Holocaust survivor epigenetics, Dr. Ilan Meyer's minority stress model, and extensive research on discrimination and health. I applied the same rigorous analytical frameworks I used in financial technology - threat modeling, pattern recognition, systems architecture - to create a comprehensive blueprint for documenting what my family and millions of others have always known but couldn't prove: Sustained hatred doesn't just hurt feelings. It changes us at the molecular level.

THE PARADOX

My in-laws survived the ultimate expression of antisemitic hate. They emerged with trauma encoded in their biology - trauma research now shows was passed to their children and grandchildren through epigenetic mechanisms. Seventy-five years later, their grandchildren and great grandchildren face a new form of the ancient hatred - not gas chambers, but an unrelenting digital deluge of antisemitic content, conspiracy theories, and dehumanization. Different mechanism. Same biological outcome. "The instructions to open the box are inside the box." The trauma impairs the very cognitive and emotional resources needed to heal from the trauma. Each generation inherits the biological vulnerabilities of the last, while facing new assaults that deepen those vulnerabilities. This must be documented. This must be measured. This must be stopped.

THE GOAL - EPIGENETICS + CULTURAL= THE SYNERGISTIC AND THE SYMMETRICAL 

Two thousand years. One hundred generations. Billions affected. Hatred doesn't just echo through history—it embeds in our biology and transmits to our children. Perpetrators and victims both carry the weight, neither fully conscious of the ancient stress responses driving their intensity. This is the symmetry: both sides biologically conditioned, culturally directed, caught in a feedback loop that feels like truth but is actually trauma. The synergy of epigenetics and culture created this cycle. Only by understanding both can we end it. The rivers of tears have flowed long enough. Science now lights the path to healing.