The Arc of Belonging

What does it mean to belong as a Jew?

I have been circling that question since childhood in apartheid South Africa, where being Jewish meant occupying a narrow, precarious space. I grew up among white privilege, yet never fully inside it. Even as a boy I sensed that Jews were tolerated but not embraced, included but still suspect in a culture shaped by Afrikaner nationalism and lingering pro-Nazi sentiment.

For three years I lived in an Afrikaner boarding house, surrounded by boys whose parents and teachers spoke openly of their wartime sympathies for Hitler. Antisemitism there had no filter. I learned early how quickly a joke could turn into a threat, how easily hatred could be inherited. A violent attack left me with a lifelong shoulder injury — and a deeper, more lasting wound: the sense that belonging could vanish without warning.

Only later did I understand that this unease was not mine alone. It was an echo of my family’s past, passed quietly from my parents, both of whom carried stories of displacement that shaped my life long before I knew them.

My mother, Fritzi, was fifteen when Germany annexed Austria. In an instant her life contracted. One day she was a bright, beloved schoolgirl in Graz; the next she was expelled, her books taken, her desk reassigned. Friends vanished. Neighbors turned away. Her mother collapsed into shock, and her father — a decorated World War I veteran who believed his medals would protect him — was deported to Dachau.

For months she had no idea whether he was alive.

Their home, livelihood, and sense of security evaporated overnight. Public life closed to them; private life became a landscape of fear. And yet even then, my mother carried a deep instinct for survival. Through Zionist rescue networks, she and her family fled Austria — first onto a tramp steamer, then, after being detained in Cyprus, to Palestine.

Her childhood was not simply interrupted; it was uprooted. She learned early that belonging could collapse in an instant — and that sometimes the only homeland left was the one you carried inside.

That experience shaped her consciousness — and through her, shaped mine.

My father’s family carried a different but related story. My grandfather had fled the Russian Empire as a teenager in the 1880s to escape the Czar’s twenty-five-year military conscription. He first made his way to South Africa, where he lived as a smous and prospected for diamonds and gold before later traveling to Palestine. There, working in an orange orchard in Rehovot, he met and married Neena, a Romanian refugee. Together they returned to South Africa to build a more stable life. That is where my father was born and raised. Years later, during the Second World War, he returned to the very land where his parents had begun their married life — this time as a South African soldier in the British forces — and it was there that he met my mother.

Two lines of Jewish exile converged in Mandate Palestine long before the state existed. Their marriage was a weaving together of Jewish histories: Austrian destruction and Lithuanian resilience, European catastrophe and Middle Eastern refuge. I didn’t understand the weight of that inheritance when I was young. Only later did I realize that I was born into the afterlife of their displacement—and into the fragile hope that belonging might someday take root.

When I came to North America in 1968, something inside me settled in a way I had never known. The background noise of vigilance softened; antisemitism no longer structured the air I breathed. It took years to recognize how startling that sense of ease was — and how much of my early life had been shaped by a fear I had absorbed without understanding it.

And then came October 7.

The shock and horror of that day awakened something old in me — a tightening in the chest, a sense that the ground was trembling again. The resurgence of antisemitism that followed worldwide was a reminder that Jewish belonging, even in the most open societies, remains conditional in ways many prefer not to see.

The question of belonging — the one I had hoped was settled — returned with new urgency.

In seeking clarity, I found myself turning backward toward my ancestors, realizing that my story is one strand in a much older braid. Jewish belonging has always been complex: rooted in land, faith, memory, and moral responsibility — yet repeatedly challenged by exile, persecution, and the need to adapt.

After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, Jews rebuilt their lives in the Mediterranean world — Alexandria, Rome, southern Italy — absorbing and reshaping elements of surrounding cultures. Later they migrated to the Rhineland, where Jewish learning and community life flourished, only to be shattered by Crusader violence. From there they rebuilt again in Poland and Lithuania, creating rich and resilient communities blending rationalism, mysticism, humor, and study.

My DNA test once reported that I am 98.1% Ashkenazi. What seems like a curiosity is, in truth, a distillation of this long story: a people who carried belonging across continents when the land beneath them never stayed still.

Belonging, in Jewish history, was never just geography. It was persistence — memory, language, ethics, and the Sabbath — a portable sanctuary when physical sanctuaries were denied.

Israel, in my family’s story, was not an abstraction. It was the place that saved my mother’s life. My love for it was born not of ideology but of gratitude. It was the home that existed when no other would take her — when Austria expelled her, when Europe burned, when the world refused to open its gates.

But gratitude did not prevent complexity.

As I grew older and came to know Israel more intimately — its politics, its power, its beauty, its contradictions — I felt tension between devotion and critique. I saw the harshness of occupation, the humiliations imposed on Palestinians, the acts of cruelty by some settlers. I also saw the existential threats Israel faces, and the trauma etched into its national memory — trauma my own family had lived.

This dual consciousness — love and discomfort, pride and sorrow — has become a defining feature of my Jewish belonging.

The war with Hamas after October 7 sharpened all of this. How does one defend against an enemy embedded in civilians, using its own people’s suffering as a weapon? How does one grieve murdered Israelis while also mourning Palestinian civilians killed in the violence that follows? How does one hold both truths without collapsing into despair or denial?

Belonging, for Jews, has always involved wrestling.

That wrestling has an ancient source. As a child I was taught the story of Jacob wrestling through the night before meeting his estranged brother, Esau. Only later did I understand the depth of that story. Jacob did not merely wrestle with an angel. He wrestled with guilt, fear, and the consequences of his own choices. He wrestled with his past — with betrayal, longing, and the hope for forgiveness.

By dawn he emerged limping. He was given a new name: Israel, “one who wrestles with God.”

What a remarkable definition of identity: not certainty, not triumph, but struggle.

The name became not just the name of a man, but of a people. It became a way of living: engaging, questioning, refusing to look away from complexity.

When I look at Israel today — the nation, the people, the idea — I see this wrestling everywhere. And I feel it in myself. To belong as a Jew is to remain inside this struggle: to see clearly, to love fiercely, to hold moral contradictions without retreat. Belonging does not require blind loyalty or uniform agreement. It requires conscience.

As I grow older, I find that the deepest source of my Jewish belonging is still my mother’s story. Everything I know about identity, resilience, and moral responsibility begins with her trembling arrival in Palestine — the loss she endured, the life she rebuilt, and the gratitude she carried until her last breath.

Her story, and the stories of my grandparents before her, remind me that Jewish belonging is inseparable from memory — and from the responsibility to honor that memory with integrity.

Austria taught our family how quickly rights can vanish.

Palestine taught us that refuge can save a life.

South Africa taught me how corrosive it is to belong in a system built on injustice.

North America taught me that belonging and safety are not the same thing.

Israel taught me that belonging includes wrestling — with history, with ethics, with ourselves.

These lessons are not contradictions. They are coordinates in the map of Jewish identity.

I used to think belonging was a place you reached when life settled down. Now I see it differently.

For me, belonging is an inheritance — not of land alone, but of struggle, conscience, and hope. It is the readiness to wrestle with complexity rather than retreat to simplicity. It is the willingness to see one’s history clearly and still choose love.

Jewish belonging is not comfortable. It is not tidy. But it is profound.

It is the echo of ancient memory in modern life.

It is the courage to face contradictions without abandoning compassion.

It is the thread that ties my mother’s survival to my own moral wrestling, and ties both to the next generation, who will inherit their own questions.

Belonging, in the Jewish story, has always meant being part of something larger than oneself — a people shaped by flight and return, by trauma and rebuilding, by grief and fierce joy, by ethics and argument, by the stubborn hope that life can begin again.

I do not claim to know exactly where I belong. But I know the shape of Jewish belonging. It is a rhythm carried across continents and centuries, through darkness and renewal, through fear and love. It is the rhythm I carry still.