When Where I Live Requires an Explanation
Before I left Israel for a week-long vacation to the Turkish riviera, I took off my necklace.
It was a simple gold necklace with my name written in Hebrew. I had worn it almost every day since moving to Tel Aviv. But as I packed for the trip, I wondered whether I wanted a stranger to look at me and immediately think I was Israeli.
I had already thought about this before.
When I moved to Israel two months prior, I decided to obtain a second American passport. I understood that there were places I may travel to where being American and being Israeli could carry very different implications.
Turkey was one of those places. Despite the short distance, there are no direct flights from Tel Aviv to anywhere in Turkey due to diplomatic tension. Instead, I would fly from Tel Aviv to Greece and then continue on to Turkey.
It was a small logistical inconvenience. But something about it felt unusual.
For the first time, I was planning a vacation not as an American traveling from the United States, but as someone who lived in Israel and to a place where residents of my home country were not welcome.
So I arrived in Turkey with my American passport, without my Hebrew necklace, and with a strange new awareness of what information about myself I was willing to disclose.
The trip was a week-long catamaran cruise around Turkey’s turquoise coast, merely 700 kilometers from the Tel Aviv coastline. I was joining a group of 45 friends and friends of friends, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City.
At the initial group orientation and conversations that followed throughout the week, one of the first questions that was asked was naturally “Where do you live?”
It is one of the most innocuous questions you can ask when meeting someone new. Each person answered without thought or hesitance.
Oakland. New York City. Singapore.
And then, eventually, me.
“Tel Aviv.”
My response was often received with a pause. A slight shift in expression.
And almost inevitably: “Why?”
No one was hostile. In fact, I was lucky. The 45 people on the trip were thoughtful, open-minded people, many of whom had traveled to Israel and understood that politics and people are not the same thing.
But I noticed the question.
How often does someone say they live in New York City and get asked why?
The question itself made me experience something I had never fully understood before. Outside of Israel, being Israeli can be perceived as a political identity before it is a personal one. And this was the first time I had felt that identity as my own.
This shift in my identity began earlier this year, when I spent several weeks in Tel Aviv during the Iran war. Prior to this, I had never experienced missiles flying over my head or sirens beckoning me to shelter.
I was surprised at how disturbingly normal it all became.
Life continued. I learned which notifications to pay attention to and which to ignore. I tried to sleep, eat, work—and inevitably a siren interrupted everything.
And somehow, I adapted.
It wasn’t until I left Israel that I began to realize how much the experience had changed me.
When I eventually returned to New York, I remember going into the office and seeing some of my coworkers in person for the first time since I had returned from Israel.
“How was Tel Aviv?” they asked.
“It was a strange and challenging time to be there,” I said.
“Oh, right. The war. Did those rockets affect you?”
I realized that most people abroad don’t understand that a war with Iran means mass disruption to Israeli society and they certainly don’t understand what it means to have ordinary life repeatedly interrupted by the possibility of something violent happening simply because of where you live.
I also met up with Jewish friends in New York, assuming those interactions would feel more in tune with the times we were living in. And yet, I remember sitting across the table from so many close friends feeling strangely disconnected from the conversation.
We talked about their children’s private-school tuition. Their husbands. The weather. The usual minutiae of New York life.
Meanwhile, part of my brain was still tracking the latest Telegram notification about an intercepted missile or an analysis of the latest tweet from Trump. I even kept the Israeli red-alert notifications on my phone even after returning to the United States. I no longer needed them to know when to run to a shelter, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn them off.
Something had shifted in me.
I began to understand that there was a dimension to Jewish life in Israel that I had not fully grasped as Jewish person living in the Diaspora.
Jews abroad experience antisemitism, fear, discrimination and even violence. Those experiences are real. But there is a degree of responsibility that comes with living in Israel: knowing that, despite all the challenges, there is a collective responsibility to protect the place that so many Jews consider home—and that, for many Jews, there is no other place that carries quite the same meaning.
That realization was part of what eventually propelled me to officially move to Israel and start my Aliyah journey, on the heels of another war with Iran.
So when I found myself in Turkey a few months later, hiding my Israeli identity in small ways, I was struck by the contradiction.
I had chosen to move to Israel.
I had chosen to make this country my home.
And yet, for the first time, I hesitated to tell someone that I lived there.
And then, eventually, I said it anyway.
“Tel Aviv.”
It seems insignificant, but it stayed with me.
I realized that the fear I was feeling went way beyond just traveling to a country that is not welcoming to Israel.
It was about what it means to carry an Israeli identity into a world that increasingly interprets that identity through the prism of the war and polarizing media.
I felt the fear that Israelis feel when they don’t know how their identity will be received by others abroad.
I felt the temptation to hide it.
And then I felt something else: responsibility.
Israel is portrayed in much of the world through an extraordinarily charged political lens. Israelis are sometimes reduced to caricatures—to people who are indifferent to suffering or who support everything their government does.
I don’t pretend those perceptions don’t exist. But I also know that the person standing in front of them is just a person. And so, each time I said, “I live in Tel Aviv,” I found myself wanting to explain the why.
Why did I choose this place?
Why would someone choose a country that is so politically complicated, so frequently under threat and, right now, so deeply misunderstood?
The answer is not that I think Israel is perfect.
It isn’t.
The answer is that, for the first time in my life, where I live feels connected to something bigger than myself.
When I moved to New York in my twenties, my reasons were, in many ways, selfish ones. I wanted a career. I wanted excitement. I wanted to experience the city. I wanted to become the person I imagined I could be.
And I did.
But moving to Israel at this point in my life feels fundamentally different.
This decision is not only about career or lifestyle or adventure. It is about identity. It is about community. It is about belonging. And, increasingly, it feels like it is about purpose.
I don’t know exactly what that purpose will look like.
Perhaps part of it will simply be living an ordinary life here—going to work, making friends, falling in love, complaining about the cost of rent, finding the best coffee and becoming frustrated with Israeli bureaucracy.
But as someone who works at a global company and will continue to have a significant presence abroad, I also think part of my purpose may be found in the encounters I have with people who ask me the simplest question in the world:
“Where do you live?”
And when I say “Tel Aviv,” and they pause, and they ask me why, I have an opportunity to tell them.
Not why I support every Israeli policy.
Not why I think Israel is beyond criticism.
But why, despite all of its contradictions, I chose to make a life here.
Why I believe Jews deserve a place where being Jewish does not require an explanation. Why community, family, and living in the moment feels different here.
And why, after everything I experienced this year, I realized that I wanted that place to be home.
I know I am only at the beginning of this journey. I am still figuring out the logistics of living here, learning the language, the culture and what it actually means to build a life here, but something in my identity has already shifted without choice.
I used to think of Israel as a place I visited. Then it became a place I lived.
And somewhere along the way, without quite realizing it, it became a place I felt responsible for.
Maybe that is what becoming Israeli means.
Not simply being born here.
Not simply holding a passport or signing a lease.
But reaching the point where someone asks you, “Where do you live?” and you realize that your answer carries great responsibility—and that you are willing to explain why.
