Like many Jews, I always feel like an outsider

I had grown up in a waspy, virtually (and sometimes proudly-seeming) Judenfrei small town in New England, very oriented around church life. I was the only Jew in school there, bar my little brother, and again at the Hampshire boarding school I ended up at for A-levels. Snippets of antisemitism of various degrees of crassness cropped up from time to time.

So the friend’s comment amused but didn’t really surprise or upset me, and I barely thought about the exchange for years. But as time went on, it has begun to feel more significant.
Why was I in that house at all? The answer is that — despite a number of boozy evenings at Chabad and J-Soc — I left Cambridge with as little sense of real belonging or attraction to the Jewish community as I had going in. This meant I had no sense of, or desire to place myself within, Jewish topographies in London.

Churning around in an arch-British world of lapsed Church of Englanders — still my dominant milieu — I found myself living in Putney in a friend’s spare room. The girl who made the nose comment was in the same extended circle. I was, again, the only Jew around, knowledge that was emphasised by the fact that many of my new friends had never met a Jewish person before Cambridge (and not everyone had met one there either). A decade later, doing an MPhil at the same university, I met the man I thought I would marry. Born and bred in a midsized midlands town, I was only the third Jew he had ever met.

I used to be proud of all this, as if being people’s first Jew was a special status, or as if being privy to what people really think about Jews gave me a kind of detached, secret agent quality. And I have sometimes seen my gravitation to English non-Jews as a throwback to my family’s highly assimilated past in Germany. Now I wonder if that sense of belonging in non-Jewish communities has actually been a mirage – if I had stood out as different all along, in ways that my peers saw more clearly than I did.

Perhaps. But I still don’t fit the Anglosphere’s Jewish template either. It’s not that I don’t have close British Jewish friends or have never experienced the generosity and myriad enthusiasms of the community. But where most of my fellow Jews here seem to respect the basics of kosher to some extent, my Bamberg-born grandmother and I used to bond over trays of sizzling white bratwurst from Waitrose. For them, the Holocaust happened generations after their family arrived here.

And where many of my Jewish peers went to Jewish schools and were in Jewish youth groups, pepper speech with Yiddish and grew up listening to great Jewish entertainers, I picked a path through the mainstream. Like the rest of my generation, I too loved Seinfeld, but Woody Allen, whose model of neurotic Ashkenazi sensibilities still holds enormous power among non-Jews and Jews alike, never felt like home.

There is one place I fit in: Tel Aviv. In my early 20s, already an ardent defender of Israel, I was sent on the family’s behalf to a wedding there. I fell passionately in love with the city, not only because of its dreamy bars and beach and men, but because it offered the equivalent of a facial recognition password: I was in.

In Tel Aviv, I have my secular Mecca: a place where I can eat bacon for breakfast on shady terraces draped in Star of David flags, surrounded by other curly-haired people who don’t believe in God but whose family memories are pockmarked by those who died, not so long ago, and in the case of fallen IDF soldiers no time ago at all, for being Jewish.