Hitching a ride with the diaspora: an Israeli-Canadian nudnik non-Jew in a self-imposed exile

This morning I woke up with that familiar churning in my gut—the quiet anxiety that has become a kind of companion over the past two years. It is the feeling of not knowing where you belong anymore.

We left Toronto to explore the possibility of new homes in CDMX and Tel Aviv. False starts. Now we are in Nuremberg, Germany. Will we stay?

It is a long journey for someone who was born and lived for 63 years in the Central Canadian province of Ontario, and who like most of those like me always assumed I would die there.  It was a long road to an awakening – as a child, I didn’t even know of an ethnic group called the Jews, even after watching Fiddler on the Roof.  I was ten

In my teens, I’d been exposed to some Holocaust revisionism. I’m still embarrassed by my father, a Volkdeutscher who used to doubt the historical statistics of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. My father has since met my Jewish husband.  He was impressed by the pathologist who could diagnose diseases and run a lab. He capitulated. Yes. I married a Jewish doctor.  It just happened that way.

Traveling as a tourist is easy. You do not need to belong anywhere. You simply pass through. But when you try to build a life somewhere new, the question of belonging suddenly becomes unavoidable.

I remember my mother once saying, almost wistfully: I have no home. Yet despite decades in Canada, she never fully felt she belonged there. Her thick German accent marked her as a foreigner, but it was more than that. Her emotional compass still pointed toward Germany—to its culture and to the vanished Sudetenland where she had been born. Her Heimat.

This morning I felt a little like her. I am comfortable here in Germany, in the city of Nuremberg—my mother’s second of three homes. Despite having family here and my familiarity with the urban landscape, I will never quite feel like it’s a home.

CDMX was good to us, but we would always have been outsiders there. As Canadian gringos we stood out immediately – paler and taller made it impossible to blend in. I speak Spanish reasonably well, but I learned the language as an adult from books. The instinctive rhythm of native speech still escapes me.

Tel Aviv might have been different, but our time there was cut short by the Iran–Israel conflict of June 2025. Soon afterward I spent a month mostly confined to our apartment while waiting for hernia surgery. I never had the chance to really know the city, the country or its inhabitants.

And yet Israel felt special. Barely a word of Hebrew, and even knowing I would always be an outsider, I sensed that Israelis welcome people who choose to live there despite the danger. Making Aliyah carries meaning. It signals a kind of commitment that Israelis instinctively understand.

Israel itself is also something unusual: a mosaic society. Jews, Christians, and Muslims live alongside one another—Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian Jews and Christians, Druze, and Arab Israelis. Walking down the street, you hear Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Ukrainian, French, English, Amharic, Spanish, and occasionally German.

So why does Canada no longer feel like home? Why do I now feel like an outsider in the country where I was born and spent almost all of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)