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 my life? The thought of returning fills me with dread. The question comes up whenever we discuss the long term—especially healthcare, which becomes more important as the years pass. Canada and Israel provide the kind of coverage few other countries offer. Germany will not be an option. But the Canada I imagine returning to is the Canada that existed before October 7, 2023. That is lost in time. We left Toronto because of the wave of antisemitism that followed October 7 and because so much of it went unchallenged. What shocked me most was not simply the hostility itself, but how quickly it appeared among people who considered themselves progressive, educated, and morally sophisticated.  We both felt betrayed – the covenant with Canada was broken. Yet our individual interpretations and reactions are remarkably different.

Simon eventually realized that he had not left Canada primarily because of the antisemitism. Maybe not even from the betrayal. What he had really been fleeing was something older—a fear inherited from generations before him. His family had lived relatively safely in Britain, but more than three thousand years of persecution leave a residue. Jewish history carries its own rhythm: They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat. Today we call this inheritance “intergenerational trauma.” I have never liked the phrase. It sounds too banal and clinical.

Simon had lived a very good life in Canada. He felt fully Canadian. He had never even bothered applying for British citizenship. As a pathologist, he could have earned a great deal of money in the United States, but he chose another path. His loyalty was to Canada. Our country prided itself on being a multicultural mosaic, and for decades it seemed to work.

His experience of Canada was not the same as mine. My parents spoke English as a second language. I grew up among immigrants shaped by the aftershocks of the Second World War. In the mining towns of Northern Ontario, thick German and Finnish accents were often mistaken for ignorance. Only later did I appreciate how extraordinary these people were. Many were bilingual or trilingual. Many had missed years of schooling because of the war. They rebuilt their lives through sheer physical labour in the mines of the Canadian Shield.

Growing up, I always felt I was under a microscope. As the child of German parents, you were reminded that you belonged to the enemy. Children can be cruel – no filters and no social conscience.  They are effective little archivists of popular culture. The war movies on television taught them everything they needed to know: the British and Americans were heroic, and the Germans were Nazis. No nuance. No civilians. No grey zones.

As well I did not fit in with the boys at school. I had no interest in sports, no desire to get dirty, no appetite for hockey or rough play. I preferred books, films, music, and my mother’s company. My first language was German, which created its own problems at school in the days before anyone cared about ESL. Teachers simply told my parents to speak English at home.

Everything marked me as different: German lunches, Saturday German school, my dislike of sports, my love of reading, my attraction to dramas and musicals rather than the acceptable masculine world around me. Outsider, outsider, outsider. To cope with that feeling, I developed a small superiority complex. A contrivance, at best. I told myself I was better than they were. I was European. I came from the world of Nürnberg and Heidelberg, not from this rugged landscape scarred by the mining industry.

Looking back, I can see how deeply that mindset drove a wedge between me and Canada. When Canadians asked what I was, I said German. When Germans asked, I said Canadian, but with a Volksdeutsche background

I belonged nowhere completely.

That, I think, is the real difference between Simon and me. Simon blended in more easily. Antisemitism remained intangible to him for much of his life, like a childhood monster you are warned about but never expect to encounter. The monster was tucked away in a drawer with other childhood nightmares.

I honestly believed the monster was dead. Naïve to not know that antisemitism wasn’t a Nazi invention but that there was a 3,000-year history. Stupidity to think that the Nuremberg trials and executions put a permanent end to antisemitism.  The monster is a shapeshifter with the power to resurrect.

The irony now is that we live in Nuremberg, once the epicenter of Nazism.  We can visit Courtroom 600 in the Palace of Justice where the trials took place. A memorial? A tribute? Or a mockery considering the current state of the world?

And there you have the difference.  I watched in horror as Jew-hatred returned almost overnight—reborn with a new vocabulary. The gravity and infamy of the horrific Shoah wasn’t enough. That the words “never again” came with conditions and context.  Such duplicity. Now complicity. My outlook has changed from wounded idealism to misanthropic pessimism, and it is difficult not to feel hemorrhaging contempt for a world that has so flagrantly broken its covenant to stand in defense of humanity.

It had been lurking and growing and now it had permission to speak up again – to lash out. The best analogy I have found to describe this situation is the life cycle of the mushroom.

Mushrooms are only the visible fruit of a vast underground mycelial network. Some networks can live for thousands of years – old sections die while new ones generate. The real organism spreads discretely beneath the surface. Antisemitism works the same way. When the conditions align—often after a little rain, in this case October Rain—the network awakens, and mushrooms rise to the surface.

What is more, they are all poisonous – not as a self-defense mechanism but as an act of malice.  Once you bite and ingest the poison, you don’t succumb, but you are infected and become an extension of the noxious network.

What shocked me most was where those infections appeared: among friends and colleagues in both the teaching and arts worlds. I thought I knew these people. Critical thinking skills. Rational.  Suddenly, I found myself defending Israel and debating semantics. Jew can have various definitions depending on context and tone. Ceasefire seemed to only apply to one side. Complex and nuanced realities collapsed instantly into fictional ideological binaries—oppressor versus oppressed, colonizer versus colonized.

It felt as if intelligent people had willingly abandoned their ability to reason. Casualty figures provided by Hamas were accepted without question. Slogans replaced analysis. Suddenly everyone became a geopolitical expert on Israel, wielding a vocabulary heavy with judgment: proportionality, international law, collective punishment, famine, genocide.

Many who had never cared so passionately about any other conflict could easily denounce Israel’s response while ignoring the provocation that preceded it. In the end, their arguments collapsed into the familiar three D’s—demonization, double standards, and delegitimization—the classic hallmarks of antisemitism.

My ears and eyes burned with these libels masquerading as virtue.

In the process I lost friends. Many friends also distanced themselves, unwilling to speak up against antisemitism for fear of reprisals. I don’t want to take sides.  Sides?!  Are there any sides to direct unprovoked massacre of civilians?  What are the two viewpoints of rape and slaughter.

On a personal note, and completely unrelated but running parallel, I was suddenly estranged by two daughters. Another deep betrayal. No trigger to speak of. A simple case of them being infected by another type of mushroom. There’s a growing trend, supported by social media and therapy culture, to rewrite family history and give yourself permission to distance yourself from the villain to protect your mental health.  Kudos go to my middle daughter who did not pathologize our relationship.

Toronto itself had already begun to erode before we fully acknowledged it. First there were stickers and graffiti. Then vandalism. Recently, bullets were fired into three different synagogues, two Iranian based organizations and the façade of the U.S. consulate. Many Canadians are undoubtedly horrified by this. But Canada suffers from a particular kind of polite paralysis. We prefer not to speak too loudly or too clearly. That silence allows the loudest and most extreme voices to dominate. Political leaders, fearful of being labeled Islamophobic, often choose caution over clarity. The result is a steady erosion of trust.

So, what exactly would I be returning to in Canada?

I honestly do not know. If I could choose rationally, I would remain in Germany. I feel comfortable here. If I could choose purely with my heart, I might also try Israel again. There is something about that country—its stubborn determination to survive—that pulls at me.

I suspect I might feel less anxious living under missile sirens in Israel than in a society where antisemitism hides beneath polite silence. A sudden antisemitic remark amongst people I assume to trust is more jolting than the Iron Dome intercepting incoming Iranian missiles.

As a last refuge, I could force myself to return to Toronto. Our renovated Victorian house would be the consolation prize. It has become almost too perfect—like a magazine photo shoot. No bookshelves. No clutter. No traces of the life we once lived there. I’ve only experienced this level of elegance in boutique hotels when we travel.

Like a hermit, I would survive on grocery deliveries and Amazon packages. Not living but subsisting. Hoping for the best – that Canada will become what it once was – but expecting the worst – it remains an antisemitic hotspot that often makes headlines in Israel.

The upheaval of these past years has exceeded anything I imagined facing at this point in life. Still, I recognize my good fortune. For the moment, my destiny remains my own to decide, a luxury denied to many.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)