The quandary of being half-Jewish

I was in my early twenties when I found out that I’m half-Jewish. Until then, as far as I was aware, I was merely a lapsed Catholic embracing the secular life. (I abandoned the faith at the age of ten; my Catholic mother didn’t seem to mind.) My father, as I understood it, was Protestant. But one day he was chatting to me about his family background and dropped the bombshell that he had converted to Christianity in Budapest in the 1930s. His family was, in fact, Jewish, but with increasing anti-Semitism in Europe – courtesy of the Nazis – he had converted for pragmatic reasons, as did many other Hungarian Jews at the time. He explained that he had never before mentioned his Jewish past to me because it wasn’t relevant to my life, and that, because anti-Semitism is never far away, it could even have a potentially adverse effect on it.