What it means to be Jewish

The fact that I am Jewish has always mystified me. It bears no relation to anything else in my life — not to the way I was brought up, not to religion since I am agnostic, nor to any community in which I have lived.

My parents both came from secular, middle-class, professional German (and Russian) families and although — unlike thousands of German Jews in the 19th and early 20th century — they didn’t convert to Christianity, they were nevertheless assimilated members of German society. Indeed they believed that assimilation was the best answer to the Jewish ‘problem’. My mother hoped that I would marry a non-Jew, preferably an Englishman.

Despite these views my parents both emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s (they weren’t married at the time), very soon after the Nazis started introducing anti-Jewish legislation. They did this in a spirit of defiance and adventure — they were in their twenties — but also as a precaution: Palestine might have become the only place where Jews could live in safety.