There’s a letter my maternal grandfather wrote his father on September 8, 1945. My grandfather, who died in 1991, was a Lieutenant for the United States Army in World War II, stationed in Munich after the war. In the letter, he wishes my great-grandfather a Happy New Year, and says:

I must confess that I didn’t know the holidays were so early this year, until yesterday morning when I returned here to the unit. But we did have services here—very impressive services at that. You might have heard part of them, for we were told that they were being broadcast to the States. We used the opera house here in Munich. At least 2000 soldiers were there in addition to a number of refugees. Yes Dad, I’ll long remember observing the high holidays in Munich, one of the centers of Hitler’s Nazism.

My grandfather goes on to describe the 55,000 Jewish “D.P.s” (displaced persons) still in Bavaria. How “We all know what’s happening in Poland, and that the majority of the refugees don’t dare return to their ‘homeland.’” How “nothing has been done to help these people re-form their broken lives. There are some that still wear the rags they wore in the concentration camps. For that matter, many of them still live in the same camps they were imprisoned in.”

I get especially choked up at the end:

The relief agencies have failed miserably thus far to provide the necessary items for these people. So the chaplain is asking for all possible contributions—not cash, but such things as clothes, soap tooth pate, etc.; no food, as the army is taking care of that now. So dad, if you’d send it to me I’ll take it to the chaplain’s Hq. here in Munich.

I marvel at the profound discrepancy between my grandfather, a third-generation, second-generation born American Jew stationed in Munich after the Holocaust. He was physically in the same place where Hitler attempted to annihilate his entire diaspora; and yet he is alive, fed, heading home to a home, because his grandfather—my great-great-grandfather—and his namesake—and our ancestors—left Eastern Europe for America in the late nineteenth century.

I grew up knowing it was a cycle—exile. How one person’s exile is another person’s fleeing. How one person’s settling can cause another person to be exiled or cause another person to flee.

Because of this knowing, despite my assimilation, I still grew up ready to leave, should I be exiled, should someone else’s settling ultimately cause me into exile, cause me to flee.

I grew up never settling. Into America. Into my body. My Jewishness. I grew up ready to flee.

***

Many years ago, an acupuncturist told me that she wanted to start working on ancestral healing with me. That her teacher, who was Jewish, once explained that Jews are never really settled. We’re always ready to leave. And she could feel some of that energy in me. The readiness to flee.

Somewhat around that same time, I had coffee with an Israeli storyteller to connect over our respective work projects, who told me, “Judaism was only born when we were exiled.”

Exile. Fleeing. Settling. Into a place. I am a fourth-generation-born American. On both sides. I am technically as assimilated as it gets for a white Ashkenazi Jew in the United States.

For those of us who fled and settled in America, we are ourselves in exile on stolen land. The United States of America was founded on genocide, slavery, white supremacy, and sexual terrorism. That is the infrastructure on which this country continues to function. As a diaspora historically exiled around the world for thousands of years, there are now an estimated seven million of us—nearly half of our total global population—that have settled here in the United States. Some of us have been here for ages. Some showed up last week. Some left war-torn countries. Some survived genocide. Some have known opulence or privilege always. Some have more money than half the people on earth. Some are hungry. Some in poverty, without a home.

After the acupuncturist brought this up, I began to notice my readiness. That I wasn’t ever settled. Even alone in my apartment in Brooklyn—I never fully felt at home. I started working on it. The readiness. I started thinking about what kind of resistance it might be: to settle, into me.

To settle—instead of somewhere else, like a place, or onto someone else’s land—into myself.

My body: my only constant home. My body, and everything in it: a place I can securely settle.

And stay.

I wonder: if our diaspora was, in fact, born of exile—why do we keep searching outside of our own bodies for a settling? A common story? A shared faith? I wonder: if we are able to settle into our own respective bodies—and hearts—might we then be able to settle into ourselves?

***

Anti-Jewish oppression and discrimination—including antisemitism—is pervasive and loud. Statistical data would say it is on the rise. I would say it was always there. It never left. It has been at the bedrock and forefront of white supremacy for two thousand years. It works in tandem with anti-Black racism and racism and Islamophobia and patriarchy and capitalism to make Jews a scapegoat in a large, intricate, sophisticated global system of oppression that fractures us all.

And yet, while outside forces of anti-Jewish discrimination and oppression and antisemitism are most certain a real—and sometimes deadly—threat, our own internalized antisemitism and discriminations against one another—be it for race, religion, ideology, ethnicity, nationality, or something else—feels like a particularly pervasive threat. I worry that we might first implode.

I think regularly about the 2006 book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks, an apocalyptic novel told in a documentary style about a zombie world war. Each chapter details the chronology of the war’s unfolding at various cities and places around the globe. On page 43, one narrator details the zombie apocalypse in Israel. The text reads:

Suddenly a door at the back of the Starbucks swung open, the soldier turned in its direction and fired. A bloody corpse hit the floor right beside us, a grenade rolled out of his twitching hand. The soldier grabbed the bomb and tried to hurl it into the street. It exploded in midair. His body shielded us from the blast. He tumbled back over the corpse of my slain Arab brother. Only he wasn’t an Arab at all. As my tears dried I noticed that he wore payess and a yarmulke and bloody tzitzit snaked out from his damp, shredded trousers. The man was a Jew, the armed rebels out in the street were Jews! The battle raging all around us wasn’t an uprising by Palestinian insurgents, but the opening shots of the Israel Civil War.

I often worry that here on earth—much like in this fictional Israeli scene—we are not at risk of non-Jews destroying us (even though antisemitism and white supremacy are very, very real and significant threats). Rather, we are most at risk of destroying ourselves. If we have a shot of making it out alive as a culture, community, diaspora, and faith, I wonder into what mirror we might need to glean to witness each other in ourselves, at long last. Is that too part of settling in?

***

When I was 12 years old, I was anorexic. I was a year and a half into a decade-long eating disorder. I was at a sleepaway camp. During rest hour one day, I found myself bullying another camper in my cabin. She had eaten a single piece of fruit that day for lunch. But restriction was my thing. I wanted a monopoly on that particular kind of behavior and pain. And I say “I found myself,” but I don’t think we find ourselves accidentally bullying someone. Or forcing them into exile. Or evacuation. Or starvation. Or death. We choose to do that. We make that choice.

It was one of the few times in my life I intentionally chose to cause harm to another person in that particular kind of way. And it wasn’t until adulthood that I was able to understand my motive. That I wanted ownership over my trauma and my mental illness and my particular then-current genre of pain. I didn’t want her to have it—anorexia, restriction—that belonged to me.

I can’t help but notice the number 55,000 from my grandfather’s letter to his father in 1945.

As of July 2025, over the last year and a half, over 56,000 people have been killed in Gaza—with 2.3 million lives in exile—since 1,200 people were killed in Israel on October 7, 2023.

Two weeks ago, several loved ones’ loved ones fled their homes in Iran.

Two weeks ago, several loved ones fled to their bomb shelters in Israel.

One week ago, I stood in a room with Israelis who had taken an 18-hour boat to take a 2-hour plane to take an 11-hour plane to settle into their jobs to a summer camp in the United States.

This week, Israel issued a mass evacuation to Palestinians in Northern Gaza.

This week, nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza while seeking humanitarian aid.

This week, there is continued violence and killing and exiling of Palestinians in the West Bank.

This week, the text over an Al Jazeera Instagram reel of settler violence in the West Bank reads:

These Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank attacked Israeli soldiers during a protest over the military’s handling of settler attacks on Palestinians. The settlers vandalized armoured vehicles and assaulted personnel in a riot that even far-right leader Itamar Ben-Gvir condemned. Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid called them ‘Jewish terrorists.’ The day after, EU diplomats visited the occupied West Bank village where settlers under the watch of military forces killed three Palestinians. Witnesses say Israeli forces provided protection for the settlers as they set fires. But the Israeli government has since been trying to prevent a repeat.

Repeat. Repeat. Exile. Settle. Flee. Repeat.

We are Max Brook’s fictionalized prediction in World War Z.

We are exiling each other.

We are exiling ourselves.

I am anorexic at sleepaway camp in 1995, bullying another camper who is restricting her food.

I am exiling her.

I am fleeing from myself.

After so many centuries and generations of exile and fleeing, I don’t know into what else I can settle without causing someone else into exile, without causing someone else to have to flee.

***

What unsettlings, exiles, and flees have propelled us to make others unsettle, exile, and flee?

What might happen if we stopped searching outside of our bodies—and hearts—to land?

If we stopped asking each other and ourselves to settle into places, forcing other people to flee?

At some point, I decided there’s a world where my settling into my body—exiling myself from a readiness to flee—could perhaps be an act of resistance. Maybe there’s privilege in that. Thinking I can outgrow my lineages of exile and fleeing. But the lineage has fractured anyhow. There are parts of the Jewish diaspora who remain in exile, who remain ready to flee. There are parts of the Jewish diaspora who have settled into spaces that are causing others to exile, to flee.

What I’m wondering—and asking myself—is how settling into my body—and heart—might help me make choices and settle into my life—and the places I live—in ways that prevent other people from being exiled, that prevent other people from having to themselves then flee.

I think of the Israeli storyteller telling me over coffee in New York City so many years ago that Judaism was born out of exile. I ask then, into what have we evolved when we are responsible for someone else’s exile? Into what might we evolve when we break the cycle of exile, instead?

We—anyone who has ever known exile. Like violence, exile too is a cycle to break. Exiling begets exiling. Fleeing begets fleeing. Settling begets settling. And so into what might we want to settle so that it is a settling into something deeper inside, that breaks the cycle from within?

***

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