I began my life as a white girl in the segregated South, and I’m likely to end it as a Jewish woman in Berlin. “There’s an old saying,” Reverend Wheeler Parker, who was Emmett Till’s cousin, told me. “If I was Catholic and I lived in the South, I’d be worried. If I was Jewish, I’d be packing up. If I was black, I’d be gone.” If the South never felt quite like home, five years in Tel Aviv, decades later, failed to make me Israeli. Perhaps that’s why I feel so easy in today’s Berlin, which has become a haven for many who feel at home nowhere else.

I began my life as a white girl in the segregated South, and I’m likely to end it as a Jewish woman in Berlin. “There’s an old saying,” Reverend Wheeler Parker, who was Emmett Till’s cousin, told me. “If I was Catholic and I lived in the South, I’d be worried. If I was Jewish, I’d be packing up. If I was black, I’d be gone.” If the South never felt quite like home, five years in Tel Aviv, decades later, failed to make me Israeli. Perhaps that’s why I feel so easy in today’s Berlin, which has become a haven for many who feel at home nowhere else.