A recent debate about Jewish identity left me thinking less about who gets to define Jewishness and more about what it feels like to grow up at the edges of a community rather than at its center.

And perhaps that is precisely why I reacted to the article.

I have always known I stood outside the Jewish community more than inside it.

I was raised in a secular French family by my non-Jewish mother. She was the parent who raised me, cared for me, transmitted most of my culture, and even gave me her name and lineage. My father is Jewish, but he is about as religious as my atheist French mother.

That created a strange irony for me. Most (recent at least) civilizations have historically been patriarchal and transmitted identity through the father. Take Islam, for example. In Tunisia, when I was there, despite being myself firmly opposed to many patriarchal traditions, I would hear people say, "If my father is Tunisian, then I am Tunisian." On some level I was willing to bend my gender-equity principles for the sake of belonging and community. I discuss some of that in my writing about "missing my brown half."

Yet when it came to Jewishness, my father's heritage suddenly became insufficient in some circles.

Ironically, I think having a Jewish mother might have made me feel closer to Judaism—not because matrilineality makes someone more Jewish, but because she is the parent who actually raised me. That is a question of cultural transmission, not a question of worth.

Judaism is a religion. Jewishness is also an ethnicity, a peoplehood, and an inheritance. My father is about as secular as my mother. Is he suddenly not Jewish either? Probably not. In fact, he is likely considered more Jewish than I am by many people because he was born to two Jewish parents. Being a man also tends to confer a certain credibility in some Jewish spaces, especially religious ones.

One does not choose to be Jewish.

With a French maternal surname, an Italian-Spanish first name, and an Arabic-Muslim paternal surname, I have no obvious Jewish markers. Depending on the context, people have read me as European, Middle Eastern, North African, Latin American, or something else entirely. I did not grow up around Jewish institutions. I did not grow up practicing Judaism. For much of my life I did not identify myself as Jewish. "Half Tunisian" was often the identity I felt more comfortable claiming.

But here is the thing: my DNA test was a dead giveaway. To most people looking at the results, I was half Jewish.

More importantly, antisemites have rarely been interested in whether someone attended synagogue often enough, spoke enough Hebrew, or practiced Judaism correctly. Historically, ancestry itself was often enough.

This is one reason community gatekeeping does not bother me as much as it might bother others.

Throughout history, some Jews sought acceptance through assimilation, conversion, or cooperation with dominant societies. Yet those processes did not erase ancestry, memory, or origin. Many Jews from the MENA world were gradually absorbed into surrounding Islamic civilizations through conversion and assimilation. Yet their descendants did not suddenly cease to have Jewish ancestry, Jewish history, or Jewish origins.

I also think these conversations are often shaped by what I can only describe as community privilege.

People whose Jewishness has never been questioned, who grew up surrounded by Jewish institutions, Jewish family networks, Jewish education, and communal recognition, often do not understand the experience of outsider Jews.

They are speaking from inside the house.

Some of us spent our lives standing on the porch.

The closest analogy I can think of is immigration.

I grew up in France aware of many forms of inequality. I was not immune to marginalization. I experienced mixed identity, sexism, and gender-based violence, both personally and through the experiences of women in my family. At the same time, I also benefited from many forms of privilege. I was largely white-passing. I had a non-immigrant French mother. My father's immigration story was shaped by the unique position many North African Jews occupied under French colonial structures. I grew up with relative middle-class stability.

Because of that, I could empathize with immigrants and refugees in France. I could see their struggles. I could oppose discrimination. I could care deeply.

But I had never actually occupied that position.

Only after becoming an immigrant myself did I fully understand what it feels like to depend on a visa, to navigate systems you do not control, to worry about legal status, to feel structurally vulnerable in ways that are difficult to explain to people who have never experienced it.

That experience changed how I think about belonging.

When people occupy very different positions within a structure, you do not necessarily expect them to fully understand one another's experiences.

For me, there was never any obvious benefit to "coming out" as Jewish on the internet. If anything, it often felt easier not to.

Yet I eventually did because I realized that you still carry the history, the antisemitism, the outsider experience, the lineage and the inheritance whether or not you publicly acknowledge it. At some point I no longer wanted to carry that alone.

So I see no shame in claiming one's place within the Jewish community when one is just inside enough to share its vulnerabilities, but outside enough not to receive all of its protections.

People who live securely inside a community often underestimate what identity feels like at its edges.

That does not make them wrong.

But it does mean they are speaking from a different place than many of us are.