Ignite Your Heart and Soul with Sara Troy and her guest Dr David Weill, on air from Janaury 20th

 Dr. David Weill, author of TELL ME I BELONG: A Journey Across Faiths and Generations 

A heartfelt memoir about the search for religion and identity

“I’m not Jewish.” For years, that’s what David Weill told anyone who asked about his religious background. Yes, his father was a Jew who had left Nazi Germany as a boy. But his mother was a Southern Baptist. Growing up in New Orleans, religion wasn’t something his family discussed, let alone practiced. As an adult, he developed a fervent zeal, and profound devotion to his work as a specialist in organ transplants. Transplantation was all he needed to define and fulfill him—until a crisis shook him to the core. 

In 2015, after the simultaneous unraveling of his carefully crafted career and the death of his father, Weill began to doubt everything, including his purpose in life. While grappling with emotional pain and sinking deeper into despair, he began to suffer perplexing physical symptoms. In his moment of crisis, he was seized by a strong desire to practice a formal religion. But for Weill, the real question was, Which religion? Eventually, he chose Catholicism and was baptized at age fifty. He found solace in heart-to-heart talks with a priest and his daughters’ happiness at having the whole family at church together. Everything was fine—until 2020, when he learned that his mother had converted to Judaism right before marrying his father. He was born a Jew. And in the eyes of the Jewish faith, he would always be Jewish. That realization sparked his second quest. 

He reflects on what drew his mother, a native of Selma, Alabama, to Judaism—partly because, as she once said, Jews “always seemed like such practical people,” but more deeply as a rejection of the hypocrisy she saw in Baptist churches that preached love for all of God’s children while practicing racism. He also explores his father’s complicated relationship with being Jewish, a source of pride linked to intelligence and success, yet shadowed by a lifelong fear of ostracism and stigma. This personal history comes into sharp focus during a heart-wrenching journey to Berlin with his daughter Hannah, where he seeks out his father’s first home and confronts the inner work of defining who he is. His search deepens through a determined effort, aided by investigators, to uncover the truth about his grandfather’s imprisonment in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and the pivotal role played by his renowned relative, composer Kurt Weill, in orchestrating his family’s escape to the United States.

DAVID WEILL, MD, is the former Director of the Center for Advanced Lung Diseases and the Lung and Heart-Lung Transplant Program at Stanford University Medical Center. A sought-after advisor to various transplant programs across the country, he also serves on the Board of TransMedics, a company focused on improving availability of donor organs. Dr. Weill has also served on several non-profit boards including the Tulane Medical School, Xavier University of Louisiana, SFJAZZ, the Isidore Newman School, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) Foundation, NextGen Personal Finance, and the Bellevue Literary Review. Dr. Weill’s writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Salon, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, STAT, the Washington Post, The Hill, LitHub, Tablet, The Times of Israel, TODAY.com, and the Los Angeles Times. His previous books include the memoir Exhale: Hope, Healing, and Life in Transplant (2021) and a novel, All That Really Matters (2024). He lives in New Orleans.

AMAZON

Here’s an Op-Ed piece that he just wrote:

 https://forward.com/opinion/791122/bondi-beach-jewish-religion

 Davidweill.com

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