Politics & Power Quote by Janet Suzman

A carpet bag is an old theatrical prop of exile: portable, fraying at the seams, always ready to be grabbed when the room turns hostile. Janet Suzman’s line taps that imagery to describe Jewish identity not as an inherited comfort but as a practiced skill - selfhood packed up, carried, protected. Coming from an actress raised in apartheid South Africa and long alert to how states script belonging, the metaphor lands as both personal and political: identity as luggage because history keeps changing the rules at the border.

Her swipe at “nationality” and “patriotism” isn’t a lofty plea for cosmopolitan purity; it’s suspicion born of pattern recognition. For Jews, nationalism has often arrived not as a warm hearth but as a demand to prove loyalty, to assimilate, to disappear - and when that fails, to be marked as permanent outsiders. The subtext is that patriotic rhetoric is rarely neutral. It’s a costume the majority gets to wear effortlessly, while minorities are asked to audition for it, again and again.

Suzman’s phrasing is careful - “I think perhaps” - the softening that often accompanies criticism of nationalism in polite company, especially from a public figure. But the point is sharp: overinvestment in flags and borders can flatten real, lived identities into paperwork. The “carpet bag” image quietly argues for another kind of belonging, one less dependent on the state’s approval and more resilient than any single nation’s promises.