Politics & Power Quote by Janet Suzman

It’s the offhand “OK, well maybe” that gives the line its bite: Suzman approaches identity the way many modern people actually do, not as a banner but as a reluctant accounting. The phrasing sounds conversational, even sheepish, yet it opens onto a heavy truth about diaspora life: when geography won’t hold you, ancestry starts doing the work.

Her “get back to Judaism” isn’t framed as piety or ritual. It’s an identity move, almost logistical. She’s reaching for Judaism less as theology than as the one durable container left when “place” and “nationality” feel unavailable or unstable. That’s a particularly Jewish predicament historically, but it’s also a late-20th-century cosmopolitan one: migration, exile, colonial histories, and political disappointment make “nation” feel like either a fiction or a demand you can’t honestly meet.

The subtext is a quiet critique of how nationalism expects people to be rooted, legible, and locally loyal. Suzman’s lineage is described as “forebears forever stretching back,” a long temporal corridor replacing the missing map. She doesn’t claim a homeland; she claims a continuity. The repetition of “sense” matters too: identity here is not a fact but a feeling, something you’re supposed to possess. When she says “there’s no sense of place,” she’s naming an absence that isn’t just personal disorientation but inherited condition.

Coming from an actress, it lands with an extra layer: performance versus belonging. If you spend your life inhabiting roles, the question of which “story” is truly yours becomes sharper. Judaism, in her telling, is the story that doesn’t require a passport.