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Tell Me I Belong: A Journey Across Faiths and Generations
A memoir by a renowned transplant doctor who grew up without religion, and then through a series of events, began searching for his own identity.
David Weill grew up in New Orleans the only son of a world-famous Jewish pulmonologist and a Southern Baptist mother. Religion was never discussed in his home, and as a young child, Weill always felt something was amiss—that he never quite fit in with either his Christian or Jewish friends. These feelings stayed with him even as he became the head of heart and lung transplant at Stanford University, which lead to two journeys of first, converting to Catholicism, and then embarking on an intense search for his Jewish roots after he discovered his mother had converted.
The author takes the reader on his journey—hiring investigators in Berlin, who found his grandfather’s records of his time imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp; a heart-wrenching trip to Berlin to find his father’s first home—and ultimately does the internal work to define himself.
David Weill grew up in New Orleans the only son of a world-famous Jewish pulmonologist and a Southern Baptist mother. Religion was never discussed in his home, and as a young child, Weill always felt something was amiss—that he never quite fit in with either his Christian or Jewish friends. These feelings stayed with him even as he became the head of heart and lung transplant at Stanford University, which lead to two journeys of first, converting to Catholicism, and then embarking on an intense search for his Jewish roots after he discovered his mother had converted.
The author takes the reader on his journey—hiring investigators in Berlin, who found his grandfather’s records of his time imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp; a heart-wrenching trip to Berlin to find his father’s first home—and ultimately does the internal work to define himself.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published December 9, 2025
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December 11, 2025
David Weill is the former Director of the Center for Advanced Lung Disease and Lung and Heart-Lung Transplant Program at Stanford University Medical Center. In 2016, burned out from gruelling work as a transplant surgeon and finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the deaths of his patients, he left clinical practice. He is now both a writer and the Principal of the Weill Consulting Group (in his hometown of New Orleans) which focuses on improving the delivery of pulmonary, ICU, and transplant care.
In the opening pages of his second memoir, Weill observes that growing up as the son of an agnostic Holocaust survivor and a Baptist mother from Selma, Alabama, he did not fit in with either the well-established Jewish community or the aristocratic gentile crowd in New Orleans. He had an identity problem. Humans, he says, like to identify themselves as members of a group, whether it be one based on shared ancestry, culture, and language or a common occupation or interest. For many years, Weill’s identity was based on his being a surgeon—that is, until the insecurity masked by “transplant doctor bravado” could no longer be denied. His beloved father had died and Weill was also experiencing a professional crisis.
In childhood, the author and his two older sisters met individually with their parents who asked them whether they wanted to keep going to synagogue regularly. This was puzzling to the boy, as the family had never gone to synagogue, regularly or irregularly. The children declined religious involvement, and neither Judaism nor Christianity was practised in the home.
As an adult who’d long admired and even envied his Catholic wife’s faith—in which his daughters were also grounded—Weill underwent a year of formal training, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, to become a Catholic himself. He admits that he was interested in exploring the controversies in which the Church had been embroiled—not the least of which was the clerical sexual abuse of children—but these were not mentioned, never mind discussed, during the classes. Overall, I found Weill’s treatment of his Catholic initiation superficial and unsatisfactory. There is no description of his internal intellectual, emotional, or spiritual processing of the information he received. Not having read his first memoir, I don’t know if it was addressed there.
Weill states that although Catholicism helped him in a crunch, it ultimately did not do the trick. He consequently embarked on an intensive quest to learn more about his parents’, and particularly his secular German Jewish father’s, family histories. He read, had a number of his dad’s personal documents translated from German into English, and, most importantly, he travelled: to New York, Selma (Alabama), Berlin, Buchenwald, and his paternal ancestral town, Kippenheim, in southwest Germany. The Weills had lived there from 1390 until 1939, when Nazism changed everything, wiping out most members of the prominent family. He discovered that the German Jewish- American composer Kurt Weill likely used his considerable influence to arrange for his cousin—David Weill’s grandfather, a Buchenwald survivor—and his family to come to America.
Most of Tell Me I Belong concerns Weill’s uncovering his paternal ancestry, which makes for absorbing reading. Along the way, the author also addresses a couple of other interesting topics. For one thing, he talks about some surprising research which reveals that doctors as a group are quite religious. He cites a 2005 survey of two thousand physicians by the University of Chicago, which revealed that “76 percent of doctors believed in God and 59 percent believed in some sort of afterlife. The survey found that 90 percent of doctors in the United States attended religious services at least occasionally, compared to 81 percent of adults in the general population. Fifty-five percent of doctors said their religious beliefs influenced how they practice medicine.”
Another matter Weill considers is inherited trauma, a concept I’m familiar with but sceptical about, as I’m unacquainted with the scientific evidence on which it is based. Weill explains that it is defined as generational “‘unresolved trauma and shame inherited from one’s parents through epigenetic inheritance.’ It is essentially ‘family trauma’ because we inherit it from our parents, just as surely as we inherit things like eye color certainly, but also mannerisms that are not likely to be genetically determined but rather ‘epigenetic,’ or circumstantial inheritance.” He speculates that his perfectionism and his mysterious chronic pain syndrome may be due to inherited trauma.
By the end of the book it is evident that Weill has found his tribe, though it’s not entirely clear how this affects him on a daily basis, practically or psychologically. Does he now attend synagogue regularly? Does he continue to go to church with his wife? He doesn’t say.
Based on what he writes about his response to Hamas’s massacre of 1200 Jews in October 2023, Weill’s having become a member of a tribe has come at a certain cost. The price, as I see it, is the darker side of tribalism—what Merriam-Webster defines as “having or showing strong in-group loyalty and often a negative view of outsiders.” Weill characterizes October 7, 2023 as “an assault on my people, again, on my father and grandfather, on me.”
I acknowledge the intense distress and rage the author felt in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s brutal slaughter of innocents and even in his reaction to a hostile young anti-Israel protestor he met on the Tulane University campus a month or so after the attack. The protestor captured Weill’s attention as he yelled “From the river to the sea [Palestine will be free].” As Laurie Kellman observes in her November 2023 Associated Press article: “Palestinian activists” state that the slogan is “a call for peace and equality after 75 years of Israeli statehood and decades-long, open-ended Israeli military rule over millions of Palestinians,” while “Jews hear a clear demand for Israel’s destruction.” Weill was appalled that the protestor’s call for an end to Israel “for the crime of defending itself” and the young man’s claim that “October 7 was a justified attack, given the policies of the Israeli government toward the Palestinians”—what the author sees as “the rationalization of terror”—should be considered “acceptable free speech in 2024.”
The author also expresses distress about the reaction of university communities around the US: “The lack of moral compass was astonishing, the unwillingness or inability to make a clear-eyed assessment of what had just happened astounding,” he writes. “The cognitive dissonance rampant in certain sectors of academia and the contradictions and moral equivalency was startling—and all this before one IDF plane was in the air, before one brigade of ground troops was deployed.” It should be noted that Weill is not accurate here. Israel’s military response to the massacre was swift. The IDF was bombing Gaza before the end of the day on the 7th. Small-scale ground operations started less than a week later, on October 13 , and a full-scale invasion of Gaza commenced on October 27th.
Although his book concludes in April 2025, Weill appears to have made no reassessment of his initial reaction to the situation in Gaza, one which numerous scholars characterize as genocide but which few Holocaust historians are willing to do. As I was completing this book, I recalled Omer Bartov’s July 15, 2025 guest essay for the New York Times, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” In it, Bartov, who is considered one of the world’s leading experts on genocide, wrote that having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of his life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and an officer, and spent most of his career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, he reached the painful but “inescapable conclusion . . . that Israel . . . [was] committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
“Mr. Netanyahu,” Bartov stated, “had urged his citizens to remember ‘what Amalek did to you,’ a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to ‘kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings’ of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting ‘human animals’ and, later, called for ‘total annihilation.’ Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on X that Israel’s task must be ‘erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.’ Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.”
David Weill is rightly concerned about the trauma Hans, his beloved father, endured in childhood. Hans witnessed his father, the author’s grandfather, dragged away from the family home to be taken to Buchenwald. Would the author, evidently a empathetic person, not also be concerned by what Bartov describes as “an entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition [who] will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives” and the “untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons [who] have had little access to hospital care”? Being critical of or opposed to the Israeli government’s actions is not equivalent to anti-Semitism. Having been victims of a terrible genocide does not entitle a nation to cause others to suffer on the scale that the Palestinians have. Over 70,000 have been killed.
I valued and learned from David Weill’s book and I appreciate the privilege of having early access to a copy. I think it is wonderful that he has reconnected with his heritage and feels he has finally come home. Regarding the structure of the book itself: I do not think that his dividing the memoir into four sections was necessary. A chronological telling would’ve been more effective, eliminating some unnecessary repetition. Furthermore, I wished for a deeper more considered psychological processing of the author’s spiritual journey. Most of all, however, I would have liked to see an acknowledgement that there are elements to being a member of a tribe that can potentially be toxic.
In the opening pages of his second memoir, Weill observes that growing up as the son of an agnostic Holocaust survivor and a Baptist mother from Selma, Alabama, he did not fit in with either the well-established Jewish community or the aristocratic gentile crowd in New Orleans. He had an identity problem. Humans, he says, like to identify themselves as members of a group, whether it be one based on shared ancestry, culture, and language or a common occupation or interest. For many years, Weill’s identity was based on his being a surgeon—that is, until the insecurity masked by “transplant doctor bravado” could no longer be denied. His beloved father had died and Weill was also experiencing a professional crisis.
In childhood, the author and his two older sisters met individually with their parents who asked them whether they wanted to keep going to synagogue regularly. This was puzzling to the boy, as the family had never gone to synagogue, regularly or irregularly. The children declined religious involvement, and neither Judaism nor Christianity was practised in the home.
As an adult who’d long admired and even envied his Catholic wife’s faith—in which his daughters were also grounded—Weill underwent a year of formal training, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, to become a Catholic himself. He admits that he was interested in exploring the controversies in which the Church had been embroiled—not the least of which was the clerical sexual abuse of children—but these were not mentioned, never mind discussed, during the classes. Overall, I found Weill’s treatment of his Catholic initiation superficial and unsatisfactory. There is no description of his internal intellectual, emotional, or spiritual processing of the information he received. Not having read his first memoir, I don’t know if it was addressed there.
Weill states that although Catholicism helped him in a crunch, it ultimately did not do the trick. He consequently embarked on an intensive quest to learn more about his parents’, and particularly his secular German Jewish father’s, family histories. He read, had a number of his dad’s personal documents translated from German into English, and, most importantly, he travelled: to New York, Selma (Alabama), Berlin, Buchenwald, and his paternal ancestral town, Kippenheim, in southwest Germany. The Weills had lived there from 1390 until 1939, when Nazism changed everything, wiping out most members of the prominent family. He discovered that the German Jewish- American composer Kurt Weill likely used his considerable influence to arrange for his cousin—David Weill’s grandfather, a Buchenwald survivor—and his family to come to America.
Most of Tell Me I Belong concerns Weill’s uncovering his paternal ancestry, which makes for absorbing reading. Along the way, the author also addresses a couple of other interesting topics. For one thing, he talks about some surprising research which reveals that doctors as a group are quite religious. He cites a 2005 survey of two thousand physicians by the University of Chicago, which revealed that “76 percent of doctors believed in God and 59 percent believed in some sort of afterlife. The survey found that 90 percent of doctors in the United States attended religious services at least occasionally, compared to 81 percent of adults in the general population. Fifty-five percent of doctors said their religious beliefs influenced how they practice medicine.”
Another matter Weill considers is inherited trauma, a concept I’m familiar with but sceptical about, as I’m unacquainted with the scientific evidence on which it is based. Weill explains that it is defined as generational “‘unresolved trauma and shame inherited from one’s parents through epigenetic inheritance.’ It is essentially ‘family trauma’ because we inherit it from our parents, just as surely as we inherit things like eye color certainly, but also mannerisms that are not likely to be genetically determined but rather ‘epigenetic,’ or circumstantial inheritance.” He speculates that his perfectionism and his mysterious chronic pain syndrome may be due to inherited trauma.
By the end of the book it is evident that Weill has found his tribe, though it’s not entirely clear how this affects him on a daily basis, practically or psychologically. Does he now attend synagogue regularly? Does he continue to go to church with his wife? He doesn’t say.
Based on what he writes about his response to Hamas’s massacre of 1200 Jews in October 2023, Weill’s having become a member of a tribe has come at a certain cost. The price, as I see it, is the darker side of tribalism—what Merriam-Webster defines as “having or showing strong in-group loyalty and often a negative view of outsiders.” Weill characterizes October 7, 2023 as “an assault on my people, again, on my father and grandfather, on me.”
I acknowledge the intense distress and rage the author felt in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s brutal slaughter of innocents and even in his reaction to a hostile young anti-Israel protestor he met on the Tulane University campus a month or so after the attack. The protestor captured Weill’s attention as he yelled “From the river to the sea [Palestine will be free].” As Laurie Kellman observes in her November 2023 Associated Press article: “Palestinian activists” state that the slogan is “a call for peace and equality after 75 years of Israeli statehood and decades-long, open-ended Israeli military rule over millions of Palestinians,” while “Jews hear a clear demand for Israel’s destruction.” Weill was appalled that the protestor’s call for an end to Israel “for the crime of defending itself” and the young man’s claim that “October 7 was a justified attack, given the policies of the Israeli government toward the Palestinians”—what the author sees as “the rationalization of terror”—should be considered “acceptable free speech in 2024.”
The author also expresses distress about the reaction of university communities around the US: “The lack of moral compass was astonishing, the unwillingness or inability to make a clear-eyed assessment of what had just happened astounding,” he writes. “The cognitive dissonance rampant in certain sectors of academia and the contradictions and moral equivalency was startling—and all this before one IDF plane was in the air, before one brigade of ground troops was deployed.” It should be noted that Weill is not accurate here. Israel’s military response to the massacre was swift. The IDF was bombing Gaza before the end of the day on the 7th. Small-scale ground operations started less than a week later, on October 13 , and a full-scale invasion of Gaza commenced on October 27th.
Although his book concludes in April 2025, Weill appears to have made no reassessment of his initial reaction to the situation in Gaza, one which numerous scholars characterize as genocide but which few Holocaust historians are willing to do. As I was completing this book, I recalled Omer Bartov’s July 15, 2025 guest essay for the New York Times, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” In it, Bartov, who is considered one of the world’s leading experts on genocide, wrote that having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of his life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and an officer, and spent most of his career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, he reached the painful but “inescapable conclusion . . . that Israel . . . [was] committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
“Mr. Netanyahu,” Bartov stated, “had urged his citizens to remember ‘what Amalek did to you,’ a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to ‘kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings’ of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting ‘human animals’ and, later, called for ‘total annihilation.’ Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on X that Israel’s task must be ‘erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.’ Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.”
David Weill is rightly concerned about the trauma Hans, his beloved father, endured in childhood. Hans witnessed his father, the author’s grandfather, dragged away from the family home to be taken to Buchenwald. Would the author, evidently a empathetic person, not also be concerned by what Bartov describes as “an entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition [who] will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives” and the “untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons [who] have had little access to hospital care”? Being critical of or opposed to the Israeli government’s actions is not equivalent to anti-Semitism. Having been victims of a terrible genocide does not entitle a nation to cause others to suffer on the scale that the Palestinians have. Over 70,000 have been killed.
I valued and learned from David Weill’s book and I appreciate the privilege of having early access to a copy. I think it is wonderful that he has reconnected with his heritage and feels he has finally come home. Regarding the structure of the book itself: I do not think that his dividing the memoir into four sections was necessary. A chronological telling would’ve been more effective, eliminating some unnecessary repetition. Furthermore, I wished for a deeper more considered psychological processing of the author’s spiritual journey. Most of all, however, I would have liked to see an acknowledgement that there are elements to being a member of a tribe that can potentially be toxic.
November 15, 2025
This was an interesting story, and I appreciated reading it. I found the author's search for identity and belonging really fascinating. I do have a few differences of opinion with the author on Gaza, small caveat, but I do wonder if his take has changed any in the past year or so.
January 28, 2026
4.5 stars
Very intersting book, the author is discovering his roots.
Very intersting book, the author is discovering his roots.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews