The Australia I almost lived in - and the Jewish life I chose

A crossroads in my life almost took me to Sydney. As a Jew today, I’m grateful it remains only a distant possibility.

At some point in 2016, I renamed our family WhatsApp group.

It was a small, almost throwaway act. It was one of those funny changes you make without announcing it, although everyone knew what it was referring to. The four of us - my immediate family members - had been called “Spiros”.

A crossroads in my life almost took me to Sydney. Photo generated with AI.

I changed it to “SpirOz.” A reference to Australia and what I thought would be our next adventure.

I wasn’t even fully committed to going, although I had applied and been accepted on a long-term travel visa. Sydney (specifically, the University of Sydney) had lodged itself in my imagination ever since we had visited the country for the first time six years earlier.

And I remember exactly where I was when I first had the idea to move there.

It was New Year’s Eve in 2010, and I was on Bondi Beach. It was a stop in our travels after we had stayed in the city for a holiday. In that time, we took a walk over the Sydney Harbor Bridge and saw a show in the Sydney Opera House.

The rendition of Time to Say Goodbye was the first time a live performance moved me to tears. It was pure beauty that had taken over me. I had always wanted to travel to Australia (what young boy doesn’t want to travel as far across the world as possible?), but that trip had solidified it in my heart and mind: Sydney was the place I wanted to be.

On that very trip, I started looking at academic courses right away. I knew it wasn’t in my destiny to complete my Bachelor’s there, but maybe a Master’s? Perhaps further education would provide a legal path to moving to a new country and settling along its shores.

Of course, it didn’t go that way - I never returned to Australia. Instead, I ended up studying in New York for three years, earning my MFA from 2013 to 2016.

My time there gave me everything I was looking for in what many would describe as its last “golden era,” before a decline accelerated by Covid.

In some ways, it was the freest time of my life. I was surrounded by creativity, ambition, and proximity to ideas and institutions that mattered to me at the time. I learned how to think, argue, write, and explore. I took advantage of my accent. I let the city that never slept take me to where it wanted me to go. It guided me toward opportunity and many times I followed.

I never thought about Australia when I was drinking cocktails in rooftop bars across midtown Manhattan. Nor did I miss the beach when I roamed the galleries, the museums, or the parks across the city.

I’m grateful for that period of my life, and I left just before my visa expired, when my legal stay came to an end. It taught me how to live fully in a place that was never meant to keep me, but it didn’t make my departure any less painful.

I returned to London in the summer of 2016, at a time when the broader world seemed to be fracturing. Brexit had just won in the UK. Trump’s campaign was raising tensions across America. Every disagreement at dinner tables was interpreted as some sort of moral failing.

I still have a clear memory of some of my oldest and closest childhood friends calling me every “phobe” under the sun because I had returned from the States and attempted to explain his appeal, and Brexit’s potential, to their Europe-inclined minds. To them, I had become a foreigner - and to me, they became unfamiliar.

So SpirOz was born.

Months went by, and I began to think about my potential time in Australia to escape the chaos that the West was quickly becoming. But despite a newly approved visa, I no longer had the safety net of a university to fall into. I would also be restricted to a one-year stay with the opportunity to renew.

I knew that feeling from New York. The idea of entering a new game with a familiar possibility to end prematurely made me feel uneasy. I had already been forced to return home once, and the risk of doing it again felt too painful to repeat.

For that reason, it was during this moment, in 2017, that Israel began to pull at me.

Not because it seemed calm or unified. It wasn’t. But because it felt collective. Like a place where disagreements were internal, not existential. Where arguments happened within a shared feeling of belonging and an assumption that you were part of the story (even when you disagreed about how it should unfold). You could shout and scream in someone’s home, but still be expected to stay for dinner afterwards.

Before I eventually moved, I changed our WhatsApp group name again.

This time, to “Spiro’im”. A Hebrew plural.

I’m not here to romanticize Israel. Anyone who lives here knows how loud, fractured, and combustible it can be. Political divisions are real. Cultural rifts run deep. Today, it is still reeling from the deep trauma of the war, felt across every age and sector in society.

But there’s a difference between division within a society and division about your legitimacy. And there is no replacement for being safe as a Jewish person today.

What’s struck me most in the eight years since I moved to Israel is how the places I once imagined as safe or neutral have started to feel increasingly familiar - in the wrong way.

Sydney, the future I never lived, now appears in headlines related to terrorism at Jewish events. The tragedy at Bondi Beach, where Jewish people were murdered while celebrating their religion, makes me realize how lucky I am to still place my Channukiah in my window.

New York, the city that shaped me as a student, has elected a mayor who sympathizes with the perpetrators of the October 7 attack. Its college campuses now challenge where Jewish presence is tolerated, if at all.

London now has a rising number of Jews who question whether they have a future there at all.

These days, my only real connection to “Oz” is a different one entirely. We chose it as our son’s Hebrew name: Not as a reference to Australia, but after Nir Oz, one of the communities attacked by Hamas, as a way to honor the memory of those lost that tragic day.

The irony is not lost on me: I left the West in part to escape polarization, only to arrive in one of the most polarized societies on earth. But the nature of the polarization is different. It’s loud, yes, but it’s internal. It’s safe.

I didn’t end up studying in Sydney. I didn’t stay in New York. I ended up in a place that demands a lot from you but doesn’t ask you to justify your existence or fear for your life based on your religion.

For those wondering, the WhatsApp group still exists, and the name has remained the same. I am still here: now with a wife, a son, a circle of friends, and an almost-decade-long career reporting on Israeli high-tech - one of the strongest ecosystems in the world.

There is nowhere else I would rather be.