Tell Me I Belong: Family, Faith, and My Search for Identity

In this heart-wrenching memoir by a renowned transplant doctor who grew up without religion, a journey of self-discovery as he uncovers his family’s past.

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 discovery: 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 the Buchenwald 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 is the former director of the Center for Advanced Lung Disease and Lung and Heart-Lung Transplant Program at Stanford University Medical Center. He is currently the principal of the Weill Consulting Group, which focuses on improving the delivery of pulmonary, ICU, and transplant care. Dr. Weill’s writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Salon, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, STAT, the Washington Post, The Hill, and the Los Angeles Times. He also has been interviewed on Fox News and CNN and by the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Wall Street Journal. His first memoir, Exhale: Hope, Healing, and A Life in Transplant, was published in May 2021. His most recent novel, All That Really Matters, published in June of 2024. He lives with his wife and their two daughters in New Orleans.