This Thanksgiving, I’m thinking about Passover — and how the way we choose to remember the past can shape the present and the future.

I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, a town known for its leftist politics. But those commitments belie the troubling legacy of its namesake, Lord Jeffrey Amherst. In the postscript to a 1763 letter, Amherst notoriously advocated for biological warfare against the indigenous population in North America, encouraging a military colleague to use smallpox-contaminated blankets “to extirpate this execrable race.” That legacy casts a long shadow, especially around Thanksgiving.

I love my hometown, and my home state of Massachusetts, the place where the early pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock sought to build their “shining city on a hill.” I love my country, and the ideals toward which it strives. But I struggle to know how to love these things while also confronting the injustices woven into their founding. At Thanksgiving, we often tell two stories about our past, each of which offers a different way of reconciling history and understanding our national identity.

The first is a familiar and comforting story, the one many of us learned in school: a tale of friendship and generosity between the white European settlers and the Native peoples of America. This story is reenacted in the Thanksgiving feast, which celebrates the abundance of the harvest alongside an abundance of goodwill.

The second tale is darker. It depicts a world of tribalism, exploitation and racial violence. In this story, there wasn’t enough land for everyone; outsiders were........

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