JTA — It feels strangely appropriate that our family’s calendar has us celebrating July 4th in Israel and Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, in the United States.

Like many American Jews, we live in a liminal space, experiencing a push and pull between our at-homeness here and our at-homeness there. This feeling of being in-between is even more acute after having spent last year living in Jerusalem, leaving us with the persistent challenge of knowing what home is: Is home where you can seamlessly express yourself in your native tongue, or is home where you belong to the majority culture? Is home where you vote and pay taxes, or is it where you imagine your family’s story originating and unfolding many generations ago?

As our family returned from a year in Israel last fall and transitioned from our Israeli lives — a constant negotiation of sirens, time zones, and school in Hebrew — back to our American Jewish lives — I worried that what we were bequeathing to our children a sense not of two homes but of no homes. The blessing of being comfortably local in not one but two places — something our ancestors could never have fathomed — comes with the unsettling sense that one does not fully belong to either.

Yet, I recognize that this in-betweenness and nowhereness comes with an obligation to serve as a bridge, particularly when both homes are beset by global conflict, precariousness and threats to their founding visions. For different reasons and in different ways, America and Israel have served as fertile places for Jews and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)