I first traveled to Israel more than 40 years ago, returning ebullient, as if I had just discovered a missing piece of my identity.

With a group of young, Jewish leaders from across the United States, we journeyed from Poland to Israel, from darkness to light, from the deep shadows of the Holocaust to the shining miracle of the Jewish state.

I will never forget the intense sweetness of the first sip of orange juice offered as we arrived in Jerusalem nor the warmth and brightness of the sun.

From darkness to light, indeed.

Later, as I sought to process the intensity of the experience, I wrote how it challenged my perception of who I was, how I perceived myself, a Jew or an American?

It was years before I studied Jewish identity construction, years before I read sociologist Sylvia Barack Fishman’s apt description of dual identity as “negotiating both sides of the hyphen.”

But I became much more aware of the hyphen, and my own self definition, plumbing it further, was I........

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