Walking the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem while visiting my Israeli relatives, I feel my full Jewish self. It is a sensation denied me in my Brooklyn neighborhood, where I am acutely aware of my religious heritage being but one piece of a vast multicultural puzzle. Passing old Arab homes in Jerusalem, or driving through a West Bank checkpoint, I acknowledge the tension of possessing a sensibility formed around American notions of liberty, while identifying with a state that imposes a brutal occupation. I long justified my emotional connection to Israel by seeing it as a nation evolving towards...