Dear Jews,

What a messy, complicated, glorious, tough, lovely thing it is to be Jewish. Family dinners, orthodontia, summer camps, a shared sense of history, destiny, and endurance amidst impossible odds. So much of it’s just swell. Then there’s the other stuff: exile, persecution, pogroms, genocide, the many horrors that are as much a part of our narrative as parting waters, burning bushes, and coats of many colors.