In this essay I recount my engagement with my father's experience of the Holocaust and its impact on my professional career and way of thinking about the world. The voices of survivors like my father are no longer silenced and marginalized as they once were, but the legacy of the trauma they endured remains in dispute. As such, I consider questions of Jewish identity and continuity in the postwar era as well as controversies about Israel's role in the Middle East, especially as the latter is a source of contention within the political left. I conclude with some observations about particularistic and universalistic identities that mark the path toward expanded human liberation.
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