When I was in elementary school, I had recurring nightmares about the Holocaust. A certainty hung around me like heavy, dust-filmed drapes — a conviction that it not only could happen again but would. I couldn’t focus on multiplication problems or long division. I was too busy figuring out where I might hide when they came for me.

This would seem like psychopathology were it not for several factors.

My dad, a history buff fascinated by my mother’s Eastern European Jewish ancestry, had been overzealous in educating me about the Holocaust. I visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to Holocaust victims, as a 7-year-old. I knew about the yellow stars, broken glass, the children torn screaming from their mothers.

I was not raised Jewish, but as an evangelical Christian. My mom converted to Christianity when she was 16; my dad, a Catholic, became a Baptist in his early 20s and eventually a Baptist pastor.

Still, it was important to my father that I knew I was Jewish; he spent his lunch hours at the Brooklyn Public Library learning Yiddish folk songs, which he taught me to sing. He taught me to say the Shema — the prayer that’s at the center of Jewish daily worship — in Hebrew. All highly unusual for an evangelical child, I need hardly say.