Aisha Sultan | Post-Dispatch

Columnist and features writer

Daniel Bogard knew he wanted to become a rabbi after he graduated with a religious studies degree from Macalester College in Minnesota.

Bogard, now 42, grew up in the progressive Central Reform Congregation in St. Louis and attended summer day camps at B’nai Amoona, a conservative synagogue, where Israel was woven into his Jewish identity.

“It’s core to the mythology of what it means to be an American Jew, particularly post-Holocaust,” he says. For a generation of Jewish Americans, especially older ones, they grew up learning much more about Israel and the Holocaust than they did about Judaism and the Torah, he said.

He lived on a kibbutz for six months before beginning rabbinical studies in Israel, where he met his wife, who

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