I was six when the Six-Day War began and ended, and I don't have any firsthand memories of either the news coverage or my family's reactions. I do have a memory of a few years later, this one of a poster that hung in my aunt's house and pictured "SuperJew," a man emerging from a phone booth wearing a superhero's costume emblazoned with a large letter "shin."

That's a pretty feeble story, compared to those told by now aging activists who remember racing over to Israel to volunteer on kibbutzim, or older friends who sat glued to their television sets or radios as Abba Eban announced to the United Nations that "a deep and universal sense of satisfaction and relief has accompanied the news of Israel's gallant and successful resistance."

The gap between their memories and mine is often regarded as a generational dividing line, between those who understood the dangers facing Israel and can thus appreciate the miracle of its victory, and those who take Israel's military superiority for granted. SuperJew suggests another version of this divide, between those who grew up under the shadow of anti-Semitism and their own outsider ambivalence, and those who grew up in the self-confident 1970s, when Jewish self-doubt was replaced with Jewish pride.

The idea that Jews who missed out on some historical milestone also missed out on an essential element of identity building has become a cliche within Jewish organizational life. No Jewish conference passes without a speaker lamenting that a younger generation of Jews has no recollection of the Six-Day War, or Munich, or the Yom Kippur War, or Entebbe, or the (first) Lebanon War. The statement is usually voiced in terms of a challenge, the idea that the work of educators or fund-raisers or membership chairpeople is made more difficult as a result of how much these youngsters don't know.

I don't know whether it is a curse or blessing, but it is certainly a fact that Jewish history doesn't know when to quit. Just when we get a foundational, defining story, history throws another one at us, sometimes confirming, sometimes contradicting the one that came before. Holocaust is followed by Israel's independence, the Six-Day War by the Munich massacre and the rise of Palestinian terrorism. The event that was supposed to say who we are turns out to be the event that tells us what we used to be. From a chain of calamity we become Calamity Jane, with each episode featuring a moment of peril followed by a last-minute rescue (or, if you're so inclined, each last-minute rescue followed by the next moment of peril).

The genius of the Jewish calendar is that it canonizes which stories are supposed to mean the most to us and places them in a past so distant that no one generation can claim a stronger attachment to a particular event. So we are all instructed to remember the Exodus as if we were participants in it. On Tisha B'Av we are all mourners, fasting and keening. On Purim, we mock the evil courtier who tried to kill us — emphasis on "us."

Commemorations of recent historical events have been added to the calendar, but there is always something improvisational and vaguely unsatisfying about the rituals of Yom Hashoa and Yom Ha'atzmaut. We don't have the distance from these recent events, and the gap between eyewitnesses and subsequent generations means we can't agree on how best to mark them. Some have even suggested that the miracle of Israel's rebirth and the reunification of Jerusalem should allow us to do away with Tisha B'Av — why mourn for a city that is back in Jewish hands? Tradition says wait a minute — history is a process, and at least we can all agree that this ancient disaster made us who we are today. You can't discuss a recent historical event at an academic seminar and then expect it to inspire a uniform and lasting liturgy.

I accept the criticism (what choice do I have?) that I am too young to appreciate the Six-Day War. I try to remind myself that the way I grew up — free from anti-Semitism, with no limits on how or whether I would practice as a Jew — is, if not a historical anomaly, at least the result of a particular set of historical circumstances. Those circumstances would lead some to draw very different lessons from recent Jewish history — some reveling, others recoiling, at the image of the "SuperJew." The Forward's Ami Eden has written how two contemporaries — Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg and Rabbi Meir Kahane — adapted the lessons of the Holocaust to two wildly divergent theologies. While Greenberg "insisted that living in the Holocaust's shadow obligated the Jewish people to apply a heightened moral calculus when exercising Israeli military force," writes Eden, Kahane "argued that the annihilation of European Jewry justified the unbridled use of this newfound power."

I know I am shaped by the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the expansion of Jewish settlements, the Oslo peace process, and the tragic rejectionism of the Palestinian nationalists and the Islamists who seek to displace or co-opt them. As a result, I want to wind the clock back to the seventh day, only this time Israel would heed the warnings of then Justice Minister Yaakov Shapira, who spelled out with uncanny prescience the consequences of a long-term occupation of the West Bank.

Would I believe differently if I were a little bit older? Would I be who I am were I a decade younger? That's the Jewish dilemma — we're the People of the Book, but the Book keeps being written.