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I grew up as a secular Jew in a sheltered corner of Suffolk County, Long Island where everyone I knew was either Jewish or Catholic, and almost everyone was white.  Unlike most Jewish families on Long Island, my family did not belong to a synagogue.  My parents were secular – Jewish by culture and identity, but not religious.  We attended a Jewish cultural school on Saturdays, where we studied Yiddish, music, bible studies, and current events.  Our education explored the rich history and traditions of our ancestors. One of my teachers, Ruth Minsky Sender, was a Holocaust survivor from Lodz, Poland.  As a young teenager, she survived imprisonment in Auschwitz because her poetry uplifted the spirits of the other women in her barracks.  In her soft Polish accent, she explained to us the horrific circumstances, sharing her experiences in the ghetto and the concentration camp, and delicately answering our questions.  This was not the cold facts of a history book but rather the very

I grew up in a moderate, Muslim-American family—first generation American on my dad’s side, second generation on my mom’s. Both of my parents hoped that raising their three daughters in the U.S. would bring us a comfortable life, and, by the grace of God, we have a roof over our heads, food on the table, money for college, and we even go on the occasional vacation. However, September 11, 2001 drastically changed my family’s sense of comfort in the U.S. and altered the way we looked at the world. After 9/11, my family wasn’t comfortable identifying openly as Muslim and operated by one simple rule: culture is for the world, religion is for the home. Even though I felt like an outcast as one of the only brown kids in school, I was encouraged by my parents to embrace my Indian/Pakistani heritage. However, I was also told to always conceal my religious beliefs from the public. It never made sense to me, even as early as a 6-year-old. Why could Christian kids freely celebrate