" To me, being Jewish was the shape of my nose, the color of my eyes and my hair, and the notation in my documents, all of which kept me from being like other people. For my parents, it was the source of their greatest fear - that their children would be kept from becoming who they could be and, more immediately and more to the point, that their children would get hurt. My parents knew precisely what they feared: both of them had been blindsided by college admissions committees that had rejected them for being Jewish. For both of them, Jewish was what they were and what they did not want to be. "

― Masha Gessen , Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region