Svetlana, 41, emigrated from Russia to the United States and has been living here for 15 years. She explains how discrimination in Russia drove her to migrate to the United States:
Life in Russia was pretty difficult, especially for me because I’m Jewish and in Russia Jewish people were treated with a lot of animosity and they were discriminated against almost everywhere they went. […] My father even had to change our family’s name from X to Y to make it sound more Russian than Jewish so that my sister and I wouldn’t be made fun of in school. […] Getting into college in Russia wasn’t easy at all, once again especially because we were Jewish. Most Jewish people never got into any top universities or any good school… no matter how good their grades were, no matter how much they were qualified. I didn’t even bother applying to the university that I really wanted to go to because I knew that there was no chance that I would get in just because I’m Jewish.”
