My name is Loolwa Khazzoom. I was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, with an Iraqi father and an American mother. When I was five, my father taught at Stanford University in Palo Alto. The first priority in my parents’ life was giving my sister and me a solid religious education and Jewish identity. Accordingly, we settled in the closest area with a Jewish day school that both my sister and I could attend. Though living in San Francisco gave my father a two-hour commute each day my parents found the sacrifice worthwhile as a Jewish investment.