When I was in fifth grade, my great-aunt took me to an Indian jewelry store in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood and bought me a necklace with a Jewish star pendant.
It had only been three years since we immigrated from what’s now the former Soviet Union, where religious expression was often persecuted. Nobody there would have worn such a necklace. And even in the relatively Jewish part of Chicago where we were living in the 1990s, such expressions were rare. People may have owned jewelry with Stars of David, but they kept the symbols discreetly tucked away.
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