An American JewIn our big city located on a big spinning ball, inside a vast galaxy and an even bigger universe. We sometimes tend to throw ourselves into the unknown by embracing and fearing life on other planets, when we cannot accept life or learn not to fear life on our own planet. As a society, we formed our own barriers when the ones imposed on us were removed. We rarely see mixed neighborhoods outside of big cities. Even in our own district, we can see it; for example, Borough Park is predominantly religious Jews, the area surrounding Brooklyn College is predominantly black, and Gerritsen Beach is predominantly Italian. When someone who does not belong to a community invades that community, that community will then fear and reject the invaders. The community is like the indigenous people of an island: when the island receives its first visitor from outside, the indigenous people are afraid of the visitor and fear the change he might bring. My family was the first Russian family to move to an entirely Italian neighborhood. , I was told to go back to where I came from "damn rooskies", the kids were yelling and taunting my sisters and myself. They were yelling at us to go back to Russia even though we had never been there. But soon I made friends with a local girl who accepted me for myself, not because I was Russian, but because I was Diana. My parents didn't want me to get involved with the wrong kids and they also feared my friendship with people from different backgrounds. But our families started talking, and then we went to each other's houses for dinner, and soon we were having block parties and backyard barbecues. We were no longer Russian, and they were not Italians whom we had met somewhere in the middle. . My mom now makes an amazing lasagna and Laura's mom (the girl I became friends with) makes a great Chicken Kiev. We didn't belong to any social class, our neighborhood was no longer Italian and it didn't become Russian, it just was. It was just a neighborhood, no classification, just a middle class neighborhood, it was gray. Gray is that color between black and white, it's not black, and it's not white, it's right in the middle. If you think about it, there are a lot of colors like that; take pink for example it's a mix between red and white, it's not red and it's not white, it's just in the middle it's just pink.