I am a Jew by birth and almost all of my known ancestors were or are Jewish.

That put aside, my mother was born in Baghdad, Iraq and lived there for some years as a child before her parents and her made aliyah (or immigrated) to Israel. My father, on the other hand, was born in Israel to a mother from Vilnius (a.k.a “The Jerusalem of Lithuania”) who immigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, along with most of her family during the 1930s, and to a father who was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, and who escaped from the Nazis during World War II through the USSR, and Persia/Iran.

As such, I look (see photo) like a kind of a Iraqi/Persian version of my father, who looks East European.

A conversation I took part in the evening at a during a hiking trip, went something like that:

• Girl to Shlomif: "which Jewry do you belong to?"

• Shlomif: "I am half-Polish / half-Iraqi."

• Girl to her male friend with me overhearing it: "You know what is the only thing that is worse than a Polish Jew? A half-Polish / half-Iraqi!"

I found it amusing, and kind-of have taken it to my advantage.