Larisa Alexandrovna

Larisa Alexandrovna (born 1971 in Odessa, Ukraine) is a journalist, essayist, and poet. She has served as the Managing Editor of Investigative News of The Raw Story for the last three years, and contributes opinion and columns to online publications such as Alternet. She is also an American blogger for the Huffington Post and for her own journalism blog, . Alexandrovna has had her work referenced in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Newsweek among others.

Background

Alexandrovna was born in the Soviet Union to Jewish parents Aleksander Yurovich, a physicist, and Klavdia Borisovna, an accountant. In the Soviet Union, Jews were discriminated by the state. She has written of her childhood that even as a child, she was able to understand that her family was treated differently:

<blockquote>"What I was given was not what one would call edible or even in a class of food-like products. Again I did not tell my parents, because again I feared something terrible would happen should they react. I was six and I knew this. But my continued weight loss had my mother so concerned that she began selling off the little she had in jewelry in order to bribe my school officials to feed me, with food, the same food, served the same way, as the other children.

Most Americans, especially white Americans, would never understand this and have no clue what racism, anti-semitism, and hate are and what damage real hate can do. They faint in public when someone makes a slur but say nothing...
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