Nora Murad: Hello. My name is Nora Lester Murad, and all my three names are important. Nora is a combination of my grandfather and my grandmother's name, Nathan and Dora. They were going to call me Laura, but another member of the family had a baby before I was born and named her Laura, so they called me Nora. My middle name is Lester. Lester's important because it's the name I grew up with, but it's not my family's original name. My father grew up with the name Lashinsky, and when he was about 14 years old, his father officially and legally changed his name to Lester. I heard the story that it started when my aunt changed her name because she was unable to find a job with the very Jewish sounding Fanny Lashinsky, so she became Francis Lester and then everybody followed up with her on that.

My last name is Murad, and it's actually my married name, not my name at all, and I didn't use Murad until many, many years after I was married. The reason is that my oldest daughter, the oldest of three, was about five when 9/11 happened, and there was a lot of anti-Arab racism in the air. At one point she said to me, "Mommy, why did you make me be Arab when you don't have to be?" And that broke my heart and started me down a long, many decade road of Palestinian activism. When she said that to me, I put her in the car, we went to the social security office and I added Murad onto my name so that she knew that I am just like her and that we are members of the same family and the same community.

I use all three names, Nora Lester Murad, because if I didn't use Lester, people might think I was pretending to be Palestinian. And since I write about Palestine and I work on Palestinian issues a lot, that would be an understandable assumption. But I don't want to misrepresent myself. So I use all three names. Nora Lester Murad.