They Stamped Every Neighborhood But Ours

There is a particular loneliness in being counted only when someone is counting victims, and forgotten every other day of the year. This summer, as the World Cup came to New York, the City handed out a “Neighborhood Passport,” a cheerful civic invitation to wander into the enclaves that make this the greatest immigrant city on earth: to eat in Little Colombia, to pray your curiosity in Little India, to hear the drums of Little Senegal. It is a lovely idea. New York is a city of villages, and the passport was meant to say to each of them: you belong to the whole.

And then you turn the pages, and you notice the shape of the silence.
There is no page for Borough Park, where the streets empty into stillness every Friday afternoon. None for Midwood, none for Williamsburg’s Hasidic heart, none for Crown Heights, none for Brighton Beach, where Soviet Jews rebuilt their lives beside the ocean and speak an English still braided with Russian. The Jews of New York are the oldest continuous immigrant story this city has, more than a million of us, and we did not merit a stamp.

Every neighborhood but ours. It is the sort of omission that a careless bureaucrat might call an oversight. But we have learned, over a very long history, to read the grammar of an oversight, and to ask who tends to be its object.

Consider the record, not the rumor. On his first day in office, Mayor Zohran Mamdani rescinded the executive order adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, and his administration has since confirmed it will adopt no definition at all. Sit with that. The one community in this city that suffers a majority of its religious hate crimes, a fact the Mayor himself concedes, is now to be protected by a City that refuses to say, on paper, what the hatred against it even is. You cannot fight what you will not name. And a government that will not name your suffering has already decided how much your suffering is worth.

Consider his words. When asked, plainly, whether he supports Israel as a Jewish state, the Mayor answered that “any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.” Note the sleight of hand by which the world’s only Jewish state is filed alongside a theocracy, as though the ingathering of a people hunted across every continent were merely a form of sectarian privilege. Consider that he branded the pro-Israel lobby “monsters” trafficking in “dark money,” language that the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, identified as the oldest calumny we know: the shadowy Jew, the hidden hand, the money that moves the world. Swap the AIPAC acronym for the word “Jews,” a Jewish congressman observed, and you have the pamphlet that has followed us out of every country that ever expelled us.

Here is the thread I am asking you to follow, because our enemies have never bothered to hide it. The campaign to strip us of legitimacy in our ancient homeland and the campaign to render us invisible in our adopted one are not two problems. They are one posture, wearing two costumes. The logic that says the Jews alone among the nations have no right to a state of their own is the same logic that says the Jews of New York alone among the peoples have no neighborhood worth celebrating. First they argue you do not belong there. Then they behave as though you do not quite belong here. Disenfranchisement abroad and erasure at home are the same sentence, spoken in two dialects, and the subject of the sentence is always us. We are not naive about how this ends, because we have the world’s longest memory for how it begins.  It begins with the unstamped page. It begins with the official who will not say your name, the definition quietly repealed, the map on which your street has gone strangely blank.

We are not asking for a favor, and we are certainly not asking for pity. We are the garment workers and the Nobel laureates, the pushcart peddlers and the Supreme Court justices, the yeshiva boys of Borough Park and the physicists of Riverdale. We built hospitals this city cannot live without and universities the world flies to attend. We buried our dead in Queens and raised this metropolis with our hands, and we will not now be quietly folded out of its official story like a page a censor thought no one would miss.

Stamp our neighborhoods. Say our name. Define the hatred that stalks us, and then have the courage to fight it. This is our city too, and we have the receipts, four hundred years of them. We are not passing through. We are home. And a passport to New York that has no page for the Jews is not a passport to New York at all.

With tremendous gratitude to the inimitable Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt