Amid COVID-19 and riots, 2020 has brought New York to its knees

Walking through New York, once energizing and inspiring, now spurs concern.

By SHMULEY BOTEACH
THE PROMETHEUS statue at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan is seen adorned with a face mask, earlier this week. (photo credit: JEENAH MOON/REUTERS)
THE PROMETHEUS statue at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan is seen adorned with a face mask, earlier this week.
(photo credit: JEENAH MOON/REUTERS)
The year 2020 will be remembered, among many things, as the year that brought New York to its knees.
It began with the quarantines and the lockdowns, a challenge in all settings, which left millions confined for months on end inside cramped apartments with few windows or access to fresh air. By day, lines to enter supermarkets besieged entire city blocks; at night, streets felt eerily empty.
For months now the city has felt like a ghost town. Even the traditional urban perks – museums, theaters and nightlife venues – were shuttered, showcasing expired shows and exhibits. America’s cultural capital, celebrated for Broadway, the Met, Carnegie Hall and incomparable bars and nightlife – went dark all at once, with cold weather making the parks of little use to most people as well.
Everywhere, the fear of infection made strangers act stranger than they normally would, an airborne tension over an airborne threat.
Almost en masse, urban-dwellers found themselves suddenly dreaming of a move to suburbia, if not even further to open country. Many, including some of my closest friends, actually made the move. One friend who is a noted writer and a diehard New Yorker gave up his rental apartment and moved – get this – to a farm. When I asked him if he’ll be spending his nights now milking cows, his response was, “That’s a lot more night action than I’d be getting in New York right now.”
As winter turned to spring, I wondered if Big Apple dwellers, having fought through the cold, could withstand the city’s closure. Without LA’s hikes or Miami’s beaches – and with higher rent than both – was New York City still worth it?
Then, the pandemic arrived with a force that left one questioning the very value of cities this big. Even as healthcare workers labored heroically beyond exhaustion, hospitals were overwhelmed and nursing homes were swept up in a cloud of death. One after another, I discovered that friends of mine had lost loved ones. Terribly, tens of thousands would die, all in or near a single city. Although I was deeply uplifted by New Yorkers’ 7 p.m. nightly salute to healthcare workers, living in the New York area had never felt so grim.
As spring edged toward summer, the demonstrations (virtuous) and then the riots (horrible) hit. Watching as tens of thousands of protesters marched down Fifth Avenue demanding racial justice was inspiring. George Floyd’s murder was not just an injustice but murder that deserved national outrage and demands systemic change. I deeply appreciate and respect the NYPD and law enforcement across the country. But bad-apple racist incidents must forever end. America’s dark legacy of the abomination of slavery and Jim Crow must be confronted, racism utterly rooted out. But none of this had anything to do with the subsequent trashing of New York, which was a tragedy.
The ferocity of the protesters who turned violent spoke its own kind of terror. Entire blocks were burned, businesses robbed, and the streets littered with broken glass.
Walking through New York, once energizing and inspiring, now spurs concern. The stores aren’t just closed, their windows are boarded up with wood, capturing a spirit not of America’s leading city but of Baghdad or Caracas. Window-shopping, once a noted New York wonder, is now canceled amid the inherent liability of a storefront that incorporates glass. All around me, I see signs of a city sliding back toward a more ignominious past, when Central Park was a gangland and Times Square a walkable porn hub.
Despondent, I wonder now whether New York, the centerpiece gem in the crown of America’s metropoles, will soon recover. One expert told me, “Not for five years, if ever.”
From the bottom of my heart, I pray he is wrong. I love New York – all of it: its size and its grandeur; its priceless art and eclectic architecture; the way it swells into every morning and quakes through every day, a supercity glistening with every stripe of life.
BUT SAVING New York isn’t just about preserving a unique and beautiful city. New York, after all, is more than just a city. It’s a living, breathing testament to the ability of people from all walks of life to come together and be one. More so than anything American, New York brings our national motto – e pluribus unum – to life.
Utterly unparalleled in its diversity, New York forms a patchwork of communities representative of just about every corner of the globe. Add to that New York’s service as the spine of so many global fields – theater, fashion, diplomacy, medicine and finance, to name a few – and the city seems to bring so much of the world together inside itself. Never has the sheer force of shared human potential been so apparent in a place.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe, meeting New York’s former mayor David Dinkins, praised the city as a melting pot that proved humanity’s common origin in one God. Indeed, that New York’s countless communities could be so agreeably unified as New Yorkers proves God’s oneness in a way that few things do. With members from every faith and continent, New York’s neighborhoods tingle with the beat of a robust and integrated human future, an urban prophecy of hope.
As we head into the future, don’t we want to see this bold, modern project actually work?
New York is the graceful host to the world’s largest Jewish community, including dozens of hassidic sects and some of the world’s most beautiful synagogues (and most cutting-edge kosher restaurants and supermarkets). Jewish schools prosper throughout its boroughs, and children walk fearlessly about, they’re tzitzit (ritual fringes) and peyot (sidelocks) blowing in the breeze. Jewish communities from Europe, Africa and the Middle East – forced by pogroms and persecutions to flee the towns of their ancestors – now thrive across New York’s boroughs. To see the members of these once-shattered communities living so big and so freely is inspiring in the extreme.
Last year’s uptick in violent anti-Jewish attacks proved that things are far from perfect – which is why I am utterly opposed to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s blunder in proposing a $1 billion reduction in NYPD funding at a time of rising terrorism and crime – but where else would communities of this magnitude be so seamlessly woven into the municipal fabric?
At my bar mitzvah I had a one-on-one meeting with the city’s holiest inhabitant. I would arrive in the city a boy, but would leave the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s room a man charged with his mission of spreading the universal light of Judaism throughout the world.
Through Chabad, New York really has been something of a conduit for the surge of Jewish life and teachings throughout the most far-flung Jewish communities on earth. Like so many other hassidic dynasties, the Chabad movement had its roots in the Jewish life of old Europe but its home in New York. Today, the movement quarterbacks thousands of outposts from Brooklyn’s most famous brownstone, 770 Eastern Parkway.
Every year, members of the global Chabad community celebrate the date of the previous Rebbe’s arrival to the city, on the eve of the Holocaust he narrowly escaped. For him, as for millions of Jews (including my own grandfather), New York offered a refuge from millennia of antisemitism, often deadly and always there. Passing through Ellis Island, Jews would mark a new chapter of their own lives and for Jewish history as a whole. New York guaranteed a future of freedom, equality, opportunity and unprecedented communal growth. Jewish singles would even get the world’s foremost Jewish dating scene – itself an essential stop in the life cycle of Orthodox Jews from around the world.
I speak from the Jewish perspective, but we are hardly the only community for whom New York is a one-of-a-kind home – a place we cannot replace. As its future hangs in the balance, Americans have to fight for the city that we love by coming together. Building on traditions of openness and unity – and as a direct result thereof – New York has risen as arguably the most influential city on earth. If we want to see a world modeled on those values, we must fight for our city and prove to all mankind (and to ourselves) that multiethnic enclaves are cities that work.
Those rioters who want to destroy New York in the name of social justice ought to be using the city as a model of what should be emulated rather than torched.
The writer’s Holocaust memoir, Holocaust Holiday: One Family’s Descent into Genocide Memory Hell, written with historical contributions by Mitchell Bard, will be published later this year. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @RabbiShmuley.