Immigrant New Yorkers beloved by Mamdani all feel warmth for their homes. Why can’t Jews? - opinion

My grandparents married and moved to Great Neck, which was not yet a Jewish suburb, where my father was born and raised. And then, in their 20s, my parents moved back into the city, to the Upper West Side, in the late 1960s, where I was born and raised a few years later. Until the age of 46, I’d lived in New York City almost all my life.

I adore the city and everything about it. What I love most about it, I think, was what the great Jewish New Yorker Horace Kallen called its “cultural pluralism.” New York is a vast collection of different nationalities, the greatest such collection ever assembled in one place, all living together, neighborhood by neighborhood.

The City (there is only this one City) and not the soulless slab of glass and concrete jutting out of Turtle Bay, is the true United Nations.

Subway signs are written in four, five, six languages; each train car is some space shuttle out of Star Trek, teeming with New Yorkers of every possible complexion and dress from every corner of the globe.

And I was deeply moved by his vision of returning the city to its everyday, working-class people, so that New York might “remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant.” (Whether this speech accurately reflected his actual median voter, who was more likely to be a recent college graduate living in Bushwick than a working mother of four in Flushing, is another matter.)

But as he spoke, I turned to thinking about Ibrahim, a young handsome Yemeni who ran his family bodega around the corner from my former home in Brooklyn. We used to speak about Yemen; he had strong views about which Yemeni singers I should listen to, and how much he loved and missed it; he and his cousins would travel back there to stay for years at a time, returning to Brooklyn to earn and send remittances home.

And I thought of all the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cab drivers I’ve had over the years. How every last one of them told me about the house they’d always dreamt of building in the countryside of Pakistan or Bangladesh, for their parents, if not for them, or their now-local children.

I thought of the apartment of the girl who lived downstairs from me in the building I grew up in on West 90th street, with whom I was half in love, her family Trinidadian Indians, and the apartment heavy with plants and oversized rattan furniture and the moist exhaust of the humidifier that was always blowing; her apartment felt, I imagined, like Trinidad itself, and the curry tasted as it did back home.

And I think always of Delsie, the Jamaican woman who cared for me when my mother went back to work, who scolded and spoiled me and regaled me with stories about Montego Bay.

All of my fellow New Yorkers loved their home across the ocean; all of them sent money and love to their families and countrymen, sustaining that tie as much as they could.

And the Jews? Well, we were the same, but also different. For one thing, we had been in the city longer. We’d left our mark on the Lower East Side, where my Chinese-Brazilian best friend lived generations ago, on its landscape and on its idiom, but we’d long moved on to other neighborhoods, as the progress of my own family demonstrates.

[Jews] do not come to the United States from truly native lands, lands of their proper nation and culture. They come from lands of sojourn, where they have been for ages treated as foreigners, at most as semi-citizens, subject to disabilities and persecutions.

They come with no political aspirations against the peace of other states, such as the Irish, the Poles, and the Bohemians. They come with the intention of being completely incorporated into the body politic of the state. . . .

Yet, once the wolf is driven from the door and the Jewish immigrant takes his place in our society as a free man and an American, he tends to become all the more a Jew. The cultural unity of his race, history, and background is sustained only by the new life under new conditions.

The Jewish quarter... has its sectaries, its radicals, its artists, its literati; its press, its literature, its theater, its Yiddish and its Hebrew, its Talmudical colleges and its Hebrew schools, its charities and its vanities, and its coordinating organization, the Kehilla, all more or less duplicated wherever Jews congregate in mass. Here, not religion alone, but the whole world of radical thinking, carries the mother-tongue and the father-tongue, with all that they imply.

This was the position of the Jews of New York until mid-century; a “nation and culture” without a homeland to pine for.

But, of course, then the Jews, like the Irish, and the Poles, and the Czechs, regained a homeland. And fitfully, not without controversy and dissension, we, too, came to love it, and maintain a deep, unbreakable attachment to it, and seek to support it.

In this, we became like the Poles and Irish and Czechs and also like the Armenians and the Macedonians and, yes, the Palestinians, supporting “political aspirations” for our people that can rub up “against the peace of other states”). Such is the complexity of national attachments. And some of us, in fact, were so deeply attached that we left our first love, the city of our birth, to upbuild it.

I won’t argue that what Israel is to New York Jews is identical to what Yemen is to Ibrahim. The Jews’ homeland is different from other homelands because Jewish history is different from other peoples’ history. But it’s just as precious to us. And listening to Mamdani, I wondered why his Whitmanesque reveries have no room for that attachment.

I wondered why, based on his past statements, he intended not to embrace our love and grief for Israel but instead, by seeking to localize his longest-standing political priority, to turn the grievances of his Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas and Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses and Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties against us and against the Jewish homeland.

I realize that I am homesick for a city that was also a Jewish city, my city, that I fear is gone. And the pain that I felt when the new mayor summoned a vision of that vanished city, an ersatz vision, with no room in its heart for Jews as we really are, was a deep pain.