Like all men of sense and taste, I have always abhorred New York City.
There are those who appear besotted with the great lumbering beast; I find it the most noisome, malodorous, grimy, overfull, and generally uncouth city of my acquaintance, far better suited to the flourishing of rodents than to the habitation of men. There is an old line that to be tired of London is to be tired of life. Perhaps so. To be tired of New York, by contrast, is merely the natural consequence of possessing a functioning nervous system. Having spent a long weekend there on university business—in most agreeable and winsome company, to be sure—I confess to emitting an audible sigh of relief upon returning to the warm spirit and warmer skies of the Lone Star State.
Yet even an incorrigible New-York-hater like myself must concede the obvious: The city remains one of the great Jewish capitals of the world. It may be impossible to live there without acquiring either a respiratory complaint or a personality disorder, but it is equally impossible to deny the sheer density and vivacity of its Jewish life. The metropolitan area is home to well over a million Jews, the largest such concentration anywhere outside Israel, and the visitor feels it at once: synagogues, schools, bakeries, bookshops, charities, and whole neighbourhoods in which Jewish life has not demurely retreated into the private sphere but spilled out, audibly and unabashedly, onto the street.
The kosher food alone is nearly worth the trip. Whether one craves the most marbled steak, the most authentic shawarma, the fluffiest babka, the most formidable bagel, or a burger of frankly alarming diameter, New York remains the unrivalled capital of Jewish gastronomy in the Western Hemisphere. My university’s generous per diem was, I need hardly say, put to splendid and judicious use. A special mention is owed to Oshi’s, a tiny hole-in-the-wall café in Brooklyn that turned out a masterly shakshuka while its eponymous Israeli proprietress loudly berated the only other customer (a sporty-looking yuppie) for not trying hard enough to find himself a wife. It is difficult not to admire a woman who discharges her duties as cook, shopkeeper, matchmaker, and life coach with equal gravity.
I also made the pilgrimage to what I consider the finest Jewish bookshop in the world: Mizrahi, in Brooklyn, a gloriously chaotic and labyrinthine affair, three storeys thick, in which close to a million volumes of every conceivable Jewish genre are compressed into aisles narrow enough to threaten engulfment. I managed to spend only two hours inside, which I regard as a considerable feat of discipline. Caught between the constraints of my research budget and the preservation of my marriage, I limited myself to a mere dozen purchases. This, I submit, was an act of near-heroic restraint.
Food and books are the two obvious and gladdening forms of Jewish plenty in New York. The third, and less expected, is history. As a European, I confess to a reflexive suspicion of the very notion that America possesses any such thing; in a good many American towns, the venerable historic building turns out to date from roughly the same decade as the London house in which I was raised. Yet Jewish New York does have a history, and not merely the thin antiquarianism of brass plaques and politely preserved brickwork. It is a history entangled with all the great forces that forged modern Jewish life everywhere: commerce, immigration, religious adaptation, civic ambition, and the slow evolution of a confident minority in a patchwork city.
This was brought home to me by pure happenstance, on a Shabbat afternoon. I had been reading in Central Park, and drifted westward into the Upper West Side in search of somewhere to pray Minchah, the afternoon service. Quite unexpectedly, I came upon a synagogue I had never entered: Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue.
Congregation Shearith Israel (credit: Wikimedia Commons)
