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A ‘Landing Day’ ceremony in Lower Manhattan celebrates the first Jewish community in the US
(New York Jewish Week) — When a small group of people convened next to an inconspicuous plaque steps from the entrance to the Staten Island Ferry’s Whitehall Terminal earlier this week, they weren’t there to catch a boat leaving the island.
Instead, they had come to the southern tip of Manhattan to celebrate a ship that had arrived on its shores centuries before.
The gathering on Wednesday was the 369th anniversary of an event most New Yorkers don’t know about, let alone celebrate: the arrival of the first Jewish community to the United States in 1654. That lack of awareness is exactly what Howard Teich, the founding chair of a group called the Manhattan Jewish Historical Initiative, hopes to change.
That year, a group of 23 Sephardic Jews arrived on the shores of New Amsterdam, the Dutch colony located on the island. In the centuries since, the city and its image have been shaped in no small part by its Jewish denizens — from Emma Lazarus to Ed Koch to Nora Ephron.
In hosting the “Landing Day” ceremony, Teich’s ultimate goal is for Jews in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population to gather every year to celebrate their culture and accomplishments.
“We just have to change the narrative of the community right now,” Teich told the New York Jewish Week, adding that he felt Jewish communal discourse was at times overly focused on fear and division. “We’ve got to spread a positive message of who we are, what we’ve accomplished, how we’ve worked with other people, what we’ve started, the difference we’ve made in the time we’ve been here and, really, what America has meant to us as a people.”
Wednesday’s ceremony was held at Peter Minuit Plaza, next to a flagpole adorned with a plaque that reads: “Erected by the State of New York to honor the memory of the twenty three men, women and children who landed in September 1654 and founded the first Jewish community in North America.”
Donated by the State of New York, it is called the Jewish Tercentenary Monument and was put up in The Battery in 1954 to mark the 300th anniversary of the Jews’ arrival. That year, events were held for months across New York and the United States to celebrate, but in the decades since, there have only been a handful of gatherings at the site. None of the events and pronouncements associated with a Landing Day celebration in 2004, for the 350th anniversary, took place near the monument.
Teich aims to revitalize the celebration, and he hopes an annual event will take place at the plaza each fall.
“Now is the time,” he said. “[This ceremony] was supposed to show the positive of a community that’s really excelled in freedom. It’s incredible what’s been established in America and in New York in particular as a center of American Jewry to a large extent. That’s what I want to see celebrated.”
For Wednesday’s ceremony, Teich partnered with the Battery Conservancy, the New York Board of Rabbis and dozens of other Jewish and historical organizations across the city. Local and state politicians were also in attendance, including City Councilmember Gale Brewer, State Assembly Members Rebecca Seawright and Alex Bores, and State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Elias Levy, the Jewish consul general of Panama in New York, was also present.
“I want our monuments to come alive,” Warrie Price, the president of the Battery Conservancy, said in a speech. “I ask all of you to make this monument as relevant as it was in 1954, because its values and what it symbolizes are as true today as ever. We are still a landing site. We will never stop being a landing site. As New Yorkers and as a people of consciousness, we care and we will find the solutions to continue being a landing site.”
Along with speeches and music, which included Ladino and Hebrew versions of “Shalom Aleichem” and “Ein Keloheinu” from Rabbi Cantor Jill Hausman; a klezmer clarinet performance from the musician Zisel; and a rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from singer Hannie Ricardo, attendees also heard a short history of the Jewish arrival in New Amsterdam from Bradley Shaw, a historian at the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy.
Like so many immigrants to New York City who came after them, the Jews who landed in Manhattan in 1654 were fleeing persecution. In this case, they were escaping the Portuguese, who had conquered the Dutch colony of Brazil where the Jews had been living and instituted the Catholic Church’s Inquisition.
As it happens, just weeks before the group of 23 landed, three Ashkenazi Jews — Jacob Barsimson, Solomon Pietersen and Asser Levy, who was the New World’s first kosher butcher and Jewish homeowner — had come to New Amsterdam from Europe. Those three men greeted the group. When Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director-general of New Amsterdam, originally rejected the new refugees — saying he wanted to establish a colony solely for Dutch Reformed Christians — Levy advocated on their behalf.
“The question I have is, did they have a minyan?” Shaw said, referring to a traditional Jewish prayer quorum of 10 men. The group had arrived just before Rosh Hashanah.
“The answer is, I really don’t know,” he said. “But that said, they might have. They had the four men from the boat and the three that were here. And of the children, there might have been one or two that were bar mitzvahed,” or over 13 years old.
With Levy’s help, along with urging from the Dutch West India Company, which counted many Sephardic Jews among their investors, the group stayed. Eventually, they established the Mill Street Synagogue, the first congregation in the United States. It eventually became Congregation Shearith Israel, or the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, whose building is now on West 70th Street.
According to the most recent estimates, the five boroughs are now home to more than 1 million Jews.
“Usually you come to a strange place and the first thing you look for is a synagogue,” said a woman at the ceremony who wished to remain anonymous, and who did not know the history of the Jews’ arrival before the event. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be the first ones to arrive.”
Teich wants to build momentum for the 400th anniversary of Landing Day — just 31 years away.
“There’s a real continuity that we need to appreciate,” he said. “That’s who we should be as a people — we have 5,000 years of history and nearly 400 here. It’s quite something.”
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The post A ‘Landing Day’ ceremony in Lower Manhattan celebrates the first Jewish community in the US appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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No Harvard Students Punished for Anti-Israel Encampments, US Congress Says in New Report
Anti-Zionist Harvard students taking part in a sit-in organized by a student group which favors the Islamist terror group Hamas. Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Nov. 16, 2023. Photo: Brian Snyder via Reuters Connect
Harvard University disciplined virtually no one who was accused of perpetrating antisemitic harassment or participating in a “Gaza Solidarity” encampment last academic year, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce alleged on Thursday.
As evidence supporting its claims, the committee cited documents obtained during its ongoing investigation of Harvard University, which was prompted by a succession of antisemitic incidents in the weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel as well as allegations of antisemitism going back years. According to the committee, “not one of the 68 Harvard students referred for discipline conduct related to the encampment is suspended, and the vast majority is in good standing.”
Neither, it continued, were any of the students who chanted antisemitic slogans on campus property punished. Essentially slapped on the wrist, they were “admonished,” a verbal measure which, Harvard acknowledges, is not recorded in their records as a disciplinary sanction.
“Harvard failed, end of story. These administrators failed their Jewish students and faculty, they failed to make it clear that antisemitism will not be tolerated, and in this case, Harvard may have failed to fulfill its legal responsibilities to protect students from a hostile environment,” US Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who chairs the committee, said in a statement on Thursday. “The only thing administrators accomplished is appeasing radical students who have almost certainly returned to campus emboldened and ready to repeat the spring semester’s chaos. Harvard must change course immediately.”
The Algemeiner has previously reported that Harvard University was amnestying students charged with violating school rules which proscribe unauthorized demonstrations and disruptions of university business. During summer, it “downgraded” disciplinary sanctions it levied against several pro-Hamas protesters it punished for illegally occupying Harvard Yard and roiling the campus for nearly five weeks.
For a time Harvard University talked tough about its intention to restore order and dismantle a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” — a collection of tents on campus in which demonstrators lived and from which they refused to leave unless Harvard agreed to boycott and divest from Israel — creating an impression that no one would go unpunished.
In a public statement, interim president Alan Garber denounced their actions for forcing the rescheduling of exams and disrupting the academics of students who continued doing their homework and studying for final exams, responsibilities the protesters seemingly abdicated by participating in the demonstration.
Harvard then began suspending the protesters following their rejection of a deal to leave the encampment, according to The Harvard Crimson. Before then, Garber vowed that any student who continued to occupy the section of campus would be placed on “involuntary leave,” a measure that effectively disenrolls the students from school and bars them from campus until the university decides whether they are allowed back. The disciplinary measures were levied one day after members of Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) created a sign featuring an antisemitic caricature of Garber as Satan, and accused him of duplicity.
During Harvard’s commencement ceremonies in May, reports emerged that some students had been banned from graduation and receiving their diplomas.
However, Harvard and HOOP always maintained that some protesters would be allowed to appeal their punishments, per an agreement the two parties reached, but it was not clear that the end result would amount to a victory for the protesters and an embarrassment to the university. Indeed, after the suspensions were lifted, HOOP proceeded to mock what they described as their administrators’ lack of resolve. Unrepentant, they celebrated the revocation of the suspensions on social media and, in addition to suggesting that they will disrupt the campus again, called their movement an “intifada,” alluding to two prolonged periods of Palestinian terrorism during which hundreds of Israeli Jews were murdered.
“Harvard walks back on probations and reverses suspensions of pro-Palestine students after massive pressure,” the group said. “After sustained student and faculty organizing, Harvard has caved in, showing that the student intifada will always prevail … This reversal is a bare minimum. We call on our community to demand no less than Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea. Grounded in the rights of return and resistance. We will not rest until divestment from the Israeli regime is met.”
The past year has been described by experts as a low point in the history of Harvard University, America’s oldest and, arguably, most important institution of higher education. Since the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas across southern Israel, the school has been accused of fostering a culture of racial grievance and antisemitism, while important donors have suspended funding for programs. In just the past nine months, its first Black president, Claudine Gay, resigned in disgrace after being outed as a serial plagiarist; Harvard faculty shared an antisemitic cartoon on social media; and its protesters were filmed surrounding a Jewish student and shouting “Shame!” into his ears.
According to the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Harvard has repeatedly misrepresented its handling of the explosion of hate and rule breaking, launching a campaign of deceit and spin to cover up what ultimately became the biggest scandal in higher education.
A report generated by the committee as part of a wider investigation of the school claimed that the university formed an Antisemitism Advisory Group (AAG) largely for show and did not consult its members when Jewish students were subject to verbal abuse and harassment, a time, its members felt, when its counsel was most needed. The advisory group went on to recommend nearly a dozen measures for addressing the problem and offered other guidance, the report said, but it was excluded from high-level discussions which preceded, for example, the December congressional testimony of former president Claudine Gay — a hearing convened to discuss antisemitism at Harvard.
So frustrated were a “majority” of AAG members with being an accessory to what the committee described as a guilefully crafted public relations facade that they threatened to resign from it.
Currently, the university is fighting a lawsuit which accuses it of ignoring antisemitic discrimination. The case survived an effort by Harvard’s lawyers to dismiss it on the grounds that the students who brought it “lack standing.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post No Harvard Students Punished for Anti-Israel Encampments, US Congress Says in New Report first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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If Eric Adams Steps Down, New York City’s Next Acting Mayor Will Be an Anti-Israel Critic
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Photo: Screenshot
The next acting mayor of New York City might be a left-wing activist and staunch critic of the Jewish state.
US prosecutors charged New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday with soliciting illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals and bribery. Adams’s potential departure from office could prove consequential for New York City’s estimated 960,000 Jewish residents, representing roughly 10 percent of the Big Apple’s population, and supporters of Israel living in the city.
If Adams resigns as a result of the federal charges against him, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams is widely expected to step into the mayoral role as his replacement. A review of Wiliams’s social media history reveals a pattern of denigrating Israel, raising questions over whether the public advocate would defend the city’s Jewish community.
Williams has condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza as a “war crime” and criticized the US Congress for inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak in July.
“Aside from basic humanity, under accepted [international] Law Benjamin Netanyahu is quite literally, at this moment, engaged in [international] war crimes/human rights violations,” Williams posted on X/Twitter at the time. “Instead of Congress trying to stop it, they gave a platform.”
Williams issued a statement on Oct. 11 of last year, four days after the Hamas terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, lamenteing the terrorist attacks on the Jewish state before calling on Jerusalem not to retaliate and shifting attention to alleged “oppression” of Palestinians.
“We can, we have to be able to, at once grieve the hundreds of innocent lives taken in Israel, and oppose the escalating violence of retaliation, the endless war, the systemic violence and oppression of Palestinians too often ignored, excused, or condoned,” Williams wrote.
On Oct. 14, one week after Hamas’s brutal slaughter of roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel, Williams condemned “shameful” New York elected officials that “won’t even mention [Palestine] or [Gaza].”
Five days later, less than two weeks after the largest single-day mass-murder of Jews since the Holocaust, Williams called for an immediate “ceasefire” between the Jewish state and the terrorist group. Israel had not yet launched its military offensive in neighboring Hamas-ruled Gaza to dismantle the terror group’s military capabilities and free the 251 hostages kidnapped from southern Israel on Oct. 7. He also drew an equivalency between Israel’s military operations to the Hamas atrocities.
“The moral compass of our leaders shows stunning irregularities,” Williams wrote on Instagram.
“On point in condemning horrendous attacks on Israel and demanding hostages be returned,” he added. “[Yet, failure] to recognize the [United Nation’s] description of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, let alone support de-escalation and ceasefire.”
On Oct. 24, Williams declared Gaza a “humanitarian crisis” and added that “all of us who rightly condemned Oct 7 on Israel should be rightly demanding a [ceasefire] now and before any ground invasion.”
Israel began striking Hamas targets after repelling the Oct. 7 invasion but did not launch a ground offensive into Gaza until Oct. 27.
In February, Williams appeared at a press conference conducted by the “NYC 4 Ceasefire” coalition to demand an end to Israel’s military operations in Gaza. During the event, participants referred to the Gaza war as a “genocide” and honored Palestinian “martyrs.”
“We have gathered here today to show city-wide support for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and end to the genocide in Palestine,” said Jawanza Williams, organizing director of left-wing activist group VOCALNY.
Williams harbors ties to the vehemently anti-Israel Democratic Socialists of America group (DSA). In a 2018 interview with the left-wing media outlet Jacobin, Williams said, “I have no problem saying I’m a Democratic Socialist.”
Williams has solicited an endorsement from the group while running for office in New York City. DSA has routinely praised Hamas’s so-called “armed struggle” against Israel. The group issued an explicit endorsement of Hamas, stating that the terrorist organization is a cornerstone in the “resistance” against the “Zionist project.” DSA has also accused Israel of committing “genocide” and praised the Hezbollah terrorist group for attempting to pummel the Jewish state with missiles.
The post If Eric Adams Steps Down, New York City’s Next Acting Mayor Will Be an Anti-Israel Critic first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Book Event for Award-Winning Jewish Author Canceled After Co-Panelists Refuse to Appear Alongside ‘Zionist’
Illustrative: Pro-Hamas protesters in front of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City’s Upper East Side neighborhood. Source: X/Twitter
A book event for award-winning author Elisa Albert was canceled after two fellow panelists refused to appear alongside a “Zionist.”
The nixed event, which was set to take place at the Albany Book Festival, was going to cover the female “coming of age” experience. The organizers of the event New York State Writers Institute (NYS) wrote that they were “nonplussed” at the decisions of Aisha Gawad and Lisa Ko to refuse to attend the panel, but decided to cancel the event anyway.
Mark Koplik, NYS assistant director, sent Albert a letter saying that Gawad and Ko “don’t want to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist.’” Koplik added that Gawad and Ko’s decision not to share the event with Albert took the organization by “surprise” and that they “want to talk this out.”
Albert stated that the book event cancellation was the latest instance of discrimination she has experienced since the Hamas Oct. 7 attacks on the Jewish state.
“Unfortunately, I’m not surprised,” Albert said. “I’ve been really vocal from the get-go, and I’ve lost many friends. I’ve seen my whole professional life wildly altered. I’m not surprised at all. I’ve seen all kinds of people behaving in all kinds of ways that are on the spectrum of this exact same kind of bigotry, complicity, fear — all of it.”
Despite the heavily anti-Israel sentiment prevalent throughout the literary world, Albert has been a public and vocal supporter of the Jewish state since the Oct. 7 slaughter of roughly 1,200 people. She has criticized Hamas supporters on social media and penned articles defending the Jewish state. Weeks following Oct. 7, she wrote “An Open Letter to Hamas’ Defenders” in which she defended the need for a two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We unequivocally condemn antisemitism,” Koplik said in an email to WAMC public radio. “I can’t tell you how sad and upsetting this is for me personally.”
Koplik added that the organizers refused to remove Albert from the panel, which resulted in two authors refusing to participate in the event.
“We no longer had a panel to be moderated. We fully support Elisa’s expression of outrage and disappointment. We believe in civil dialogue, and we condemn intolerance of any kind,” Koplik stated.
Zionists authors have faced a torrent of backlash from the literary industry in recent months. Joshua Leifer, the author of Tablets Shattered, was unable to hold a discussion at a New York City bookstore after the manager canceled the event over the presence of a “Zionist” rabbi on the panel. PEN America, a prominent literary society, was forced to cancel its annual awards ceremony after the organization refused to condemn the Israel-Hamas war as a “genocide” and agree to deplatform “Zionist” writers.
The post Book Event for Award-Winning Jewish Author Canceled After Co-Panelists Refuse to Appear Alongside ‘Zionist’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.