A New York City “neighborhood passport,” which the city’s official marketing group created and which is on hand at libraries in the Big Apple for tourists coming for the World Cup, includes a “cultural map” of the city detailing “thriving international communities and cultures.”
The map identifies 30 neighborhoods associated with immigrant populations, including “Little Palestine” (Bay Ridge, Brooklyn), “Little Egypt” (Astoria, Queens), “Little Pakistan” (Newkirk Plaza, Brooklyn) and multiple Chinatowns.
The map, which is sourced from the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, does not note any Jewish neighborhoods. (The immigrant affairs office doesn’t include posters for “Little Palestine” or “Little Egypt.”)
Reactions were mixed to the lack of depiction of Jewish neighborhoods, as well as Irish and Italian ones.
“They just couldn’t figure out how to represent 11% of the city,” stated Avital Chizik-Goldschmidt, a writer. “Couldn’t decipher where the Jews are from. Asked everyone. Huge riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
The map was intended to show parts of the city that have “substantial foreign-born populations from regions and countries around the world,” according to City Hall. “It does not highlight religious groups.”
It added that a map of Little Odessa depicts a neighborhood with a substantial Jewish population.
“Also no Italian or Irish enclaves in New York City? Interesting,” stated Karol Markowicz, a prominent, Jewish conservative columnist. “The two Staten Island flags look funnier the longer I look at this. Two small ethnic populations and absolutely no others in the whole of Staten Island.”
“The major Sephardi corridor of South Brooklyn, Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese and others, from the East side of Ave. J down toward Ave. V, gets left out completely,” stated
Isaac Choua, a board member of the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America.
“So does the Bukharian Jewish community in Queens, largely from Uzbekistan and Central Asia. The Brooklyn community is not some tiny side community,” he stated. “Flatbush, Midwood, and Gravesend alone have roughly 54,000 people living in Jewish households, comparable in size to the Pakistani community being recognized here.”
“This is not a small omission,” he stated. “It is one of New York’s most distinctive immigrant-descended Jewish communities, and it gets erased from the story. Weirdly enough, Zohran Mamdani’s office ‘wanted’ to speak with me about this very issue and has not followed up since the election.”
Others, like the journalist Jesse Singal, dismissed the purported controversy.
“The Hasidic neighborhoods are overwhelmingly composed of American citizens, who have been here a long time,” he stated. “I don’t get this. It comes across like looking for something to get mad about. Could just as easily 180 this and be, ‘Oh, so you’re saying they aren’t quite American?”
Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, a Chabad rabbi, stated that he finds “the absence frustrating as well.”
“But what exactly would we call it and where?” he stated. “Little Israel? Surely not the right name for Borough Park, the largest enclave of Jews and Jewish culture. Doesn’t really work for the Upper West Side or the Lower East Side either.”
