The New Politics of Jewish Invisibility

New York City has put out a map of its "immigrant neighborhoods", and some people are complaining that Jewish neighborhoods aren't represented. These complaints, in turn, are generating a counternarrative expressing the irony of insisting on the foreignness of Jews when the Jews in these neighborhoods are, overwhelmingly, not immigrants.I'm going to try to fall in the middle on this. First, let's highlight the words of one activist quoted in the article, Isaac Choua, a board member of the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America who specifically flagged a "major Sephardi corridor" in south Brooklyn that was not found on the map:"This is not a small omission," he went on. "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."The emphasis is mine, and of course it is a telling descriptor:…