Landing Day 1654
Three hundred seventy-two years ago this month, the North American Jewish experience began. A party of 23 Jews from Brazil disembarked at the port of New Amsterdam on the Hudson and blew past the anti-Semitism of Peter Stuyvesant. They were refugees from the Inquisition in South America on their way to somewhere when they were blown off course. With the support of Stuyvesant’s overlords at the Dutch West India Company, they were allowed a restricted version of settlement in New York.
Everything Jews have experienced in this country is rooted in that fateful moment: freedom of movement, struggle and resilience, self-sufficiency, and extraordinary good fortune. It would be years before the first Jewish institutions took shape, but the founding settlers no doubt celebrated the string of fall holidays, just as their descendants do to this day. Where they got citrons and palm fronds for Sukkot is anybody’s guess, including mine. But there were certainly willows beside the rivers of the New World. I wish that I could somehow be transported back to witness their landing-year improvisations.
Our own family arrived over two centuries later. My mother and father were born in North America, but all of their parents were immigrants from Europe. The northern Latvians and Lithuanians might have gone to South Africa, following the general trend of immigration, but they ended up in the Jewish neighborhoods of Detroit. All my father’s forebears were Polish, arriving in Detroit after decades in Canada. My children descend from those fortunate few. In the course of three generations in this country, we went from peddlers, housepainters, embroiderers, and homemakers to formally educated, privileged professionals. America did not exactly strew our path with roses, but neither did it limit access and mobility. This has been a very good experience of Diaspora.
It’s a mystery how any of this will finally play out. We have entered a period of peak anti-Semitism, but it doesn’t begin to rival the situation of the 1930s. Yes, indeed, there are people who hate Jews, but when Israel’s New York Consul General shared his accusation that Zohran Mamdani was a nazi (spelling intentional), he was surely exaggerating the mayor’s threat to our community. Terrible things could happen in America, but I do not see the handwriting on the wall. Our task is to be sensitive and alert, pursuing justice for ourselves and others, and right-sizing the fears of our own community. No one is executing the intellectually impaired as a warm-up to gassing Jews, Roma, and homosexuals.
The key thing here is to underscore our longevity. Jews have always lived in the Land of Israel, but Jewish statehood is less than a century old. The obvious contrast is that there has been an active, vital Jewish presence in America for close to four centuries with no signs of erasure. No disruption, deportation, or trains to the east. I am grateful for that and expect it to continue. My children are Jews and so are my grandchildren. With the help of God, we will produce American descendants for centuries.
No one knows the precise date of Landing Day, just that it took place in the days before the New Year. I wish you blessings of every kind, and a living connection to the Brazilian 23, who helped to create the multi-cultural inheritance that we are called to defend and strengthen in North America.