New York
Where every journey begins and ends at home.
New York City · Albany · Rockland County · The Hudson Valley · The Catskills · Long Island
The Journey
Where do we even begin with New York?
This is not a state we visited. This is home.
New York is all I know. It is the lens I carry with me wherever I go. It is part of my being, part of my DNA.
I grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, surrounded by the noise, energy, people, buildings, languages, and cultures that make New York what it is. My great grandparents arrived here after the Holocaust, all eight of them survivors, and built new lives and generations in a city that gave them opportunity and a future.
Today, I am a father, continuing to weave my own life and our family’s story into this place. It is a place I will always call home.
New York is vast, and sometimes people forget that it is much more than the city. You can spend the morning surrounded by millions of people in Manhattan and, only a short time later, hike a mountain alone, miles from another human being.
Over a lifetime here, we have experienced so much of what New York offers, history and culture, faith and fun, museums and parks, beaches and mountains, little towns and the greatest city in the world. People say you could eat at a different New York restaurant every night for a lifetime. The same might be true of places to explore.
In Albany, we have visited the Governor’s Mansion several times. The girls loved meeting Governor Kathy Hochul and spending some quality time there, with chocolates and doughnuts naturally helping the experience. We also visited the State Capitol, continuing our journey through every capital in America. This one obviously felt different. We were not visiting the government of another state. We were standing inside the capital of our own.
The girls have also visited City Hall, where they met Mayor Zohran Mamdani and learned about city government and the history of the place. In a very New York moment, they even shared some freshly cut apples with the Mayor of the Big Apple.
But over a lifetime here, New York becomes less about attractions and more about moments. Driving into the city. Crossing the bridges. Walking through neighborhoods we know by heart. Summers upstate. Family gatherings. Work. School. Museums. Parks. Restaurants. Snowstorms. Beaches. Mountains. Traffic. Lots of traffic.
Other states gave us trips.
New York gives us a life.
Jewish New York
Jewish New York is not something I can describe as a place we visited.
I grew up inside it.
In Williamsburg, Yiddish was spoken on the streets. Shuls, yeshivos, mikvahs, bakeries, kosher stores, weddings, holidays, and Jewish life were simply the world around us. It was not something we went searching for.
It was home.
As I grew older, I came to understand how much larger the Jewish story of New York really is.
Congregation Shearith Israel was established in 1654 by Sephardic Jews in what was then New Amsterdam, making it the oldest Jewish congregation in New York and in the United States. From that tiny beginning grew one of the largest and most diverse Jewish communities anywhere in the world.
Today, Jewish New York stretches from Hasidic Williamsburg and Borough Park to the Upper West Side, Queens, Long Island, Westchester, Rockland County, the Catskills, Albany, Buffalo, and communities across the state.
There are Sephardic Jews, Hasidim, Litvish communities, Modern Orthodox families, Reform and Conservative congregations, Israelis, Russian Jews, Syrian Jews, Bukharian Jews, and almost every expression of Jewish life imaginable.
For our family, this history is not abstract.
Our children are growing up inside its next chapter.
Jewish New York is not simply part of our story.
It is where our story began.
What Stayed With Me
New York is both the hardest and easiest state to write about because nothing really “stayed with me.”
I am it. It is part of me. I stay with it, and it stays with me.
This is where I grew up, where our children are growing up, where we work, celebrate, struggle, build, argue, laugh, and live.
Traveling through all fifty states actually made me appreciate New York differently. We saw extraordinary places across America, but every trip eventually ended the same way.
We came home.
You could spend a lifetime in New York and still never see all of it.
Luckily, we have a lifetime.
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