There is a particular loneliness in being counted only when someone is counting victims, and forgotten every other day of the year. This summer, as the World Cup came to New York, the City handed out a “Neighborhood Passport,” a cheerful civic invitation to wander into the enclaves that make this the greatest immigrant city on earth: to eat in Little Colombia, to pray your curiosity in Little India, to hear the drums of Little Senegal. It is a lovely idea. New York is a city of villages, and the passport was meant to say to each of them: you belong to the whole.

And then you turn the pages, and you notice the shape of the silence. There is no page for Borough Park, where the streets empty into stillness every Friday afternoon. None for Midwood, none for Williamsburg’s Hasidic heart, none for Crown Heights, none for Brighton Beach, where Soviet Jews rebuilt their lives beside the ocean and speak an English still braided with Russian. The Jews of New York are the oldest continuous immigrant story this city has, more than a million of us, and we did not merit a stamp.

Every neighborhood but ours. It is the sort of omission that a careless bureaucrat might call an oversight. But we........

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