My family was never American; we were New Yorkers. My great-grandparents came from the old country to the Lower East Side as children; they moved to Harlem and to the Bronx and there they raised my grandparents. My grandparents married and moved to Great Neck, which was not yet a Jewish suburb, where my father was born and raised. And then in their 20s my parents moved back into the city, to the Upper West Side, in the late 1960s, where a few years later I was born and raised. Until the age of 46, I’d lived in New York City almost all my life.

I adore the city and everything about it. What I love most about it, I think, was what the great Jewish New Yorker Horace Kallen called its “cultural pluralism.” New York is a vast collection of different nationalities — the greatest such collection

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