‘Jewish safety’ isn’t one thing. Let’s stop reducing 1 million New Yorkers to a single concern.

As Election Day neared, Jewish New Yorkers found ourselves reduced to one-dimensional characters in a flat, never-changing narrative. That we might live lives as complex as any other New Yorker doesn’t seem to occur to most of the people talking about us — whether those voices are coming from within our community or beyond.

This is in part because so much of the discussion around the election has centered on “safety,” as if that were a single, easily understood and universally shared concern, especially in the Jewish community.

Trying to force a million New Yorkers into a box labeled “Jewish safety” is both futile and dehumanizing. When you boil people down to just one part of who they are, and treat that as the whole of their identity, it harms their sense of safety, rather than protect