In 1654, more than 100 years before the United States of America’s founding, a boat containing 23 Sephardic Jewish refugees from Brazil sailed to what was then New Amsterdam. (You know it today as New York.) This group, descendants of the Jews who had been expelled during the Spanish Inquisition, had fled Brazil when the Portuguese Inquisition arrived there. The Jewish refugees settled in New Amsterdam, the nearest Dutch colony. That move marked the first instance of Jewish communal life in North America, although the community was one that, due largely to intermarriage, dissolved into the broader population. “They weren’t...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
