Having recently returned from New York, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about cities and how they hold together such intense diversity. I’ve also been revisiting films that capture different aspects of the city — Woody Allen’s Manhattan for its atmosphere, Moonstruck for its Italian-American world, and other works that reflect the layered cultural identity of New York. What stands out is how many different communities have shaped the city over time — Italian, Irish, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chinese, African American, South Asian, Russian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, and many others — each leaving visible traces in neighbourhoods, food, language, and everyday life.
Within that wider mosaic, I am aware of the strong historical and cultural presence of Jewish life in New York, particularly in the arts, music, comedy, intellectual culture, and food traditions. Figures like Leonard Bernstein, alongside the wider legacy of New York theatre, film, and comedy, sit alongside everyday cultural forms such as delis, bakeries, bagels, pastrami, cheesecake, and other foods that have become part of the city’s broader identity. In places like the Upper West Side or Brooklyn, and even in the cultural memory of the city through film and literature, there is a sense of how deeply these influences are woven into urban life.
At the same time, one of our most ordinary but memorable experiences was going for breakfast at Breads Bakery. It had a strong tradition of Jewish baking, but what stayed with me most was not any sense of entering a defined cultural space, but rather how natural and open it felt. People were simply there — working, eating, talking — and we were warmly welcomed without any sense of separation or boundary. In fact, we didn’t approach it as “a Jewish place” at all in any conscious way; it simply felt like part of the everyday fabric of the city, where different traditions exist in a shared space without needing to be emphasised.

What New York suggests to me overall is not a neutral city, but one where many identities have accumulated and interacted over time to form something layered and continually evolving — more like a living mosaic than a single culture. It feels like a place where difference is constantly present, but also routinely absorbed into everyday life. That raises for me a broader question about whether other cities, or even the world more generally, could sustain a stronger sense of shared civic life across such diversity, where coexistence is normal rather than exceptional.
This is part of why I find myself thinking more anxiously about London. I feel concerned about any situation where communities begin to feel unsafe or under threat in the places they live. It seems to me fundamental that no group should feel frightened simply because of who they are, and that a city depends on a baseline assumption of safety and belonging for all its residents. I am particularly troubled by antisemitism wherever it appears, and by any form of prejudice that turns political tensions into hostility towards entire communities.
At the same time, I wonder how fear and insecurity are experienced differently across groups, and how cities can better manage political disagreement and public expression without allowing it to spill into hostility or prejudice. Whatever one’s views on global or political issues, it feels essential to maintain a clear distinction between political conflict and discrimination against people because of their identity.
Ultimately, what stays with me from New York is not the absence of tension, but the possibility — however imperfect — of coexistence at scale: a city where many histories are present at once, and where identity is layered, ordinary, and continuously shared in everyday life.