New York City’s Jews have helped shape the city and, in turn, been shaped by it ever since the 17th century, when they first arrived in what was then New Amsterdam. Never a majority of the population, even in their 20th-century heyday, Jews carved out a variety of public and private spaces as their own within the larger city. These spaces—synagogues, lodge rooms, businesses, neighborhood streets, tenement apartments and leafy, semi-suburban blocks—reflected the wide array of secular and religious Jewish identities that Jews in New York fashioned for themselves.