In the wake of last weekend's Charlottesville rally and violence, and the public debate around removing Confederate monuments, the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center has called on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to remove monuments of the anti-Semitic Peter Stuyvesant and replace /rename all public landmarks named in Stuyvesant's honor in honor of prominent 17th-century Jewish activist Asher Levy.
In a letter to the mayor, the leading Jewish civil rights group dedicated to combatting terrorism and anti-Semitism notes that while Stuyvesant played a crucial role in the expansion of Manhattan when it was a Dutch colony, he strongly opposed the religious freedom of Jews, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and Quakers. Furthermore, he put forward many anti-Semitic laws imposing a Jewish tax, forbidding the construction of synagogues by Jewish immigrants, and pressuring the minority community to leave the colony.