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 protecting it. Essentializing identity reduces people to caricatures in their own lives and contributes to the risks they face.

What’s more, of course, is that there’s also no such thing as the Jewish community. There are many Jewish communities, each with their own philosophies, norms, and cultures. As the saying goes: Two Jews, three opinions.

Living all over the city and drawing on myriad traditions, we aren’t even a monolith in purely religious terms, which range from ultra-Orthodox to atheist. And that’s before you get into the multiple identities every individual carries; for Jews who are LGBTQ, for instance, New York may be the safest place to be, regardless of the results of the........

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