True hospitality

"Many immigrants come to New York hoping for hospitality, but end up working in the hospitality industry," where they encounter exploitation rather than welcome. Thus remarked Sekou Siby, the Côte d'Ivoirian co-director of the Restaurant Opportunity Center, an advocacy group for immigrants working in restaurants. "New York's taxis are sweatshops on wheels," said Bhairavi Desai, Executive Director of the Taxi Workers Alliance, and have become more dangerous for their predominantly South Asian drivers since 9/11. "Take a minute to think of six families I'll tell you about," said Juan Carlos Ruiz, founder and regional director of the New Sanctuary Movement and one-time program director at the Community Center for Tepeyac, describing families divided by deportations; "Memory is already a form of sanctuary."
These were some of the voices at a panel discussion I heard at Union Theological Seminary this evening called "Making Room at the Table: Hospitality and Immigration." The occasion was itself a celebration of hospitality, the Eighth Annual Ramadan Community Iftar & Interfaith Dialogue. An iftar is the traditional fast-breaking at the end of a day of Ramadan, marked by prayer and the eating of a date and followed by a joyous feasting. This is often done in community, and in communities of interreligious dialogue, interfaith iftars are not uncommon.
It was moving to see this celebration used as an occasion to consider the call to hospitality to strangers in so many of the world's faiths, and not just at some airy-fairy level but by bringing together organizers and advocates - many but not all also religously engaged - who work for some of the most vulnerable in our own New York community.

(The texts are apparently those one recites before
breaking the fast, and as one takes the first mouthful.)