Profiles

Outside Purnima Kapur’s office, the spires and towers of downtown Brooklyn sparkle in the early fall sunlight.

“Everything we create here is for people to live and work in,” says Kapur, 45, wearing a smart black...

“We agreed we wanted a life that had an open home,” says Jodi Samuels, co-founder of Jewish International Connection New York, a nonprofit organization that provides a home away from home to immigrant Jews from...

A survivor of domestic violence and rape, Katarina Tepesh has spent much of her adulthood trying to forget.

But after Sept. 11, the 58-year-old Croatian, who immigrated to New York at 17, started trying to remember.

An upper East Sider who works...

“My mother told me, ‘My heart is broken to be separated from you, but you will find family in America,'” says Morris Sheriff. “That never left my mind.”

Nattily dressed in a tan suit and a red and...

In the early 1980s, Mohammed Saleh got a break that changed his life. He was working as a pharmacist, raising a family in New York City and struggling to get ahead.

A Muslim originally from Bangladesh, Saleh heard about a Jewish pharmacist in...

On a blustery afternoon in late March, Jimmy Bissan guides a visitor around his neighborhood.

In the distance, the Cyclone roller coaster, a Coney Island landmark, stands dinosaur-like above a terrain filled with souvenir shops and pizza...

March 5, 2008

“When you look at the news, they don’t talk about different African communities in the U.S. unless something bad happens.”

On the third floor of the Harlem State Office Building, groups of young Africans and...

July 23-25, 2004

On the New York City nightclub scene, Walter Monheit is a fixture, an icon even.

Since the days of ballroom dancing clubs in the 1950’s, this now-78-year-old man has been clubbing two to three nights per week from around...

December 19, 2007“

When I first came to Sloane-Kettering, a small glass cabinet held all the cancer drugs that were known,” recalls Dr. Yashar Hirshaut. “So I’ve seen the transition from a very primitive time till now, where people...

November 27, 2007

“This is the mother, who has leprosy, [and] this is the son,” says Adeboye Subuloye, looking down at a photograph of a woman and a tall young man. “We bought a sewing machine for him.

“We decided to empower the...