Episode Details

Anthony Janszoon van Salee and his wife Geitje were always feuding with neighbors and authorities, who put them down as the Turk and a whore and who kept putting them on trial before they were finally exiled from Manhattan — only to become the biggest landowners in what’s now Brooklyn, with descendants who married into American royalty. 

Alan Mikhail, the author of Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York, joins Harry Siegel and guest host Asad Dandia — the new Brooklyn historian and an informal Mamdani advisor who gives a walking tour or Lower Manhattan’s old Little Syria that includes a capsule history of van Salee — for a lively conversation about the contested story of a man who came to be known, a century after his death, as the city”s first free Muslim.