As winds whipped off the Hudson River and through Lower Manhattan on Sunday afternoon, crowds of people in their warmest coats and hats descended on Battery Park. An estimated 10,000 were there to take part in a pop-up protest — announced that morning — against the presidential decree banning refugees and immigrants from seven mostly Muslim nations.
But as Mayor Bill de Blasio, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and other congressional leaders began the mile-long march up to Foley Square, more than 60 notable New Yorkers, including a number from the Hollywood community, made their way though the January cold toward another event: a communal marathon reading of Night, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel’s seminal memoir of his experience with his father in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.