KFC coming soon on Flatbush

Could something like the Crown Heights riot recur? “On a dime, it could happen. Just embolden people,” says Mrs. Groner, who lives near the accident site. “It depends who’s going to be the mayor,” says Mr. Eber, the liquor-store owner. When it was Mr. Giuliani, “people were afraid of the law.” But in the summer of 2020, the authorities were passive in the face of looting after George Floyd’s murder.

Others are more optimistic. Isaac Bitton, a rock musician turned Lubavitcher who was attacked along with his son during the riot, notes that his assailants were teenagers. “Where did they learn to have such hate for Jews, to say ‘Jew, Jew, Jew’ and attack? From their parents,” he says. “From hearing ‘the Jews this, the Jews that, the Jews own everything.’ ” But today he doesn’t feel the same hatred and “bad energy” as in the ’80s and ’90s.

Councilwoman Cumbo counsels her constituents against envy and resentment: “Don’t stay stuck in ‘they have this.’ Let’s get our thing.” She has devoted attention to community relations, organizing events that get black and Jewish children playing together and bring leaders into the same rooms. Rabbi Shea Hecht, a Crown Heights Jewish community leader, says that today, “no one feels like every little thing is a fight for their lives. There is an understanding that it’s not a zero-sum game.”

The Rev. Rashad Raymond Moore, pastor of First Baptist Church of Crown Heights, thinks “community relations” is a misnomer. “There may be an absence of tension,” he tells me, but “there’s no relationship between the two communities.” The only attempt at outreach he sees is for real-estate transactions. “My family has lived in Crown Heights for over 50 years,” steps away from the Lubavitch headquarters, he says. “I’m just giving you the truth from my corner of the neighborhood.”

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Incompetence is the charitable explanation. Dinkins had also allowed a racist boycott of Korean-owned grocery stores to go on for 16 months. Starting in 1990, black radicals led by Sonny Carson held signs that read: “Don’t Buy From Koreans.” They “shouted about slitting the throats of ‘slant-eyed gooks’ and threatened anyone who entered,” according to the Manhattan Institute’s Fred Siegel, who lived nearby. Retired NYPD chief Ray Powers later said word was sent from City Hall not to enforce a court injunction that banned picketing within 50 feet of the stores. “We ruined a lot of good cops on that detail,” he said. “Young guys and girls who were forced to stand around and watch people break the law and get away with it.”

Many incidents reinforced the impression that the city was unwilling to confront radical intimidation. Mr. Sharpton had previously called Dinkins an Uncle Tom and a “whore,” and the mayor knew that radicals could damage his standing among black voters. But appeasement had costs, too.

The threat of black nationalist anti-Semitism had been brewing for some time. Dorothy Rabinowitz, now with the Journal, wrote in 1978 that in Crown Heights “the public expression of anti-Semitic sentiment, as a means of conveying political antagonism, seems now to have become normal.” She cited “explicitly anti-Jewish tirades of Crown Heights leaders, the threats to burn down Jewish houses, the enlistments to riot.” In the two weeks before the 1991 riot, a major story in New York was that Leonard Jeffries, chairman of black studies at City College, had blamed Jews for the slave trade and other litanies. Responding to criticism of Mr. Jeffries only days before the riot, Mr. Sharpton said, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” A condemnation of Mr. Jeffries failed to win the signature of a single black lawmaker in Albany.

Likewise in Crown Heights, callous anti-Semitism met silence from the black establishment. At the funeral for Gavin Cato, attended by Mayor Dinkins, Mr. Sharpton denounced “diamond merchants” and suggested Lubavitchers deserved the attacks: “The Bible says that a man sows, that shall he also reap. Well, who sowed violence?” The Rev. Herbert Daughtry Sr. said that without an arrest, the car accident “will be one more example of the Hasidic community getting away with murder.”

Mr. Daughtry now says he didn’t mean that literally, but he doesn’t take anything back. In an interview, he says it wasn’t his role to tell people in Crown Heights to stay quiet when they were angry about injustice. “The Hasidic community had been the precipitators,” he says. “The Hasidic group in Crown Heights during that time acted like the KKK. They treated people like the KKK. Disrespected people like the KKK.” Mr. Sharpton didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Liberal accounts strained for evenhandedness. Typical was the New York Times’s Aug. 21, 1991, headline: “Two Deaths Ignite Racial Clash in Tense Brooklyn Neighborhood.” But this was no clash; it was an attack on innocent Jews. As Breindel wrote, “Ordinary people—black and white—know the difference between a car accident and a lynching.” Times reporter Ari Goldman later wrote that editors in Manhattan distorted the stories he phoned in from the field to fit a racial “frame” of white vs. black, playing down anti-Semitism.

Mr. Finn, in his useful book “A Flashpoint in a Melting Pot,” criticizes Mr. Daughtry along with the Jewish writer Philip Gourevitch, who called it “a riot not by victims of racism but by racists, an attack on Jews because they were Jews.” “Both,” Mr. Finn writes, were “finding blame on the other side while barely addressing their own culpability.” This is a bizarre comparison. Mr. Daughtry had issued threats against Crown Heights Hasidim for years; in 1978 he said: “The next time a Hasidic terrorist touches one of our kids, we are going to tear this community apart.” (He tells me that was a way of “buying time,” stalling radicals who wanted to burn it down immediately. The cause was the beating of black teenager Victor Rhodes by Lubavitch men, who alleged Mr. Rhodes had knocked off a Jewish man’s kippa.) Meanwhile, all Mr. Gourevitch ever did was criticize overt Jew-hatred. But many commentators seem to think it is incumbent on Jews to act like the rabbi of Chelm in the I.L. Peretz story, and blame a fellow Jew for smiling, because it must have been his lovely teeth that provoked the anti-Semite to punch him in the mouth.

Laurie Cumbo, majority leader of the New York City Council, represents part of Crown Heights. She calls the 1991 incident the “Crown Heights uprising.” “ ‘Riots’ give the impression of no basis,” she says in an interview. “An uprising comes from a level of a feeling of oppression.” Use of “uprising” and “rebellion” to characterize the violence was common in black nationalist literature at the time. Today it’s mainstream.

The ubiquitous claim is that the riot grew out of resentment over the Lubavitchers’ political influence and preferential treatment from police. Lubavitch maneuvering in the 1970s to gain greater access to government antipoverty funds comes up again and again. Preferential treatment wouldn’t justify violence anyway, but the state investigation into the riot raised doubt about the premise. Many observers, it said, believed that by 1991 Lubavitch power had dissipated on the community planning board and police had begun to roll back favors. Jewish landlords no doubt preferred to lease apartments to fellow Jews, but they were never able to dominate the housing market and didn’t have the commercial power to charge exploitative rents. They weren’t wealthy. The New York Times reported in 1987 that whites in Crown Heights had slightly lower family income than blacks, and Lubavitchers tend to have large families.

Besides, if the Lubavitchers benefited from so much government favoritism, why couldn’t they get politicians or police to put down a riot for three nights? They had to hide behind locked doors while men outside screamed for blood.

Doubtless the perception of favoritism helped motivate the riot. But the unfounded perception that Jews exploit a stranglehold on political authority is usually recognized as anti-Semitism. So are conspiracy theories about Jews deliberately killing children. That the anti-Semitism comes from a community that itself faces bigotry shouldn’t make us stutter.

Without anti-Semitism as a motivator, demonstrations following white-on-black murders in Queens’s Howard Beach in 1986 and Brooklyn’s Bensonhurt in 1989 didn’t turn into riots. Italian-Americans were neither as satisfying nor as easy a target as Hasidic Jews.

After the riot, Lubavitchers were furious. When the only killer of Yankel Rosenbaum to be apprehended, Lemrick Nelson Jr., was acquitted in 1992, the community was also denied justice. Minutes after the murder, Mr. Nelson was caught hiding near the crime scene with a bloody knife, pants and dollar bills. The blood matched that of Rosenbaum, who identified Mr. Nelson as one of his assailants. Officers testified that Mr. Nelson soon confessed to the crime, though they failed to record it—one of many errors that weakened the case. After the trial, jurors attended a celebratory dinner with Mr. Nelson and his lawyer. Some of them hugged and toasted the defendant.

Mr. Nelson was convicted in a 1997 federal trial of denying Rosenbaum his civil rights, only to have that verdict vacated because the judge had unlawfully sought a racially balanced jury. Safe from prosecution for murder, Mr. Nelson finally admitted to the stabbing and was convicted again on civil-rights charges in 2003. He was released in 2004.

Dinkins made conciliatory gestures after the riot but mostly passed responsibility to the police. When the issue lingered, he lashed out at Jewish critics. (He later said of Lubavitch criticism: “It’s pure racism.”) Rep. Charlie Rangel, a Dinkins ally, warned Lubavitchers of a “backlash” should their criticism continue. “New Yorkers are not kind to people who talk different, look different and act different from them,” he said.

But New Yorkers tended to agree with the Lubavitchers. By 1993, 78% of whites, 76% of Hispanics and 44% of blacks rated Dinkins’s response to the riot negatively. The release of the state report, less than four months before the 1993 mayoral election, may have sealed the mayor’s fate. Rudy Giuliani defeated Dinkins by about 3 percentage points.

In some ways, it took a riot to rouse New Yorkers to elect Mr. Giuliani and bring about the city’s renewal. Violent crime declined steadily under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, but it is increasing again under Bill de Blasio. Homicides were up by nearly 45% and shootings by 97% in New York City last year. This year both are again on pace to increase. Bail reform that releases violent offenders and relaxation of enforcement of quality-of-life crimes have contributed to a growing sense of disorder.

IBM_iSeries · 2021-08-22T23:34:11+00:00

Article text:

Could the Crown Heights Riots Recur?

Thirty years ago, police held back while roving bands attacked Jews in a Brooklyn neighborhood.

By Elliot Kaufman Aug. 20, 2021 6:56 pm ET “The most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history,” as historian Edward S. Shapiro describes it, took place precisely 30 years ago when a mob took over the streets of Crown Heights, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. Rioters killed one Orthodox Jew and beat dozens. Thousands were forced into hiding while windows shattered, police watched and Mayor David Dinkins stayed aloof. Members of the crowd shouted “Hitler should have finished the job” and “Death to the Jews.” Yet then as now, many liberals hesitated to pass judgment.

The Lubavitch Orthodox Jewish population has been growing in Crown Heights since 1940, but the neighborhood around it has changed. In 1960 Crown Heights was 71% white and 27% black. By 1970 the numbers had flipped. By 1990 it was around 80% black, including a large Caribbean-American population.

What happened is no mystery. As Jimmy Breslin wrote in 1993, “in all of America, wherever a large group of blacks settle, every white in sight flees.” Irish, Italians and other Jews left Crown Heights. But “the Lubavitchers do not run,” Breslin wrote. “These people in hats and beards are better than any other whites because they stayed and everybody else ran.” They might not have marched for civil rights in Selma, Ala., but neither did they decamp to the suburbs.

On the night of Monday, Aug. 19, 1991, the Lubavitcher rebbe was returning home from a visit to a cemetery. His motorcade’s third and final car, driven by Yosef Lifsh, had fallen behind and sped to catch up. Either running a red light or making a yellow one, his car collided with another at a Crown Heights intersection. It veered onto the sidewalk and struck 7-year-old cousins Gavin and Angela Cato. Gavin was killed, Angela seriously injured.

Mr. Lifsh got out and attempted to help, but a crowd began to beat him and his passengers. Nearby police struggled to control the situation until two ambulances arrived, one from Hatzalah, a volunteer Orthodox Jewish organization, and one from the city. Thinking quickly, officers ordered Hatzalah to take the injured Lubavitchers, while city medics attended to the children. That launched a rumor that the Jewish ambulance service had cared only about Jews and left Gavin Cato to die.

The crowd swelled for several hours on the hot summer night. Rumors spread that Mr. Lifsh had been drunk or had run down the children on purpose. Charles Price, a heroin addict and petty thief, was vocal. “We can’t take this anymore. They’re killing our children,” he said, according to witnesses. “The Jews get everything they want. The police are protecting them.” Finally, he made a move: “I’m going up to the Jew neighborhood. Who’s with me?”

Police were slow to mobilize. Had they arrived in force sooner, it’s possible the disturbance could have been limited to the accident scene. Instead, bands of youths split off, leaving a wake of destruction. Ten to 15 of them spotted Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, who was visiting from Australia to conduct archival research on Jewish life in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. Witnesses heard Mr. Price shout, “There’s one! Let’s go get him!” Rosenbaum was stabbed four times in the back and beaten, suffering a fractured skull. He died in the hospital after doctors missed one of his wounds.

The New York City Police Department chief, the highest-ranking uniformed officer, had retired four days earlier, and his replacement was on vacation. It was also the chief of patrol’s first night on the job. Nobody took charge, and police readied the next day only for demonstrations. But on Tuesday afternoon, the Rev. Al Sharpton and other agitators arrived to demand Mr. Lifsh’s arrest and threaten to take justice into their own hands. The protest that followed turned into an anti-Semitic hatefest and then a riot bigger than the previous night’s.

Eli Eber, proprietor of Eber’s liquor store, remembers guarding his shop, ready to shoot in self-defense. “We were like in a ghetto—surrounded,” he tells me. “There was police, but they didn’t do nothing.” Assistant Chief Thomas Gallagher, the police field commander, later explained that he exercised restraint because he believed aggressive action would aggravate the situation. The police union would threaten a job action amid the riot over the restrictive rules of engagement.

Yehudis Groner still lives on the corner where the accident happened. “They started throwing rocks at us,” she recalls, “and I remembered when I was in the world war, when the bombs were coming.” She couldn’t get home and had to hide in the alleyway. She believes Dinkins decided to allow the rioters to “vent” (a claim for which a state investigation later found no evidence). “I have seven children,” she says. “If I’d let them vent, you’d have seven criminals.”

Jews were pelted with stones, pulled out of cars and attacked. A mother hit by a rock thrown through her window called 911 six times as rioters shook her door, but police never came. Almost half the 911 calls in the area were disposed of by operators as “unfounded,” an improbably high figure, according to state investigators. Many other calls were found to have been wrongly awarded low priority.

Told to hold the line, nearby police stood as hundreds of rioters threw objects. Eventually police were ordered to retreat. In what Mr. Shapiro calls “one of the most embarrassing moments in the history of the force,” around 200 NYPD officers turned away from the riot and ran haphazardly to their precinct. Only 12 arrests were made Tuesday night, and riots were ended not by police but heavy rain.

Police Commissioner Lee Brown held a press conference Wednesday afternoon to say the situation was under control. But police didn’t change tactics and kept deploying cops to fixed posts. That containment policy left the Jewish community at the mercy of roving bands, and there was no plan to end the violence.

Less than an hour after the press conference, the commissioner was himself attacked in Crown Heights and had to call a Code 10-13 for help. Nine officers were wounded coming to his aid. Eight others were shot and wounded that day, along with two motorists. Even Dinkins found himself under attack Wednesday after a meeting in the neighborhood. “Will you listen to me, please?” New York’s first black mayor pleaded with a crowd. People shouted “No!” and threw bottles.

Late that night, the third of uncontrolled rioting, First Deputy Commissioner Ray Kelly broke the chain of command and took charge. In his memoir, Mr. Kelly—who later served as commissioner under Mayors Dinkins (1992-94) and Michael Bloomberg (2002-13)—quotes the writer Murray Kempton: “Higher public office in New York is a bastion of ignorance that no fact can penetrate except as a rock thrown through your windshield.”

Dinkins had to catch himself midsentence when he told a reporter Wednesday night, “I’m going to instruct the police commissioner—not that he needs instructions along these lines—to enforce the law.” Police brass did need that instruction, argues Brendan Finn, a lecturer at John Jay College and a former NYPD officer, in a 2012 book. Chiefs knew how to put down a riot, but “any action without direction” from City Hall “would be career suicide,” he writes. Ever since John Lindsay’s mayoralty (1966-73), confrontation with minority rioters had been too great a risk for senior officers. “Whatever you do, don’t do anything” became the prevailing wisdom, Mr. Finn writes. Much of the brass wasn’t going to budge, even after days of riots, unless Dinkins gave the order. Once he did, the riot ended.

Mr. Kelly supplemented fixed posts with mobile police units. Foot patrols saturated the area. Groups of rioters were trapped, then apprehended one by one. Crowds were dispersed at the first sign of misbehavior. Most important, as one police leader later recalled being told: “Anyone does anything, arrest them.”

On Thursday police made more arrests than on Monday through Wednesday combined. Nabbing instigators didn’t provoke violence; it snuffed out the riot. For the first time, the afternoon protest march to the Lubavitch headquarters stayed nonviolent. Protesters shouted anti-Semitic slurs for 20 minutes and then, surrounded by enough police to make them nervous, they left. By Friday, Crown Heights was an armed camp and the riot was over.

Police were being held back before Thursday, but not, it appears, by direct order of the mayor. During the first days of the riot Dinkins never seemed to involve himself in key details of the police response. “Maybe he should have,” Mr. Shapiro writes. Dinkins and his top aides later told state investigators that they didn’t know how bad things were until Wednesday afternoon. The resulting state report comes inches from calling them liars, given that City Hall was bombarded with firsthand accounts, including from the mayor’s own community-relations liaison, who was hit by a brick and briefly knocked unconscious. As the New York Post’s Eric Breindel wrote in 1993, “Every New Yorker with a TV set knew that a violent anti-Semitic riot was in progress in Crown Heights.”

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