From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DISPATCH
Up From the Heights
How an anti-Semitic riot changed New York's history.
Jewish homes were being attacked, windows broken. Jewish residents were cowering in the safest rooms of their homes. Sympathetic Gentiles in the area were sneaking word to some of their Jewish neighbors to keep their lights turned off. Marauding bands of outside agitators were roaming around, blaming Jews. This was taking place not in, say, prewar Poland or the Pale of Settlement back in an even earlier time. This was taking place in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.So began an editorial that--10 years ago this week--I tapped out on deadline at the Long Island plant that printed the newspaper I was editing, the Jewish Forward. Friends and reporters phoned in details, as word coursed through the neighborhood, the borough, the community and, eventually, the country that something very much like a classical pogrom was occurring right in the heart of the American city with the world's largest Jewish population.
On the 10th anniversary it would be hard to overstate the importance in the history of New York of the three days and four nights of anti-Jewish rioting in Crown Heights. It doomed the re-election chances of David Dinkins, the first black mayor of the nation's largest city, even though Mr. Dinkins had a distinguished record of speaking out against anti-Semitism within the black community. The mayor and his police commissioner, Lee Brown, had failed to bring the rioting under control at its outset. More broadly, it illuminated a chasm between the black and Jewish communities across which it may take decades to rebuild bridges.
Before the riot and after, the leadership in the black community had failed to confront what the Forward's New York bureau chief at the time, Philip Gourevitch, writing in Commentary magazine, called "political anti-Semitism." It was the season of such demagogues as Leonard Jeffries, a City College professor who made a name for himself by mocking whites and Jews. It was, as Mr. Gourevitch wrote, shockingly rare for white or black leaders to speak directly to blacks about anti-Semitism. He noted one exception, Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard, who wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times a few weeks before the riots arguing that the ultimate damage done by black anti-Semitism is to the political culture in the black community. "For his pains," Mr. Gourevitch reported, the Harvard professor "was lambasted by other blacks and received at least 10 death threats, and no significant public support."
During the riots, the New York Times itself, in one of the most painful blunders of its long history, downplayed the violence and wrote about it in terms that suggested a moral equivalence between the perpetrators and the victims. Eventually, the newspaper's then-executive editor, Max Frankel, would, in his autobiography, rue as a "major news failure" the fact that the paper did not give enough prominence to the Crown Heights riots.
Important Jewish leaders, too, were slow to react. Only a handful from outside the Crown Heights community rushed to the scene of the riot. The Anti-Defamation League, arguably the nation's leading institution in the fight against anti-Semitism, waited until August 30, a week and a half after the disturbance began, to go public with the recognition that this was at bottom an anti-Jewish riot. Then the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, issued a famous statement, ruminating on the default.
Mr. Foxman said he had been trying to understand why there was a "curious silence, at first, from those of us often heard to voice the concerns of the Jewish community." He posited that it was a self-imposed restraint born of a desire not to hurt those who have been hurt so often and so much. He said a "strange sort of color-consciousness may begin to function when the problem is anti-Semitism." Had Yankel Rosenbaum been murdered by white youths, he said, the Jewish community would have been up in arms. "But here we listened to the outpouring of sociological terms."
Nor was it just the mayor, the Times and the ADL. There was also the jury system in Kings County, where prosecutors brought murder charges against one of Yankel Rosenbaum's killers, Lemrick Nelson. Apprehended by officers who chased Rosenbaum's assailants, Nelson had been found to have a bloody knife and three bloody dollar bills in his pocket, police reported. DNA on the evidence was later matched to Rosenbaum's. The dying victim identified Nelson as his assailant, and Nelson later confessed. But a jury acquitted him and, according to newspaper reports at the time, several of its members later took Nelson out to dinner.
It is one of the most unforgettable facts about Crown Heights that bringing Nelson to justice in the city of New York would eventually require federal prosecutors to haul out a civil-rights law intended to combat nullification by racist juries in the Jim Crow South. Nelson's federal conviction, and that of another individual, are under appeal.
In the years since the riot, the Jewish community in Crown Heights and the African-American and Caribbean immigrant communities have begun to reach out to each other. These efforts--under the umbrella Community Alliance Revitalization Effort, or CARE--cover everything from zoning to crime control. It has been widely remarked that today there are lots of community figures on both sides who know one another's beeper and cell-phone numbers.
This week, young Gavin Cato's father, Carmel Cato, and Yankel Rosenbaum's brother, Norman, met for the first time since Gavin and Yankel were killed. They started with lunch at a kosher delicatessen in Brooklyn and then went to City Hall to be received by Mr. Giuliani. Mr. Rosenbaum handed Mr. Cato a letter from his and Yankel's parents. Mr. Cato expressed his appreciation and presented Mr. Rosenbaum with a plaque from the Cato family. Messrs. Rosenbaum and Cato were talking about baseball, so the mayor gave them both bats with his name on them.
Reprinted in the New York Post, the letter from Yankel's mother, Fay Rosenbaum, began: "Dear Mr. Cato" and said that her husband and she regretted that they were unable to meet with him but hoped to do so when they were next in New York. "I am sure that no words can fully express our feelings--yours and ours--at this time." She said she and her husband "hope and pray that you can also draw on the good memories of your son to give you, with G-d's help, the strength and courage to carry on, as we try to."
Mr. Lipsky is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Wednesdays.
