25 Years After Crown Heights <br>Liberals Have Yet To Stand <br>With Orthodox Jews in N.Y.

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“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.”

That was how the Forward, which I was editing at the time, began its Page One editorial on the Crown Heights riot that erupted 25 years ago Friday. It was the first editorial to liken the violence to the pogroms from which so many Jews fled to New York.

Not that Crown Heights was anything like the scale of the attacks that took place in Eastern Europe and with government sanction. But the attacks on Jews were animated by the same anti-Semitism.

Crown Heights erupted after a driver in the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s motorcade lost control and killed a black child, Gavin Cato. For three days, historian Edward Shapiro would write, “bands of young blacks” had “roamed” the neighborhood, assaulting Jews.

Within hours, a Jewish scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum, was knifed to death by a member of a mob, some yelling “Kill the Jew.” Mr. Shapiro would call the riot “the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history.”

As if to underscore the point, Rosenbaum’s killer, Lemrick Nelson, was acquitted of murder by a New York jury. It would take two federal civil-rights prosecutions to send him away (he eventually did 10 years on civil-rights charges).

Yet even after all these years, what stands out for me is the reluctance of some of the most distinguished political and private leaders in our city to describe the riot as the anti-Semitic attack that it was.

Among them was Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, which had hung back from defending the Orthodox Jews under attack. Mr. Foxman quickly recovered, issuing a public apology within days of the riot.

The city’s government was also wanting, a 1993 report commissioned by Governor Mario Cuomo concluded. It faulted Mayor Dinkins and Police Commissioner Lee Brown, though it didn’t support the claim that they’d intentionally shrunk from seeking to halt the violence.

The most abject default was by the New York Times, which insisted on portraying the violence as a clash between blacks and Jews. Its mendacity was finally exposed 20 years later by the paper’s legman in Crown Heights, Ari Goldman.

Mr. Goldman wrote his exposé for the Jewish Week in 2011. He told of how, from the streets of Crown Heights, he’d been assigned to call in the facts of the violence — only to have them rewritten into a fantasy yarn.

“In all my reporting during the riots I never saw — or heard of — any violence by Jews against blacks,” Mr. Goldman wrote. “But the Times was dedicated to this version of events: blacks and Jews clashing amid racial tensions.”

He recalled how the paper ran a photo of a Hasidic man “brandishing an open umbrella before a police officer in riot gear.” The cutline under the photo read: “A police officer scuffling with a Hasidic man yesterday on President Street.”

Mr. Goldman finally reached his “breaking point” when demonstrators on Eastern Parkway started chanting “Heil Hitler” and “Death to the Jews.” He lost his cool, warning his editors over the phone, “You’ve got this story all wrong. All wrong.”

It would be folly to suggest that Crown Heights has fully healed, a fact that, as the Post marked in its editorial this week, the festival set for this weekend in Crown Heights can’t disguise. But the efforts at reconciliation are no small thing.

Liberal elites have made no such progress. They have never lifted a finger for the Orthodox Jews. The animus that erupted as “Heil Hitler” in Crown Heights has broken out on some of our city’s finest campuses, which echo with “Zionists Out” and “Long live the Intifada.”

And liberals are unalarmed that Black Lives Matter has begun to make common cause with the BDS movement against Israel. So 25 years after Crown Heights, it’s anyone’s guess where the next attacks will break out against the Jews.

This column first appeared in the New York Post.


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