On the evening of August 19, 1991, in Crown Heights, New York, Yosef Lifsh ran a red light and crashed his car. A seven-year-old Guyanese immigrant, Gavin Cato, was killed instantly, while his sister was severely injured. What followed was the worst anti-Semitic riot in history.
For almost three days, rioters attacked local Jews and destroyed Jewish homes, businesses, and institutions while police stood down. One Jew, Yankel Rosenbaum, was murdered by a group of men chanting “get the Jew!”
The riot was a touchstone moment in the history of Black-Jewish relations, anti-Semitism in America, and American race relations more broadly.
On December 23, Mosaic hosted an exclusive screening for subscribers of a short new documentary on the riot, Get the Jew: The Crown Heights Riot Revisited. Along with the screening, there was an introduction from the film’s producer and director, Michael Pack, and a conversation afterwards between Elliot Kaufman, the Wall Street Journal letters editor who appears in the film, and Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver. You can watch the documentary itself along with video of the discussion, or read the transcript, below.
Watch
Read
Jonathan Silver:
Some 33 years ago, in August 1991, riots broke out in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, a neighborhood shared by African Americans and Jews, mostly members of the hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement. We’re going to air a new short documentary that tells the story of the Crown Heights riots, what led to them, how and why they persisted for so many days on end, and what they meant to New York City in the early 1990s and what they mean to us now.
In virtually every diaspora community that the Jews have lived in over our long history, we have functioned as barometers of civic health. And to us, as an unassimilable minority, a society’s resplendent virtues and its darker vices are usually made manifest. That was true in New York in 1991, and it is true on college campuses and in the protest grounds of major cities around the world today.
We are happy to be joined this evening by two wonderful guests. Michael Pack is the president of Manifold Productions and he is the producer of this documentary. And Elliot Kaufman, whom you’ll see on screen in the documentary itself, is a Wall Street Journal editorial writer and its letters’ editor.
Now I’m going to ask Michael to introduce the documentary. Then we’ll watch it together and after that, Elliot and I will discuss it before turning to questions from the audience.
Michael Pack:
Thank you, Jon. Let me just say that this is the first in a series of short documentaries at my company, Palladium Pictures. This is a partnership between our company and the Wall Street Journal opinion section. And the purpose of this collaboration is to do short documentaries about events that have been misreported, underreported, or just sent down the memory hole that are relevant today.
And for just the reasons you said, Jon, this is a perfect event to begin with. First of all, the documentary is based on a brilliant article by Elliot Kaufman, and on his research and his understanding, but it is the first of a series. The film is called Get the Jew, since that’s what was shouted in Crown Heights.
And the second one in our series is about the premiership of Liz Truss, which is called, The Prime Minister Versus the Blob. But we really did think this was an important one to start with. Anti-Semitism is on the rise today. I think when your viewers see this film, those who recall the events of 1991 and those who don’t, will see its relevance today.
Jonathan Silver:
Thank you, Michael. So now ladies and gentlemen, let’s take a look.
* * * * *
Jonathan Silver:
The last line of this powerful documentary asks if we have learned the lessons of the Crown Heights riot. I would like us to come to that question in time, because of course all of us are thinking about the echoes and resonances that that moment has for us.
But I’d like to go back to the 1990s for a minute with you, Elliot. There are a number of different aspects that we could look at with regard to what unfolded during those four days. There are the policing and political decisions that led to inadequate law enforcement. There is the media coverage of the events leading up to the riot, and its role in stimulating some of the activism and the turn toward violence. And of course there is the relationship between the African American and the Jewish communities in New York. There are a lot of different dimensions we could look at.
I want to start with some of the dominant personalities who populated that moment. All of us are seized by the fact that we see Al Sharpton as a key player in the 1990s Crown Heights riots. He is now a star at MSNBC and is completely mainstream today. Then, it seems that he had a significant role as an instigator and leader. Why don’t you just explain what you make of that?
Elliot Kaufman:
You’re right to say that he’s mainstream now. He was either the most frequent visitor to the Obama White House, or one of the most frequent visitors. He has an MSNBC show. You could say that at the time of the riots he was more powerful and more influential, but less accepted. And so there were a great many people who would say, “Al Sharpton, he’s marginal. He’s just the loudest voice.” And yet he was the loudest voice in a way that maybe he isn’t these days.”
And so as he said in the film, he had previous experiences with things like this. That was how he put it himself. “I had done Bensonhurst, I had done Howard Beach and other cases,” is what he says in the film. He’s referring to major clashes after white-on-black killings, and in each case the circumstances are disputed. But these weren’t car accidents. And it’s worth noting also that in those cases, when Sharpton arrives, there’s already anger, there’s already a racial controversy, and Sharpton comes on the scene to drum something up. Some would say to wring out what he can from it in terms of publicity.
I would also note that in those two cases there were huge demonstrations and a lot of media attention, but there weren’t riots—even though what had happened was actually much worse than the car accident in Crown Heights that set everything else off. And you have to ask why. First, those were Italian-American communities and some people argue they weren’t as easy of a target as hasidic Jews were. Some say they weren’t as satisfying a target as hasidic Jews were—that if you attacked Italians, you couldn’t also tell yourself that you were making a political statement, that somehow you’re taking on the system. But if you attack Jews, in a strange way, you can tell yourself that.
Jonathan Silver:
The anti-Semitic attack embeds this in a structure of the quest for justice?
Elliot Kaufman:
Yes.
Jonathan Silver:
. . . in a way that is not present when confronting other sub-communities of New York.
Elliot Kaufman:
It’s worth emphasizing too that it’s not that Sharpton arrived in Crown Heights and then things got out of hand. Things got absolutely crazy the first night when Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed and killed. Knowing that that was the backstory—that this is so violent, it could lead to murder—Al Sharpton shows up and further inflames the crowds, and keeps this going a second day and a third day. And it probably would’ve been a fourth day if Ray Kelly, [then the first deputy police commissioner], hadn’t put an end to things.
The police, by the way, after that first night assumed it was over. They prepared only for demonstrations the next day. What they didn’t expect was that a familiar cast of characters—Al Sharpton, and Sonny Carson, and Colin Moore, and Alton Maddox, and Herb Daughtry—would show up and make this into something larger than a car accident and what the police thought was just a momentary spasm of anger.
Jonathan Silver:
Elliot, the documentary that we just saw is influenced considerably by a long essay that you wrote in the Wall Street Journal in August 2021 called, “Could the Crown Heights Riots Recur?” Just tell us how you got interested in the subject, why you thought it was important to resurrect this whole episode and re-investigate all of the different elements of it, why you thought it merited the attention of readers of the Wall Street Journal.
Elliot Kaufman:
It’s a good question. I wrote it for the 30th anniversary [of the riot] and I thought this was a nice time to bring it up. In this business, you’re always looking for some way that you can call something news. Well, an anniversary maybe gets you part of the way there. But the reason why is because of the experience I had of telling people about the Crown Heights riot—even Jews—and they wouldn’t believe me. “In 1991 this happened? Are you sure it wasn’t 1931?” “No, it was 1991.” “In New York City? Really?”
Jonathan Silver:
In Seinfeld’s New York?
Elliot Kaufman:
In Seinfeld’s New York City.
And not only that this happened, but that it was allowed to continue the next day and the day after? And so, after meeting that disbelief, I thought it might be worth investigating the elements that led to something like this. And I wrote it in 2021, so the summer of 2020 was not far from my mind—those riots and that breakdown of public order. And I was thinking about what happens when the police aren’t going to do anything. Thinking about when that happens, how the media cover it, what they say, the sort of excuses that they come up with. All of that was on my mind, perhaps even more than the specifically Jewish parts of it.
And then I came to read deeply about it, and there are several good books on the Crown Heights riot. I would recommend in particular one by the historian Edward Shapiro, father of Marc Shapiro, by the way, another Jewish writer. What I came to understand is that there was something even deeper here that had to do with Black-Jewish relations, and that had to do with the course of American liberalism in the second half of the 20th century. Liberals at the time were confronted with a series of choices. If I had to oversimplify drastically, I could say liberals had to choose between Blacks and Jews on a whole series of issues. And these are two core constituencies of American liberalism.
Jonathan Silver:
Just unpack that for a moment. Why did they confront that choice?
Elliot Kaufman:
Well, you have the civil-rights revolution in which liberals very much did not have to choose. Blacks and Jews were on the same side. It was an alliance. Fighting for equality under the law. And then it seems like there was almost a naive assumption, on the part of many liberals and on the part of many Jews, that when the legal barriers came down, Black students would flood into Harvard and would reach equal representation in all sorts of fields.
Jonathan Silver:
Just as when barriers were dropped to prohibit Jews from entering Harvard, in fact they did.
Elliot Kaufman:
Exactly. But then this doesn’t happen and the civil-rights movement starts to change in the second half of the 1960s, and starts saying, “This is a fake equality. What we need is enforced equality. Instead of non-discrimination, we need quotas.” And quotas were the issue in which these fights really crystallized, because then people start thinking about things through the quota ideology: that a group’s percentage of the population should be its percentage of the seats at this university, its percentage of the jobs in this union or at this law firm. Then not only do you abandon core liberal precepts, but you run into the Jews, who aren’t 3 percent of the students and aren’t 3 percent at various law firms, but might be more than that. They are overrepresented. And that becomes suspicious.
So you have these clashes between the two groups and liberals are made to choose in many ways. And I think for the radical Black spokesmen of the late 60s and the 70s on down, Jews become the figurehead of liberalism. When they want to say, “No, we don’t want to work with whites and we don’t want to work with the system,” well, who were the whites that they had been working with? They were Jews.
So if you want to show that you’re making a real break with old-style liberalism, that you are all about revolution, that you are all about taking on the system, you have to take on the Jews. And in terms of media, if you say something about whites, you’re not going to get the same kind of attention. If you say something about Jews, you’re in the New York Times. All of a sudden the news cameras are following you. And radical Black spokesmen learned this very well over the course of the second half of the 20th century.
Jonathan Silver:
It’s interesting that the achievement of that civil-rights revolution made it possible, for the first time really, for the meritocratic promise of American society to be so widely shared. For Jews, the meritocratic aspect of that society became a ladder that allowed them to grow in society, to enter into the firms and the professions, and become a success in the country. When the African American community did not succeed in the same way, its leaders turned their attention against that meritocratic ethic altogether. And with the Jews as the symbols of its success, they were recategorized as the face of oppression.
Elliot Kaufman:
Well, I would limit it to these radical spokesmen especially, who see real opportunity in this message, as opposed to the broader Black American community. However, it wasn’t just the spokesmen. Al Sharpton had big crowds and so did the rest of them, and they were feeding into something. And one saw this with the most radical of the spokesmen, the ones succeeding Malcolm X and carrying forward the Nation of Islam.
As we get closer to the 1990s, one sees the role of Louis Farrakhan. And Farrakhan and his deputies, just in these years—the late 80s and early 90s—are doing an amazingly successful campus tour at top universities, at top historically Black colleges, and are attracting significant followings with both a message of uplift and a message of radical resentment toward, and separatism from, whites, fixated particularly on the Jews. And it’s no coincidence, I think, that just before the Crown Heights riot you have the publication of the Nation of Islam’s book The Secret History of the Relationship between Blacks and Jews, a pseudo-historical work claiming that Jews were responsible for the slave trade.
Then you have the Leonard Jeffries affair, as was mentioned in the film. And Al Sharpton has a famous quote that gets brought up every now and then. He said, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house and we’ll get it on.” A provocative quote. When did he say that? He said that in response to Jewish criticism of Leonard Jeffries, [an anti-Semitic professor of Black studies at City College]. He was speaking in defense of Leonard Jeffries. When a condemnation of Jeffries went through the New York State Senate in Albany, not a single Black lawmaker would sign it. You had huge support for Jeffries in the Amsterdam News, a Black newspaper, and on the WLIB radio station. This was coming from somewhere.
Also at this time, you have the rap group, Public Enemy, heavily influenced by the Nation of Islam and its teachings. And so on all levels—the academic level with this strange Afro-centrist movement [spearheaded by Jeffries], the street level with the Nation of Islam, Public Enemy popular culture—a message is getting out there. And this wasn’t so long ago.
Jonathan Silver:
Elliot, there’s obviously a way to interpret the Crown Heights riots through this racial lens, and that is an unavoidable sociological fact of American history. I want now to turn to a completely different lens through which we might look at what happened there, which has to do with the progressive reluctance to exercise law enforcement. What you see in the documentary is police officers themselves standing there on the scene, willing to do the job, but somehow, in some mysterious way, they were not authorized to do it. That’s a political decision. And that is a decision which one sees in New York and other progressive-run cities today, just as you saw it in 1991.
Elliot Kaufman:
I think that’s right. I’m from Canada and when I talk to Canadian Jews right now, one thing I hear from them is a sense that no one will do anything about the violent anti-Semitic attacks, about people shooting at schools. And when you have that sense that the police aren’t going to do anything, that’s when it gets really dangerous. That’s when you start questioning everything. And I think the Crown Heights riot can’t be understood apart from that.
What do I mean by this specifically? Let’s talk about what happened and then maybe back up a little bit. The police are very slow to respond the first night for a variety of reasons. But you could say that this was the first night, and they weren’t ready for this, and it exploded. I think it started raining heavily [that first night]; that’s why the rioting stopped. But it ends the first night.
The second day, the police have a presence there [in Crown Heights] ready for demonstrations, but what they get is a riot. By this time, it had happened the previous night, and they should do something. The police have significant numbers on the scene already, and they can call more in. But what they do is establish a strategy of setting up a perimeter. They secure the area and stop the riot from spreading, which is all well and good, and maybe that’s a first step, but what about within the perimeter? What about the Jewish community of Crown Heights which is at the rioters’ mercy?
I try to explain to people, it’s not just Yankel Rosenbaum who was killed: you have dozens of people assaulted, homes attacked, businesses ransacked. Jews had to hide in their homes for three days while people outside screamed for their blood and meant it. You just have craziness. And by the way, police took it harder than anyone. Hundreds of policemen were injured; some were shot. Ed Shapiro calls it the most embarrassing moment in the history of the NYPD. On that second night, 200 police are lined up across from the rioters, standing there. They’re being pelted with bottles, stones, bricks. From across [the street and] above on rooftops. They stand there and take it, taking serious injuries until they are ordered to run back to their precinct. They turned and ran away from the riot.
So people start asking all kinds of questions, “Why was this? Why didn’t they do something? Why didn’t they make arrests?” And what people conclude, as you heard, is that [then-Mayor David] Dinkins must have ordered them not to. It’s possible he did, by the way. We can’t prove it, but it’s possible he did. But what I tried to suggest in the film is that the evidence is that he said absolutely nothing, that he looked away the whole time, and ignored it as best he possibly could. Now, he and his assistants tried to claim that they didn’t know what was happening this whole time. And the state report comes inches from calling them liars, because it is totally unbelievable. And the mayor’s community-relations assistants went there, saw it, got hit themselves. One of them got knocked unconscious, hit in the head by a brick, and came back and told the mayor’s office what was happening.
What I think happened is that there was a culture at the NYPD that had established itself ever since the Mayor John Lindsay years, the late 60s and early 70s, of, “Whatever you do, do not get into a confrontation with minority rioters. And certainly never do it without political backing. As a senior NYPD officer, that is the single quickest way to lose your job in one moment.” And so if political backing wasn’t going to come from the mayor’s office, the NYPD was going to stand there and do nothing and let it happen. It simply was an impossible risk for them to take at that time.
And there’s a very interesting moment. After the second night Police Commissioner Lee Brown says, “It’s under control now.” And then it happens on day three. He himself gets attacked and has to call for help. The mayor is attacked. Then they get it. What does the mayor say that third night to reporters? He says, “I’m going to give the police commissioner an order.” And then he stops himself, and says, “Not that he needs instructions along these lines, but I’m going to give him the order to enforce the law.” And I think this was very telling, because the NYPD did need that order. And if it didn’t come, the anti-Semitic riot would have continued for another day and maybe another after that.
Jonathan Silver:
So here, I want to be subtle and careful in drawing a contemporary allusion, because I have to say that in New York, over the past months and year of rioting and all kinds of anti-Jewish activism, the NYPD has by and large and for the most part been heroic in protecting Jews and in trying to stand up for order.
Nevertheless, when Americans look at the road to the airports across the country being blocked by pro-Hamas activists, and when they see American flags being taken down in front of the Union Station train hall in Washington, DC and burned, and when they see all of the disorder that comes from these sorts of riots, it stands to reason that they’ll have a reaction similar to the reaction that New Yorkers had—that non-Jewish New Yorkers had—in the next election that you detail that came after the Crown Heights riots.
It seems to me that this is one of those things—the failure to support law enforcement and the failure to uphold the social order that is necessary for society to run—that has gigantic consequences. It is one of the lessons that I take from the 1991 example that seems relevant today.
Elliot Kaufman:
Yes, and I could add that in 1991, the NYPD wanted to act. It actually had to threaten a job action, that is, to stop working on the job unless its rules of engagement were changed, because police were being ordered to hold their position rather than make arrests. So the NYPD was not happy about being pelted with bricks by some rioters who were busy yelling about Jews.
In the present day, I’m happy with the NYPD and I’m not happy. It is doing a lot, but it’s also not enforcing vigorously public-disturbance laws when a protest starts becoming a danger to the public. And when Jews are around, do they take away the Jews or do they put an end to what’s putting Jews in danger? There is more they could do and it would require more political will, but I agree, they’re certainly doing an awful lot.
The real problem, in terms of violence against Jews in New York, is with the legal system more than the police. The police are fed up. And I’ve actually reported on this. I think my article was called “‘Inconvenient Anti-Semites’ in New York’s War on Hate.” The politicians love saying, “We need to put an end to hate.” But I just wish they would punish crime. I think that would be enough. And instead, when you actually look at the numbers, when people in Brooklyn—Crown Heights, Williamsburg, what have you—punch a hasidic Jew in the face on the street, the NYPD arrests them only to find them back on the street that same night. And then their prosecution gets dragged out; it gets downgraded to a misdemeanor because the district attorney won’t treat it as a hate crime. And then progressive prosecutors don’t want to prosecute anything but a felony. So it just gets dropped. And how many of these guys ever go to prison? It turns out essentially none of them do.
And so I think that’s another way that New York City is failing, in particular, visible Jews in dangerous areas. The Jewish community knows that the NYPD will be there to defend against straight violence, but the NYPD knows that what its doing is kind of futile.
Jonathan Silver:
That’s my point: that there is a sort of harmony between the 1991 moment and this moment in which law enforcement is on the ground and ready to do its job, and it’s tethered to an elected political class that is preventing it from restoring the sort of order that all citizens of New York need.
Elliot, you referred to the 2020 riots, and I want to go back there for a moment, because the 2020 riots coincided with an enormous policy question. The policy question then had to do with whether there should be an effort to defund the police. There’s a lot of discussion about how Black communities actually oppose defunding the police, because of course they are disproportionately affected by the lack of law enforcement. Is that the same or is that different than the 1991 example?
Michael Pack:
One of the reasons I think the Crown Heights riots is relevant does relate strongly to the George Floyd riots, but not so much on the issue of defunding the police. For me, the lesson is the difficulty that Democratic leadership, especially in one-party cities, has standing up to radicalism and violence from the progressive wing, whether the issue is defunding the police or anti-Semitism from people like Al Sharpton. They just can’t do it. And it’s not because they’re anti-Semitic. Take for example the case of Crown Heights. Clearly the mayor and the chief of police, David Dinkins and Lee Brown, were not anti-Semitic. They just didn’t feel politically they could stand up to the anti-Semites, either Al Sharpton or others. Al Sharpton denies it, of course.
And it’s the same in Portland and Seattle and Minneapolis in 2020. The defund-the-police movement was perceived as a progressive movement; it was a progressive movement. And people wouldn’t stand up to it. The mayors of those cities just could not stand up to it. I think that’s the lesson. And in that sense, the issue doesn’t matter so long as the violence is coming from th progressive wing.
Jonathan Silver:
Here’s a question that’s come in from the audience. Elliot, the documentary mentions that only 3 percent of the Jewish vote in the subsequent election changed its mind. And it’s impossible to ascertain with any high degree of certainty the extent to which the Crown Heights riots influenced that. There are probably a dozen reasons why Jews may have made the decision to cast their votes one way or another. But the question is whether there was any effort among Jews to organize politically after the Crown Heights riots. And if there wasn’t, why do you think there wasn’t?
Elliot Kaufman:
The question is, by whom? And who did that influence? Yankel Rosenbaum’s uncle made a huge stir for years, holding politicians accountable. Another figure [who gets involved] is Rabbi Avi Weiss. He so dogged David Dinkins on this issue that Mayor Dinkins, in a thinly veiled reference, called Rabbi Weiss a racist over this, which was just a slur. There were efforts, but I don’t think they came from the major Jewish organizations. They came from what you might call rebels on the outside. Rosenbaum’s family was from Australia.
And there is a question of why that is. Even during the Crown Heights riot, Jewish organizations were very slow to respond. And I’m talking about the ADL, for instance. Abe Foxman, [the longtime head of the ADL], has apologized for this, and over the years has said that it’s one of his biggest regrets in all his years of service. There was just a sense that maybe they just didn’t understand [what had transpired]. Their constituents were certainly not Lubavitch Hasidim. Liberal Jews were not being threatened in the same way on the streets, and so it wasn’t felt that way.
So while the Jewish vote in Brooklyn shifted more than 3 percent [away from Dinkins], in Manhattan a lot of people think it went the other way, and Dinkins gained some Jewish votes compared to the previous election. And so there was a lot of intra-Jewish politics there that I think are still very interesting in terms of who feels the danger and therefore how they understand anti-Semitism.
Michael Pack:
Let me add that I think the anti-Semitism on college campuses last year provides an interesting contrast. Yes, there was a feeling by these major Jewish organizations [in 1991] that, “Those Chabadniks in Brooklyn were not like us. They’re not Upper West Side Jews. They don’t shop at Zabar’s. They don’t dress like us.” But now the anti-Semitism is in places like Harvard and MIT and Columbia, so maybe the Jewish attitudes will shift. I see some shifting. And, in fact, the attitudes to Chabad have shifted over the years too. So I do hear, at least anecdotally, that now [non-hasidic Jews see anti-Semitism as a threat] to their own children, not just over there in Brooklyn.
Jonathan Silver:
There’s a question from Bob in Vermont who asks if you can specify the source of antipathy against Jews in the Crown Heights neighborhood in the first place.
Elliot Kaufman:
I would say anti-Semitism is the source. But it’s interesting because there are these efforts to get an answer to exactly that question. And the New York Times started trying to do that almost immediately. A Black population is rioting; what was done to them by the whites? That is the narrative. “Well, there was a car accident. That doesn’t seem like it would really explain it. So there must be something else. Let’s start covering that and making that fit into the familiar story.”
And so in the literature on this, you see all kinds of efforts. Were the Chabadniks getting special favors from the police? Well, what does that mean? That means there was a police car outside of 770 [Eastern Parkway, the headquarter of the Lubavitch Hasidim]. Well, someone tried to burn down 770. They were closing down streets for certain Jewish holidays at times. That doesn’t really sound like it would rise to the level [of provoking riots], although maybe it would annoy people. There is stuff about preferential treatment from a community-planning board in the 1970s in its distribution of anti-poverty funds. However, the state investigation found that Jewish influence on the community-planning board had dissipated by the 90s. There wasn’t disproportionate Jewish power.
I think when you zoom out, what you start to see is, yes, those tensions were there, those beliefs and antagonisms were there. But how do you understand the belief that Jews exploit a stranglehold on political power that they’re using to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else, and something to do with killing children? It starts to sound like anti-Semitism. And the search for these motives, I think, can lead you in the wrong direction.
Just one last thing I would say is that my former colleague at the Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz, wrote about a previous flare-up in Crown Heights for Commentary magazine in 1978, and basically predicted the Crown Heights riot in 1978. What she wrote was that anti-Semitism has become the language of political discontent and political protest. There are open enlistments to riot and burn down the Jewish area and force the Jews out as a way of expressing political grievance. And so yes, there were political grievances, and I think those grievances took the form of anti-Semitism.
Michael Pack:
But Elliot, you point out in your article, and it is actually confirmed by Al Sharpton, that many of the people [involved in the violence] were from outside Crown Heights. So all the focus on the tension between the Blacks in Crown Heights and the Jews in Crown Heights doesn’t deal with the fact that Al Sharpton, and many of the people who supported Al Sharpton, came from outside and hence didn’t share in those grievances whether they explained anything or not.
Elliot Kaufman:
Absolutely right. And by the way, it’s just worth adding Al Sharpton, Herb Daughtry—all these guys—weren’t from Crown Heights. They came when they saw that there was violence. And then when the violence was over and the community was left in ruins, they got out of there. There was nothing left for them.
Jonathan Silver:
There is actually an Al Sharpton question here from the audience. He’s become mainstream of course, as we’ve said. Given what we’ve learned about him tonight—and this is not the only example in his past, but even on the basis of what we’ve learned this evening alone—how did it happen that despite his past, he could mainstreamed on the left?
Michael Pack:
That is a question for someone on the left to answer. His capacity to reinvent himself is very powerful. He claims to have changed his mind on some of these things. We interviewed him for about an hour and we asked him many things. It wasn’t all in the film, but he claims to have had a discussion with Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King’s widow, and he sort of changed his mind. But the fact that he is a mainstream figure on the left tells you a lot about the progressive left in America, which has actually moved, I think, further left than it was in 1991, so that Al Sharpton feels like he’s more mainstream.
Jonathan Silver:
Elliot, I want to ask about the reaction of the Lubavitcher rebbe to what was happening. How much do we know about that? And the reaction of Chabad more broadly?
Elliot Kaufman:
A very good question. It’s something that often goes unspoken in a lot of these things, but the rebbe has a stroke—when was his stroke?
Michael Pack:
Soon after.
Elliot Kaufman:
In 1992. And his health was already in decline. And what I’ve heard is he was sort of absent. And this came in for criticism in two different ways. One of the ways was that if he had made a public statement along the lines of, “We’re very sorry about this car accident, and of course we regret it,” and if he had visited the home of the family and taken these sorts of steps, maybe that would’ve helped to diffuse things. I don’t really buy that criticism. I’m not sure it would’ve done much of anything or changed anything.
The other criticism that I hear is that if he were more of an active leader, he could have helped his own community more and driven political action, police action, and community organizing in response. And that leadership was missing, I think, and it’s unfortunate. But his health really was poor, and it’s not clear to this day if he was fully engaged with these sorts of large matters,
Michael Pack:
People from Chabad say that others from the community went to reach out to Gavin Cato’s family, and they were kind of rebuffed and not exactly welcomed. And I’m not sure about the details of that, but I’ve heard that said from a couple of groups. You may know more about that, Elliot.
Elliot Kaufman:
That’s right.
Jonathan Silver:
This documentary is incredibly powerful, and chilling in some ways, as we think about the place of Jews in the civic life of the country. Of course, it’s not really in the civic life of the country overall. There many examples of communities in America where Jews get along very well with their neighbors Nevertheless, it tells us something about the areas in which there is this approach to law enforcement and these kinds of tribal politics.
The last question I want to ask of Elliot evokes an op-ed that he wrote in the Journal a couple of years ago, about how uncomfortable it was for Jews and Jewish organizations to recognize Black anti-Semitism. And I want to ask if in your view, as you observe things, since the onset of the war in Gaza after October 7th, that among places like the ADL and others, you see any change?
Elliot Kaufman:
I think it certainly depends on the issue, the type of anti-Semitism. And I guess the way I think about it is that people have ideological blind spots. When it comes to Black anti-Semitism, a guy on the street attacking a Hasid, do I trust the New York Times to be right on that story? I don’t. It’s an uncomfortable issue for them. And I would say the same about liberal Jewish groups. It’s a blind spot. They really would rather not talk about that. And we all have our blind spots for different types of anti-Semitism, I think.
And so when I think about post-October 7th anti-Semitism around the issue of Israel, there are all kinds of Jews on the left who would rather mock Jewish students for feeling uncomfortable while young people in Gaza are suffering, and who would totally excuse whatever’s happening to Jewish students and make them into the bad people for wondering why they’re being harassed.
However, I think the mainstream Jewish organizations are actually good on this. The ADL has been much better on the campus issue. And to understand why I might point to what Michael was saying earlier, which is an excellent point. What’s happening now affects liberal Jews as much as it affects conservative or religious Jews. And so when people see it in their own lives—other than real left-wing ideologues—I think it becomes much more difficult to brush aside. And I would not put the major Jewish organizations in that camp.
Jonathan Silver:
One of the things that one can draw from this experience is how important it is for the Jewish community to think politically, to construe itself politically as democratic citizens in America. And that means making it clear that there is a political cost that we’d want to impose on the political leaders that undermine our safety and our democratic rights. Just as we have to make it clear that we ought to praise the political leaders who have stood heroically by our community. And in this blessed country right now, there are exemplars in both parties: I’m thinking of Senator Fetterman and Congressman Torres on the left; and Tom Cotton and dozens of important members of the Republican party on the right, who’ve stood with the Jews heroically over the last year.
I am grateful to both of you for bringing this example to the forefront of our minds and helping us think through it.
More about: Al Sharpton, Anti-Semitism, Black-Jewish relations, Chabad, Crown Heights riot, Mosaic Video Events