August 12, 2011

America’s Pogrom

By Rabbi David Eliezrie

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It was tense conversation. The editor at NPR (clearly Jewish) was defending the reporting about violence in Brooklyn.  Twenty years ago black mobs had taken to the streets after a car accident that took the life of a black child.  Jews huddled in their homes in fear. Cars were torched, Jews beaten, Norman Rosenbaum, a Jewish student from Australia lay dead, killed by the mob. Police were held back by an incompetent mayor. The media whose job was to report the facts were creating a fantasy, claiming, “there are conflicts between blacks and Jews.  Tensions are high as ethnic groups clash.”  I told the editor she had the story wrong.  There were no attacks by Jews, it was a one way battle. Finally in exasperation I yelled at her, “Jews are dying and you are lying.”

Things were not much better with the so called Jewish establishment. That week the ADL was busy issuing a press release about skinheads in Idaho.  The American Jewish Congress and the Reform movement praised the mayor and even asked for a commission to be set up explore discrimination against blacks.  Abe Rothenthal in a New York Times column a few weeks afterwards was one of the lone voices to speak honestly. He described the Jewish leadership’s timid response.

“Their usually ferocious faxes were either silent or blurped out diplomatically balanced condolences to all concerned.”

None of the organized leadership had the courage to label incident what it really was, America’s first Pogrom.

What drove the impotence of the Jewish establishment?  Why was the media so gung-ho in transforming the story into one that reflected their mindset? Why did the press give a pass then, (and continues today)  to Al Sharpton who walked to the streets of Crown Heights inciting hatred against Jews.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg wrote afterwards in the Jerusalem Report that the Jewish leadership did not react since “Chassidic blood was flowing.”  Imagine for a moment if mobs of angry blacks were attacking Jews in the upper west side. Would the ADL, AJC sit stoic, politely asking for the violence on both sides to stop and a commission be established to look into Black civil rights.  Would they, as Jerome Chanes , a former leader of the JCRC in New York, just last week, two decades later, still describe the pogrom as a “riot”  clinging to the argument it was not driven primarily by anti-Semitism.

Liberal Jewish leaders failed to confront their own bias.  Deep down they felt that Chassidim caused the problem.  “Those religious Jews look different, act different, they are too Jewish, they stick out, they are provoking anti-Semitism. If only they would fit into to America a bit better than this would have never happened.”         

The media was not much different; they framed the story as they viewed the world.  Ari Goldman star reporter for the New York Times, wrote a blistering article last week revealing the lies and mistruths of the Times reporting. At the time he went along, “as a loyal employee”. Now twenty years later he laments with great angst about the rewriting of the news to fit the mindset of the Times.

The real story is that the Chassidim in Crown Heights were law abiding citizens. The community leadership urged the local Jews not to take the law in to their own hands and respond with violence. Local Jews put their trust in government and waited in fear for the police to protect its citizens.

After the second night of rioting, a desperate fax was send out to Chabad rabbis across the country from the leaders of Crown Heights.

“The mayor is doing nothing, the police are not protecting us, please reach out to your elected officials and ask them to put pressure to stop the violence.” 

I called my local congressman, the White House and others.  Across the country my associates did the same. Apparently this national uproar prompted the White House to contact the Governor of New York telling him “if you do not do something we will send in troops”.  That night the police returned to Crown Heights, and the pogrom ended.

A month later I was in Brooklyn, there was cop on every corner. I asked one policeman “how do you feel about what happened.” He painfully told me, “we are the most embarrassed police force in the world, for two days they held us back and would not let us do our job.”

It’s not just the police that need to do a mea culpa. The leaders of major Jewish organizations that pride themselves on fighting bigotry and anti-Semitism need to do some soul searching and ask themselves about their own bias they refused to confront. Why,  as Jews in Crown Heights huddled in their homes, why didn’t they have the courage to speak out strongly and call it what it really was, America’s first, and hopefully only Pogrom.

Rabbi David Eliezrie is a Chabad rabbi in Yorba Linda California. His email is Rabbi@ocjewish.com

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This can and most likely will happen again. Jews must be prepared and aware of local politics and crime at all times and Jewish families should discuss emergency plans if pogroms were to be taken up again.

Comment by Prepare on 8/12/11 at 1:17 pm

Thank you, Rabbi.  in support of your very fine article:
  Telling It Like It Wasn’t Ari L. Goldman, Jewish Week.
Twenty years after the notorious anti-Semitic riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a former New York Times reporter relates how his paper stubbornly persisted in mischaracterizing the events as a “racial clash.”

also well worth reading:
Raising the Stakes on Jerusalem Jonathan S. Tobin, Contentions.
Never until now has an American President made an issue of home-building in Jewish neighborhoods established in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war and the city’s reunification.


Comment by Moderate Muslim on 8/12/11 at 1:51 pm

Jews need to be smart & rational, work with authorities & use long-term strategies for peace& self-presentation & cultivate strong ties with police and officials and demand protection when necessary.HOWEVER, Jews also need to be prepared for last-ditch bottom line situations such as above& have a store of guns, bats, knives, stun guns, pepper spray, shields, etc. to defend and repel pure extreme violent attacks. It’s sickening&disgusting; when Jews hide away trembling for too long in the face of too much. We need to be like the Irish, Sikhs,Scots,and the ISRAELIS, and get crazy tough sometimes and fight back anbd show bullies and psychos that they will HURT if they attack Jews.

Comment by Fred Farmer on 8/12/11 at 5:17 pm

There is more. The proximate cause of the riot was a car in the Rebbe’s procession swerving onto a sidewalk and killing a young boy. However that car had been knocked onto a sidewalk by a van running the light in a hit and run. The van was never found, and that fact was reported only once in a local NY paper and never by the NY Times. Instead, black activists struggled for weeks to get the driver’s head on a plate by inventing charges and violations. To this day black people go nuts when the subject comes up, with no one telling them to be ashamed of themselves.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 8/13/11 at 9:42 pm

Mayor Dinkins was a tennis fan who spent the three days attending the US Open tournament and pretended not to know anything was going on. That’s why he lost the election after having been elected with Jewish support the first time. I predicted ever since the last national election that this is exactly what will happen to Obama.

When the tournament finished and Dinkins walked down the street like an idiot chanting “Increase the Peace”, and the black people threw bricks and bottles at him, he gave the police the orders that ended the riot in a half hour.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 8/13/11 at 9:45 pm

Ben: I’d appreciate learning from you the role of Foxman and other Jewish leaders who apparently was so interested in pandering to the black community that they at the beginning looked the other way. Who are they? What did they say and do? Also, the role of Sharpton and the other “black leaders”? My records show Sharpton was instigator, am I correct?

Comment by LT COL HOWARD on 8/14/11 at 10:10 pm

The role of Foxman and other Jewish leaders was to distance themselves from the poor and very ethnic Jewish types living in Crown Heights so the folks keeping them in $350K/year jobs or using them as tokens could keep their self-images intact. See the article above. No moral courage and totally useless. Sharpton, Mason, Maddox played the flip side of much the same role, i.e pandering and self-promoting in order to live high in white Jewish communities off whatever cause brings in the liberal and government grants, support, shekels.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 8/15/11 at 11:17 am

To be fair to our secular Jewish brethren, there is a stereotype, based on some ugly truths, that any Jew who is non-religious, non-Orthodox and secular—at least those above a certain age and born/raised in a major Jewish population center—simply hates the Orthodox/Chasidic.

So while this stereotype, this conventional wisdom, among the Orthodox/Chasidic that the above-described Jewish establishment is simply embarrassed by us (as Rabbi Eliezrie notes) and hates us may not be true, the ADL’s actions (or lack thereof) during the riots certainly did nothing to diminish, and probably confirmed it more than anything else.

Comment by Mendy Hecht on 8/15/11 at 8:29 pm

Hatred does exist, but it is secondary to embarrassment as a function of internalizing antisemitic values, and to cowardice. The bottom line is that when Jew haters are stoning and stabbing and looting and burning you, who you gonna call? Not the ADL and the Bnai Brith with all their money and contacts and influence.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 8/15/11 at 9:57 pm

I’m tried of jews acting like victims every chance they get.

Comment by WTF on 8/16/11 at 12:15 pm

@WTF Crusades;  Inquisition; Nazi Germany & Europe; SU;  Arab attacks on Jews before 1948;  Jordanian attack on Jerusalem where they attempted to starve the Jews to death & the destruction (bragged about) of all Jews in E Jerusalem;  ambush of the Hadassah medical convoy & the murder of all the doctors, nurses and patients;  strict quotas on Jewish admissions to US med schools ; Crown Heights; etc. etc.
Maybe WTF has been spared the constant threat to his life.
Unfortunately people like WTF allow the opportunity for the Jews to be victimized time after time. For evil to prevail it only takes the WTF’s of this world to be “tired” rather than to recognize and fight evil.

Comment by CHRISTIAN SERVICE WORKER on 8/16/11 at 1:13 pm

I would actually agree with WTF’s sentiment that Jews should not act like victims—especially in this great country which is probably the safest and most philo-Semitic country in our history.  Still, Mr. WTF does not seem to appreciate the nature of Jew-hatred, which is not solely in the imaginations of Jews but a very real thing that exists even today, even in this blessed country.  So while I don’t instantly conclude that every critique of a Jew or Jewish institution is automatically anti-Semitic and very well may be valid, still, hatred of the Jews as a motivating factor behind that critique must be considered.

Comment by Mendy Hecht on 8/16/11 at 3:51 pm

“m tried of jews acting like victims every chance they get.”
How about blacks and Muslims?  This was a hate crime.  Are blacks screwed up for still talking about Emit Till

Comment by jane on 8/16/11 at 11:16 pm

poor wittle jews, always the victim, never the perp.

http://www.voltairenet.org/Israeli-to-forcibly-displace-tens
“In a cabinet meeting on Sunday, the Israeli ministers approved a plan based on the ‘Prawer Report’, which involves the forced removal of 30,000 Arab Bedouin villagers in southern Israel from their homes.

The Bedouin people have lived in southern Israel for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but when Israel was created in 1948, the Israeli government chose not to recognize the Bedouin as residents, and have destroyed their homes over and over again in the decades since.”

Comment by WTFF on 9/17/11 at 7:13 am

poor wittle jews, always the victim, never the perp, take 2

http://electronicintifada.net/content/know-when-say-no-call-divestment-israeli-occupation/5523 by Shamai Leibowitz

“For decades, Israel has crushed the 3.5 million Palestinians living under military domination, beating them into submission while taking away their civil rights and their land. ”

Comment by WTFF on 9/17/11 at 7:19 am

poor wittle jews, always the victim, never the perp

Israel Tent Protests
Max Ajl
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/ajl160811.html

“The protest’s demographics run the gamut. .[from] the university educated ..middle class . . who expected a smooth ride into an affluent future and are now colliding with . .the shattered Israeli social compact. . .to, more importantly, the Arab Jewish (Mizrahi) underclass . . .90 percent of the population of perilous border towns [like Sderot] where the white European elite, eager to . . .safeguard the borders of the new Israeli state, deliberately placed them. . . .”

jews have been victimizing fellow jews since Cain slew Abel.

Comment by WTFFF on 9/17/11 at 7:42 am

@WTFF   I am sympathetic to the Bedouin and understand the cultural problems and desires. Younger Bedouin are torn between cultures. This is not unlike certain American Indian tribal dilemmas. The West Bank and Gaza are booming. The “occupation” is a delusion foisted by Palestinian propaganda. It is Gaza with the thugs where the residents are truly oppressed. I am unsympathetic with the tent protesters. They’re spoiled. This was financed heavily by the left-wing, especially from outside Israel.

Please do us all a favor and take your selective and despicable attitudes elsewhere. These postings should be for those who want and it is taught an honest dialogue.

Apparently you do not!

Comment by CHRISTIAN SERVICE WORKER on 9/17/11 at 1:13 pm

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