Telling It Like It Wasn’t
Former Times reporter looks back on coverage of the event, and what went wrong.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Special To The Jewish Week
Twenty years ago next week, on the night of Aug. 19, 1991 — the night that Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum were killed — my editor called me at home to tell me that riots had broken out on the streets of Crown Heights. “We’re covered for tonight but I want you to start your day there tomorrow,” he said.
Over the next three days, working 12 hours shifts and only going home to sleep, I saw and heard many terrible things. I saw police cars set on fire, stores being looted and people bloodied by Billy clubs, rocks and bottles. One woman told me that she barricaded herself into her apartment and put the mattresses on the windows so her children would not be hurt by flying glass.
Over those three days I also saw journalism go terribly wrong. The city’s newspapers, so dedicated to telling both sides of the story in the name of objectivity and balance, often missed what was really going on. Journalists initially framed the story as a “racial” conflict and failed to see the anti-Semitism inherent in the riots. As the 20th anniversary of the riots approaches, I find myself re-examining my own role in the coverage and trying to extract some lessons for myself and my profession.
At the time, I was a religion writer at The New York Times and was well connected in the Lubavitch community, the predominant Jewish group in Crown Heights. I was one of probably a dozen Times reporters and photographers on the streets over the course of the riots. We were a diverse group, representing many religions and racial backgrounds.
My job was to file memos to the main “rewrite” reporters back in the Times office in Manhattan about what I saw and heard. We had no laptops or cellphones in those days so the other reporters and I went to payphones and dictated our memos to a waiting band of stenographers in the home office. The photographers handed their film off to couriers on motorcycles who took the film to the Times.
Yet, when I picked up the paper, the article I read was not the story I had reported. I saw headlines that described the riots in terms solely of race. “Two Deaths Ignite Racial Clash in Tense Brooklyn Neighborhood,” the Times headline said. And, worse, I read an opening paragraph, what journalists call a “lead,” that was simply untrue:
“Hasidim and blacks clashed in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn through the day and into the night yesterday.”
In all my reporting during the riots I never saw — or heard of — any violence by Jews against blacks. But the Times was dedicated to this version of events: blacks and Jews clashing amid racial tensions. To show Jewish culpability in the riots, the paper even ran a picture — laughable even at the time — of a chasidic man brandishing an open umbrella before a police officer in riot gear. The caption read: “A police officer scuffling with a Hasidic man yesterday on President Street.”
I was outraged but I held my tongue. I was a loyal Times employee and deferred to my editors. I figured that other reporters on the streets were witnessing parts of the story I was not seeing.
But then I reached my breaking point. On Aug. 21, as I stood in a group of chasidic men in front of the Lubavitch headquarters, a group of demonstrators were coming down Eastern Parkway. “Heil Hitler,” they chanted. “Death to the Jews.”
Police in riot gear stood nearby but did nothing.
Suddenly rocks and bottles started to fly toward us and a chasidic man just a few feet away from me was hit in the throat and fell to the ground. Some ran to help the injured man but most of us ran for cover. I ran for a payphone and, my hands shaking with rage, dialed my editor. I spoke in a way that I never had before or since when talking to a boss.
“You don’t know what’s happening here!” I yelled. “I am on the streets getting attacked. Someone next to me just got hit. I am writing memos and what comes out in the paper? ‘Hasidim and blacks clashed’? That’s not what is happening here. Jews are being attacked! You’ve got this story all wrong. All wrong.”
I didn’t blame the “rewrite” reporter. I blamed the editors. It was clear that they had settled on a “frame” for the story. The way they saw it, there were two narratives here: the white narrative and the black narrative. And both had equal weight.
After my outburst things got a little better. The next day’s report began like this: “Black youths hurling rocks and bottles scuffled with the police in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn last night, even as Mayor David N. Dinkins tried to personally calm the racially troubled neighborhood after two nights of violence.”
But the Times still had trouble changing its frame. Perhaps most troubling was an article written in the midst of the rioting under this headline: “Amid Distrust in Brooklyn: Boy and Scholar Fall Victim.” The article compared the life of Gavin Cato, the 7-year-old boy killed in the car accident that spurred the riots, and the life of Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, who was stabbed to death later that night. It recycled every newspaper cliché and was an insult to the memory of both victims, but, again, it fit the frame.
“They did not know each other,” the article said. “They had no reason to know… They died unaware….” In the eyes of the Times, the deaths were morally equivalent and had equal weight.
The Times editorial page followed suit. “The violence following an auto accident in Crown Heights reminds all New Yorkers that the city’s race relations remains dangerously strained,” the editorial said. It concluded by praising Mayor Dinkins, giving him credit “for a hard night’s work” and doing “the job that New Yorkers elected him to do.”
The one who first broke the frame and spoke the truth was the fearless poet of the New York newspaper business in those days, Jimmy Breslin, then a columnist for Newsday. He was one of numerous reporters, photographers and television journalists who were beaten or otherwise injured during the riots. In Breslin’s case, he was dragged from a taxi by a group of rampaging young men, pummeled and stripped of his clothes. That night, he vowed to tell the truth of his humiliation, although he anticipated the resistance. “And someone up in the higher echelons of journalism, some moron starts talking about balanced coverage,” he said.
The other person who spoke the truth was the brilliant former executive editor of the Times, A.M. Rosenthal, who by 1991 had become a columnist for the paper. Rosenthal was one of the first journalists at the Times to call the riots what they were. “Pogrom in Brooklyn,” was the headline of his column on Sept. 3, 1991, just two weeks after the riots ended.
“The press,” Rosenthal wrote, “treats it all as some kind of cultural clash between a poverty-ridden people fed up with life and a powerful, prosperous and unfortunately peculiar bunch of stuck-up neighbors — very sad of course, but certainly understandable. No — it is an anti-Semitic pogrom and the words should not be left unsaid.”
It pains me to recall that not many people at the Times took Rosenthal seriously at the time. He had gone from being the editor of a great “liberal” newspaper to being a “conservative” columnist who seemed to return to the same issues over and over again: the security of Israel, anti-Semitism, the persecution of Christians in China and the war on drugs.
But Rosenthal was right about Crown Heights. In 1993, two years after the Crown Heights riots, an exhaustive state investigation sharply criticized Mayor Dinkins for not understanding the severity of the crisis. It also faulted his police commissioner, Lee Brown, for mismanaging the police during the riots.
The critical state report was widely covered in the press. “For the Mayor,” the Times headline said, “A Harsh Light.”
But another report, this one on how the press covered Crown Heights, got little publicity. It was written in 1999 by Carol B. Conaway, then an assistant professor at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and published in an academic journal called Polity. Her article is called “Crown Heights: Politics and Press Coverage of the Race War That Wasn’t.”
“Journalists and their audience alike rely on ‘frames’ when writing about and understanding newsworthy events because they provide cues for understanding others’ experiences,” Conaway wrote. But, she added, sometimes the frames are wrong.
She continued: “The New York Post, a tabloid, shifted away from the race frame to focus on black anti-Semitism within a few days of the initial rampages, while the New York Times persisted with the racial frame for at least two years.
“Yet,” she added, “one cannot understand the events [that unfolded in Crown Heights] without getting beyond the binaries of black versus white encouraged by the use of the race frame, and understanding the more complex dynamics of the conflict.”
As someone who saw the conflict unfold I can attest to this first-hand. I am telling my story in print for the first time because it is important that we journalists examine our mistakes and learn from them. Fitting stories into frames — whether about blacks and Jews, liberals or conservatives, Arabs and Israelis, Catholics and Protestants or Muslims and Jews — is wrong and even dangerous. Life is more complicated than that. And so is journalism.
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What do you expect from a bunch of secular liberal self-hating Jews?
I remember the Crown Heights riot well. I had just returned home from Israel where I spent 6 idyllic weeks traveling the country and I returned home to fear and terror. My parents forbade us from leaving our home, especially at dusk. One Russian lady jumped to her death from her apartment, fearing the pogroms had followed her here to Crown Heights. Busloads of angry rioters were brought in to CH to add to the havoc, something that was not reported on at all but we saw the buses... It was a terrifying time for us and the scariest part was how no one seemed to care. Not the police, not the press, and not the broader Jewish community.
Reading the paper then was like reading a new version of the events, and it undermined the NY Times credibility in our community and in the larger Orthodox community.
The Times (and their European counterparts) continue to display this tendency to put Jewish news in a frame, as Ari says. Whether it's reporting on Israel vs. Palestinians, or other Jewish topics, they present it in the same tired formula: it can't be that there is an aggressor and a victim, it must be that there are equal adversaries, or at least somewhat both to blame. I wonder how the current editorial board at the NY Times would have covered the Nazi Holocaust?
I have not read one remark about Al Sharpton in all your articles about Crown Heights.WHY????
Rubashkins case may have been reported as" fair and balanced"as the Crown Heights Riots. It's easier to lynch a man in the press and have him sit for 27yrs. for white color crime, if he looks like a Hassid and his business was involved "dead animals"- the story will sell papers and made some Rabbis and reporters temporarily popular.
Reporters failed to do their due diligence in Rubashkins case. After all the alleged charges at the time of the raid were dropped, abuse, meth labs,and other prosecution propaganda. To make him the criminal they wanted him to be, the prosecution had to resort to using old cattleman laws(never used in 100yrs.)and finding some post raid financial in discrepancies that Rubashkin mistakenly used in a desperate attempt to keep the business afloat,which was failing due to the raid.
His excessive sentence, unheard of for the such a white color crime should make us very uneasy about the American Justice system. How much does the press shape them the outcome of of a trial? Had the prosecution found allies in the Jewish community looking to lynch a Hassid ? Has someone in a Iowa court received the promotions and favors they needed at the expense of Sholom Rubashkin.
All those who turned a blind eye are culpable for this injustice of Sholom Rubashkins excessive sentence.
Goldman is a coward. He says, "I am telling my story in print for the first time because it is important that we journalists examine our mistakes and learn from them." He knew about this lie TWENTY YEARS AGO. So much for truth-seeking journalists. Shame on him. His apology is 20 years too late.
Mr. Goldman should have the necessary courage to name the pusillanimous editors he is castigating with his recollection. There is no corrective measure better than public shaming. Blaming an institution in this generalized way is a weak tea for a story that is 20 years old.
Just one obvious question: Why did the reporter wait almost 20 full years
to tell his story in print????
They probably wouldn't have done a worse job than their wartime counterparts did. Every atrocity the Nazis committed was buried in a blurb on page 17. The Times was worried about being branded as a "Jewpaper" and tried to play down the atrocities. The Times is not fit to wrap fish with. It is analogous to a degenerate gangster dressed in a 3 piece suit.
Sorry for the rant.
-Gedalya Engel
Thank you for your analysis. I lived in Florida at the time and the Times was on the lunchtable desk. I was riveted by Rosenthal's editorial, in particular how the Jewish community was drawing a line between Lubavitch and the other. Rosenthal came out with a line something like, "Darling, by me you're Fifth Avenue, by you you're Fifth Avenue, but by an antisemit, you're just a Yid." I'm sure he got it right. And I thank you for trying.
Dinkins and Brown were complicit in trying to "appease" the rioters by bot going after them strongly. They hoped it would boil over in a day or so. Instead, it encouraged them to become bolder. Being afraid of an over response and the criticism it would entail, lead them to an under response. then the stonewalling began.
When will the world learn, appeasement doesnt work. Britain is learning it now after 4 nights of random violence. LA learned it, Detroit learned it. Never again!
Chicago under Daly killed 2 looters and that was that in one night.
Ari, why did you sit on this so long? You had opportunities at the time to set the record straight. "Loyalty" to the Times is one thing -- but I'd like to think a reporter's first loyalty is to the truth. What kept you from speaking out sooner -- especially then, when it would have had a greater impact?
Mr. Goldman wrote:
"it is important that we journalists examine our mistakes
and learn from them. Fitting stories into frames [...] is
wrong and even dangerous. Life is more complicated
than that. And so is journalism."
This sounds nice, but what incentive does the NY Times have to change? They have a view of the world and interpret and report on events in ways that support that view, just the way most people do. As far as they are concerned, they have no moral or ethical obligation to report events in a way that deviates from their own, preconceived notions.
The Constitution guarantees and protects the rights of the Times (and "The National Enquirer", arguably more up front about what it does than the NY Times) to do this. Talk of "journalistic standards" is merely "market speak" and good business.
We need to just grow up.
I was also there, working at the time as a community liaison between police and the NCFJE, the Lubavitch political outreach arm. My husband and 1-year-old baby were evacuated from our apartment along with our neighbors because it was no longer safe to be there, but I remained at my post. The streets were filled with mobs wanting my death -- a weird site -- and on the street corners, police officers standing helpless. One told me that their radio frequencies were not even coordinated together so no one could call for backup if they got into trouble -- hence their reluctance to put their lives on the line, in addition to the order from Mayor Dinkins telling them to "let them (the Black rioters) vent." I can live with all this -- but what I find hard to swallow even today was the indifference of most of the rest of the Jewish world. Only Satmar came to our aid. My husband personally went to Rav Pam (now deceased), considered a leader of the yeshivish world, to beg him to intervene and send Jews to our aid, or at least to demonstrate by saying tehillim on the steps of city hall --- and he refused to do it, instead recommending my husband talk to someone at Agudath Israel. If Jews cannot rely on other Jews, our own brethren, for help in life threatening times, who CAN we rely on?
Sarah,
You wonder "...how the current editorial board at the NY Times would have covered the Nazi Holocaust?"
I'll tell you how they would have covered it: exactly as the NY Times editorial board at the time in fact DID cover it: by sweeping it under the rug. Read "Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper" to get the full story.
So...this nauseating rag has:
- Falsified and covered up Stalin's holocaust-by-famine of Ukranians
- Swept the news of the Holocaust under the rug
- Undermined American security at every turn
- Been a major force in the world-wide delegitimization of Israel, and thereby prepared her for a second Jewish Holocaust.
- Falsified and underplayed every incident of savagery perpetrated by the forces of world-wide Islamic jihadism.
- Abandoned any last shred of journalistic integrity by actively working for the election of Obama, and ignoring any attempts to investigate his background.
And that's just the most egregious of their many sins.
This newspaper is an utter disgrace. They have in my opinion gone from merely lacking any journalistic integrity, to being an active force for evil in the world.
Sickening.
Just one glaring question; Why did the reporter wait almost 20 full years
to tell his story in print for the first time ??????
Mr. Goldman,
You claim that the Times slanted its coverage of the Crown Heights riots and that Abe Rosenthal (in the Times!) and Jimmy Breslin were the only two told the truth. Strangely, you omit mention of the fact that the New York Times published your August 31, 1991 article "Jews Saying Restraint On Brooklyn Was Mistake," which reports the anti-semitism during the riots and at the funeral for Gavin Cato.
How did your story ever get past those controlling editors and their inflexible "frame?" Is the story under your own byline false and framed, so much that you are ashamed to mention it?
You say fitting stories into frames "is wrong and even dangerous." Does that include frames where you play the victim and omit mention of your own contemporaneous reporting in the pages of the Times?
Another example of journalists putting stories into frames is the coverage of Katrina. Almost immediately journalists decided that the story was poor blacks in the Lower Ninth Ward, and that was all that was heard, and that is still largely what is heard. There was almost no coverage of St. Bernard Parish with its white working class population--every single building in St. Bernard Parish was destroyed. Nor was anything much said about Lakeview, again completely destroyed, and its white middle to upper middle class population. BTW Lakeview was the site of Beth Sholom, the Orthodox synagogue, and the many Orthodox Jews who lived within walking distance of it, again the synagogue and homes of the congregants completely destroyed. The fatalities in Katrina were disproportionately elderly whites, again really never mentioned. True, many poor blacks suffered, lost their property, and were displaced. After all, New Orleans as a whole was a poor city with a black majority population, so how could it have been otherwise? And, true, the damage in the Lower Ninth Ward was, due to the force of the water released from the breech in the Industrial Canal levee, was particularly picture-worthy. And Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (again!) and later Spike Lee were on hand to work their spin "magic." But the fact remains, the utter devastation of white working and middle class neighborhoods received short shrift, because that would have undercut the racial perspective that the media decided was THE story.
My brother tried his best to help his neighbors during the ugly riot. He was on the street and saw people throwing stones at 2 Jewish girls. He asked the cops to intervene, but they just stood by and did nothing.
It amazes me how people true characters shine through when given the opportunity. The black community then and now in London should really take a good look at how their children are being raised. Ninety nine percent of the time, children learn by example.
How is hating Jews because of their race not a "race frame"?
"I wonder how the current editorial board at the NY Times would have covered the Nazi Holocaust? " Well, we know how the NY Times covered it then-- they covered it up, and reported it -- if at all, as rumors on the back pages, even when the evidence left no room for doubt. But if the Germans had been Arabs, or any other racial group that the NY Times considers oppressed, then it is frightening to think how much worse the coverage might have been.
I think it was New Republic who compared the NY Times saying "Hasidim and blacks clashed in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn" to saying that Jews and Cossacks clashed in the streets of Kishinev.
Because of politics.Al Sharpton a racist bigoted morron called a black activist' who is still allowed to address the democretic party meetings like a God send messiah.
I remember very well my feelings of fear and uncertainty at the time. I did not live in Crown Heights, but it felt very much like a pogrom. What was even harder to understand were reports that the police at the time stood by for hours and allowed the violence to unfold, without interfering. Then to praise David Dinkins for "a hard night's work"!? There is a complete disconnect here from reality.
Who were the editors that Goldman refers to and where are they now? I suspect thier antics havent changed much in the past 20 years.
Anything that can be framed as a duel of 2 equals is strictly told that way by the media. No matter how WRONG it is the media keeps pushing it as equals struggling.
Stories about anti-semitism are softened or reframed as something never true.
In the USA the right wing's rabid and vicious intent to undo anything that smacks of even a tinge of liberalism is reported as a congenial clash of cultures.
Hatred of jews is replaced with soft anti-Israeli bias. This is equal to anti-catholicism being simply mere anti-vatican bias rather than antipathy for the progenitor of christian churches of all schismatic stripes. The whore of babylon indeed. (I guess calling your mother a whore is a christian ethic.)
I applaud Ari for finally coming out with the truth but why it had to wait for twenty years one can only wonder. The fact of the matter is that the the NY Times continues this very same biased and distorted reporting every day with regard to Israel. Perhaps Ari will now have the courage to call the Times to account for this distortion and prejudice as well.
Yet so many Jews -- even 'frum' ones, daily buy the NY Times!!!! Where is the shame? What will they say for themselves after 120??
I'll never forget how they fawned after Hamas when they appeared on the scene back in the late 80s. for example: they did an article re a suicide bomber and painted the murderer as soft-hearted do-goodnik!
It is ironic and amazing that you start your article with the same error you lament! Gavin Cato was killed in an accident; Yankel Rosenbaum was MURDERED!!!!
Your opening statmenet morally equalizes the two. I guess journalists will be journalists even while trying not to be a journalists. And the world keeps turning...
When we baby boomers were growing up, there were still some vestiges of Edward Murrow's idea of journalism being a higher calling with honest and correct reporting as the foundation. Newsweek used to advertise "we separate fact from opinion." Reader's Digest boasted that no article was ever printed without a whole team checking every detail for correctness.
As journalism became (again) more a business than a calling, the new goal became selling the most papers, clicks, views, with correctness being relegated to a small typeface correction box on the bottom of page 8.
The New York Times although billed as "the newspaper of record", had an additional role to play. The owners and editors were part of the Jewish German Community in the USA who had become more American than Jewish, as documented for example in the book Our Crowd. They were ashamed of the state of Israel, or Eastern European Jews especially religious ones, whom they saw as a challenge to their full acceptance by the WASP dominated world of exclusive country clubs, boardroom seats etc.
It's amazing how long this frame of mind dominated the New York Times, and how they were able to distort their reporting under the guise of liberalism.
Ari Goldman, over the years wrote some very insightful and sensitive pieces about the Jewish religious community, which I enjoyed reading, but it is sad that he was not able to write this article for 20 years.
I doubt that the New York Times is capable today of changing its mentality.
Speaking up 20 years late does no one any good.
It was liberal bias then, but Ari doesn't want to talk about liberal bias now.
Maybe you and Bernie Goldberg should have a sit down. And just out of curiosity what took you so long? Seriously, why wait?
Does your editor no longer have power over you? Did you get sick and are now trying to make amends?
Too late by half.
I was learning in the Philadelphia yeshiva (a yeshivish type yeshiva) during the CH riots and can attest that we felt the pain of those who were suffering and we said Tehillim with great fervor and feeling. I even remember that at that time my parents came from Baltimore to visit me, and the Rosh Yeshiva somberly told them how we must fee the pain of the residents of Crown Heights and we must daven for them.
Anonymous is correct, and I'm surprised this didn't make it into our author's recollections. Mayor Dinkins became infamous for being willing to let the riots rage on for a few days. Even after the Jewish man had been murdered.
It was this, it was 100% these riots that cost him re-election.
I no longer feel like I know know if Dinkins was really guilty of holding back the cops, but that meme got out there and it stuck.
In all the riot, the police stood by and did nothing. They did not want to take risks.
How long would the riot have lasted if it were known that Every Jewish family in the neighborhood had rifles and shotguns? If it became known that there were a hundred ex-Israeli Army combat veterans standing by? Would it have started at all?
By being disarmed, you survive at the sufferance of the State, and sometimes the State will have no interest in your survival.
Jewish tradition teaches us, "where there is no man, try to be a man."
Abe Rosenthal was a man. This journalist was not. Rosenthal was willing to risk his career for the truth. For this journalist, the reverse seems to have been the case.
Our society is lacking true men, those who stand up for what's right, at the right time, in the right place.
This journalist's cowardice was wrong, as was his decision to violate his own religious principles by working on the Sabbath to cover a juicy story.
This opinion piece was a step in the right direction. Will it be followed by more such steps? Time will tell.
The question is, how much do you really know about the start of the Riots? how quickly the crowd grew, and how the first shouts started. If you think you don't know the whole truth, just ask.
Ari Goldman has made a vital contribution to understanding the world of media self censorship.
Cut and paste Goldman's ritique of the press downplay of anti-semitism and apply it to current JTA coverage of the Palestinian Authority.
JTA refuses to cover the consistent Arabic language antisemitic vitriolic expression which characterizes the Palestinian Authority's schools, newspapers, and TV.
After the next round of murders, we will see if it will take 20 years for the Ari Goldmans from the JTA to explain why JTA would not cover the real story.
David Bedein
Director
Israel Resource News Agency
Center for Near East Policy Research
Beit Agron International Press Center
Suite 105-106
37 Hillel Street
Jerusalem 94581 Israel
+972-547-222-661
+972-2-623-6470
www.israelbehindthenews.com
Did this reporter just wake up? Why the 20-year wait to tell the story? What's he hiding - that he had to hold on to some job, meanwhile? If yes, he's still dishonest. To write this report without reason for its inordinate delay does not offer the reader comfort this can't happen - just as easily - another time.
"They have in my opinion gone from merely lacking any journalistic integrity, to being an active force for evil in the world."
Still, American Jews overwhelmingly cast their votes in favor of the political philosophy that the NYT worships. All of the corrupt acts in your parade of horribles were committed explicitly in service to that philosophy. How can this be?
I believe that The New York Times (and the liberal news media in general) has been biased against: the Jewish state, the Jewish faith, and the Jewish people for decades.
It was a pogrom and it was not covered by the NY Times in the proper way partly because it was a Pogrom against Jews who looked like "old-time" European Jews in the Shtetel. For the NY Times to admit it was a Pogrom was to admit that the liberal Jewish establishment wasn't completely assimilated in the liberal, secular world. After all "those Chassidim" look like their grandparents from Europe.
Secondly, the Black community's anti-Semitism was and to a great extent is very deep. Part of the story that was missed was the anti-Semtism that pre-dated the Pogrom. It was not subtle. Starting from Stokley Carmicael's, "Hey Jew Boy with that Yalmulka on your head..." in the 60's and working its way into all facets of life. From a Black litigant telling a Jewish judge that all of you should have burned in the ovens to being accosted on the subway and being asked where your, "big Jew car is". This dynamic has rarely been covered and has mostly been excused in favor of "dialogue". As Crown Heights revealed there is no "dialogue" when someone hates you for no reason at all and one side is forgiven for anything that they might do.
The truth will set you free and might even save lives. But not if you are the NY Times because they know better.
The New York Times has always been -- and still is -- an anti-Jewish paper. Compare this to the almost daily articles they print nowadays about Muslims, which always have the most positive bent imaginable.
First, full disclosure: I am not Jewish, nor even a New Yorker; I am a Cuban-American Floridian, and a practicing Roman Catholic. Hence, I have an outsider's perspective on the Crown Heights riots, news of which I followed avidly at the time. Allow me to share it with you.
Most of the commentators above have already touched on the fact that the _New York Times_ and similar publications are not on the side of the Jewish community just because vaguely ethnic Jews publish or sit on their editorial boards . . . lesson learned.
Only one individual, however, has touched on an even more important lesson to be drawn from the shameful history of the riots: You cannot count on the authorities to protect you in situations like this. Jews--and just about any other group of people with "bourgeois" values--must arm themselves, organize themselves, and stand ready to protect their own communities. Cases in point:
(1) During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, very few Korean-owned businesses were seriously vandalized . . . because the Korean owners were armed, had formed an _ad hoc_ militia, and acted to protect their persons and businesses. Contrast this to the many small Jewish businesses that were set ablaze during the urban race riots of the late 1960s (and which essentially drove the Jewish small-merchant class out of the inner city).
(2) During the 1982 Overtown riots in Miami, the black rioters, though often virulently bigoted against Cuban-Americans, whom they often termed "Caribbean Jews" (an epithet that is actually embraced as a compliment by most Cuban-Americans), nevertheless stayed out of Cuban-American areas near the center of the riots, because Cuban-Americans are often own firearms, and had shown, in a number of incidents involving attempted robberies of their small businesses, a willingness to meet armed force with armed counter-force.
(3) Just recently, "flash mob" attacks in the Miami metropolitan area took place in South Miami Beach, a quarter largely populated by Jews, artsy Bohemians, and gays, demographics that are perceived by young blacks to be easy prey, unlikely to be armed or even to fight back; Cuban-American areas have been avoided by these flash mobs, for reasons previously discussed.
(4) Does anyone reading this doubt for a moment that Israel's survival as a nation is not principally explained by the valor and martial skills of its people? (Note, by the way, that not just the IDF is responsible for the protection of Israelis; Israeli civilians are among the most heavily armed populations in the world, a fact that is not unrelated to the country's low overall crime rate.)
Historically, one of the most important hallmarks of a free man was that _he was entitled to arm himself and use those arms in self-defense_. Nothing has changed. If you wish to remain free, you must be willing to act as a free man does.
Ari Goldman is undoubtedly right that "fitting stories into frames . . . is wrong and even dangerous. Life is more complicated than that." And he is right to fault the Times and other media outlets for fitting the complicated violence of August 1991 into the prefabricated frame of a "race riot." Unfortunately, however, he seems oblivious to the fact that his own narrative of an antisemitic pogrom is also a prefabricated frame that fails to do justice to the complex realities of Crown Heights.
As I tried to show in my 2006 book, "Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights," both the narratives of a "riot" and a "pogrom" are selective interpretations of the 1991 violence in Crown Heights. Each story highlights certain events while ignoring or downplaying others. And each fits, all too neatly, the preconceptions of some Crown Heights residents, but not others. Goldman is right to critique the failures and implicit biases of the "race riot" narrative, but his blindness about the failures and implicit biases of his own "pogrom" narrative is truly startling. He does a terrible disservice to the conversation about Crown Heights by passing off his own selective vision as incontestable fact.
If New Yorkers are ever going to get past the violence of 1991, we all need to recognize that our perceptions of it are just that -- perceptions based on partial views of an extraordinarily complex truth.
Dr. Henry Goldschmidt
Where was and where is to this day JEWISH ACCOUNTABILITY and JEWISH JOURNALISM ? One who exempalifiied it was JOSEPH M HOCHSTEIN z'l' founder/editor of the Washington Jewish Week who passed away last month. Yiheye Zichrono Livracha A YEDID NEFESH!!! ARI should do the same " HESHBON NEFESH" on the Jewish reporters and editors of the WASHINGTON POST during the HANAFI takeover of Wasington Bnai Brith / City Hall and Islamic Center. Start with Stepen Rosenfeld. Jewish Ideas should initiate an annual award for JEWISH REPORTER of the year ( name it after Joe Hochstein)
The Orthodox synagogue in New Orleans to which you are referring is Beth Israel, not Beth Sholom. Not counting Chabad, it is one of two Orthodox congregations in greater New Orleans.
I hope this article gets the wide audience it deserves, but I think one part of it is worth challenging.
Goldman writes: " 'They did not know each other,' the article said. 'They had no reason to know…They died unaware….'In the eyes of the Times, the deaths were morally equivalent and had equal weight." Here, Goldman's tone strikes me as extraordinarily cruel. First, it is entirely unclear to me (and there's no record of the article in the NYT's archives), if the NYT constructed a "moral" equivalence, but this sure reads like a MATERIAL equivalence. That is, in the larger scheme of things, Cato & Rosenbaum were both wholly innocent young people whose deaths are closely tied to a larger series of events, so in the whole historical retelling of the Crown Heights riots, OF COURSE their lives had equal weight. It is only by deconstructing that historical retelling to understand the racial and ethnic elements to the riots that we discover the difference between the two youngsters: Cato died because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Rosenbaum died because he was the target of anti - Jewish bigotry. Note, finally, that simply because I have identified the different reasons why they died, that does not mean I have assigned differing "weights" to their lives.
In the aftermath of the Crown Heights Pogrom, the Jewish Action Alliance was formed. Under the leadership of Beth Gilinsky it struggled to secure a measure of justice for the murdered Yankel Rosenbaum.
Her unrelenting efforts on their behalf were ultimately successful, but were made far more difficult as a result of the false and dishonest narratives proffered by the New York Times over a period that spanned years. At State trial, Reporter Donatella Lorch, writing in the Times, routinely portrayed the killer, Lemrick Nelson, as a sympathetic and innocent victim, while downplaying eyewitness testimony and DNA and evidence of his unmistakable guilt presented at trial. A dying Yankel Rosenbaum had identified Nelson as his attacker and Nelson's knife had Yankel Rosenbaum's blood on it.
Nelson was acquitted. The Times uttered not a word of protest or expressed the slightest curiosity about it.
Several years later, Lemrick Nelson was found guilty in Federal Court of depriving Yankel Rosenbaum of his Civil Rights. Charles Price, another defendant was also convicted.
The Jewish Action Alliance fought for justice, and against the moral obtuseness of the Times. Ari Goldman performs a service in exposing it. Thank you.
What did JW write after Crown Heights 1991? I would love to read it.
First, I am black and was directed to this site by The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg. Before this piece I had know knowledge of the Crown Heights event. Of course, I was in the 5th grade when it occured.
But to Arnold Ziffle's out-of-the-rear-end assumption that the black community was/is "very" anti-semetic: where does your measurement of this come from, save for two or three quotes (since you also forgot to include Jesse Jackson's regrettable anti-Semitic transgression) and the awful Crown Height's event. And how does black anti-Semitism compare with gentile/WASP (redundant?) anti-Semitism? Ironically, there are some blacks who are convinced that many Jewish people are anti-black. It is these misconceptions that keep the proverbial ball from moving forward. You trace black anti-Semitism to Stokley Carmicael, fair enough, but black people have always been split between the militant (Malcolm X and Booker T. Washington(?) and the "mild" (Rev. Dr. MLK and W.E.B DuBois). The fact that you chose Carmicael is telling. MLK is of the 60's too, was he also an anti-Semite? "Framing" is a tempting fruit, indeed.
To be sure, it was the advent of the Black Power Movement (from which Carmicael sprang) that strained relations between African Americans and Jewish Americans. But even cursory readings of the Civil Rights Movement and African American history unearth a disproportionate amount of Jewish representation. I also remember reading somewhere that most of the whites that blacks were married to, at least in the 60's and 70's, were Jewish. And many African Americans (including myself, actually a Haitian American) are aware of some of this history.
If black people are deeply anti-Semitic it will be news to half-black, half-Jewish known quantities like actress Rashida Jones; rocker Lenny Kravitz and his ex-wife actress Lisa Bonet; it-rapper Drake; actress Lauren London; comedian-actress Maya Rudolph; actress Tracee Ellis-Ross (daughter of Diana Ross); author Rebecca Walker (daughter of acclaimed author Alice Walker); and for levity's sake Jewish convert Sammy Davis Jr. and pseudo-Jew Whoopi Goldberg. All of these individuals are not only embraced by black Americans but their shared Jewish lineage are also known and accepted.
Lastly, the Crown Heights event is duly noted in my conscious. I can't be held responsible for it but it is just another instance of that stirring quote attributed to Martin Niemoller. I want to believe, especially in life-threatening situations, that I would say something.
Mr. Goldman,
No man is a hero in his own self-serving revisionist history, according to the commenters here. If you had mentioned your article, which the New York Times published in August 1991, you wouldn't be accused of cowardice by the people who don't know the full story. Of course, your Times-bashing would not have been credited either. Live by the frame, die by the frame.
My questions (Thu, 08/11/2011, 13:59) are serious ones. You should answer them for your own sake, even if you don't publish your answers.
I suspect that there was anti-Semitism among Blacks in Crown Heights, maybe even deep anti-Semitism. But could there not have been anti-Black feelings and beliefs in the assumption that it was o.k. to speed through a Black neighborhood, regardless of the lack of safety concern that resulted in the death of a child? It seems to me that this was a kind of disdain, if not hatred, of "the Other."
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