Crown Heights riot

Three days of violence in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in August 1991, after a car in the Lubavitcher Rebbe's motorcade killed Gavin Cato and a mob killed Yankel Rosenbaum; called a "riot", a "rebellion" or a "pogrom" depending on the speaker

Crown Heights riot (1991)
Date	19–22 August 1991 (violence largely ended by 23 August)
Place	Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York City
Trigger	Death of Gavin Cato (7), struck by a car in the motorcade of Menachem Mendel Schneerson
Deaths	Gavin Cato; Yankel Rosenbaum (stabbed); see also Bracha Estrin
Injuries	"Over 150 police officers and at least thirty-eight civilians" (Girgenti Report)
Official inquiry	Girgenti Report (July 1993), 2 vols
Other names	Crown Heights riots; Crown Heights disturbances; Crown Heights pogrom; Crown Heights rebellion/uprising

The Crown Heights riot (also called the Crown Heights riots, disturbances, pogrom or rebellion) was three days and nights of violence in the Crown Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, in August 1991. On the evening of 19 August a station wagon in the motorcade of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, went through the intersection of Utica Avenue and President Street, was struck by another car and mounted the pavement, killing seven-year-old Gavin Cato, the son of Guyanese immigrants, and badly injuring his cousin Angela. Rumours that the Hatzolah ambulance had taken away the Hasidic driver while leaving the Black children to die "fueled the disturbance for three days", according to the New York State inquiry. About three hours later Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Australian Jewish scholar, was stabbed by a group of young Black men and died. Over the following days roving groups attacked Jewish homes, people and cars, threw rocks and bottles at police, and looted shops; the state's Girgenti Report counted "over 150 police officers and at least thirty-eight civilians" injured and found that the city's response was "inadequate" until the fourth day.

What to call the events remains contested. Lubavitch Hasidim and many Jewish commentators call them a pogrom; many Black residents and activists speak of a "riot" or "rebellion" against what they saw as police and state favouritism towards the Hasidim. The anthropologist Henry Goldschmidt argues that the two framings rest on different understandings of "race" and "religion" in the neighbourhood. The events damaged Mayor David Dinkins, New York's first Black mayor, who lost the 1993 election to Rudolph Giuliani, and the role of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who gave the eulogy at Gavin Cato's funeral, has been argued over ever since.

Background

Lubavitch and its neighbours

Crown Heights became the world headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch after Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn settled at 770 Eastern Parkway in 1940. In the 1960s, as most white Jewish residents left for the suburbs and the neighbourhood became predominantly Black and Afro-Caribbean, the Lubavitchers stayed. Goldschmidt writes that "the Lubavitch Hasidim, a tight-knit community of orthodox Jews, chose to stay in Crown Heights in the late 1960s when nearly all of their White Jewish neighbors chose to leave", and dates the decisive moment to "the spring of 1969, when the Lubav­itcher Rebbe declared that his community would stay in Crown Heights as it became a predominantly Black neighborhood".

In the Chabad-side account published by Chabad.org for the 30th anniversary, the Rebbe told a gathering on the last day of Passover, 10 April 1969: "A phenomenon has recently spread among the Jewish people, like a plague, G‑d forbid, of abandoning Jewish neighborhoods". The same piece describes a meeting between the Rebbe and Mayor John Lindsay on 26 November 1968 at which Lindsay pledged support "for the Rebbe's stabilization efforts, including security and policing", and records that "during the 15 years preceding the 1991 riot, at least 10 members of the Crown Heights Jewish community were murdered". Goldschmidt notes that, following the Rebbe's 1969 call, the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council in the 1970s worked with Hasidic developers to form Chevra Machazikei Hashchuna, the Coalition to Strengthen the Neighborhood.

In his 1981 doctoral history of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), written from close to the League, Shlomo Russ traces an earlier conflict over the anti-poverty Crown Heights Community Corporation. He writes that "Only the Hasidim remained, most of them followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson", and that "Rabbi Schneerson had long fought for Jews to remain in Crown Heights". The Jewish Community Council challenged the October 1967 corporation elections, alleging intimidation of Jewish voters, and the challenge was upheld in April 1968. Russ records that "JDL was called to protect the Jewish poll watchers" at the February 1969 elections. In March 1970 armed JDL members went to the corporation's office after it was taken over by a group led by Robert (Sonny) Carson. In 1970 JDL members also planned a bombing in Crown Heights in retaliation for the burning of a Jewish communal office. The plan was dropped after the Palestinian hijackings of September 1970. Russ describes these events largely from the JDL's side; the Black accounts are not represented in his narrative.

Grievances and policing

The Girgenti Report summarised the background as "charges and counter charges of preferential treatment and inequity in City services, a 'double standard' in law enforcement, and an intense fear of crime and resentment of defensive actions against it". It added that "the conscious decision of the Lubavitchers to stay increased the competition for government-funded resources, especially for housing", sharpened by the creation of Community Board 9.

Black residents pointed to the 1978 death of Arthur Miller, "a prominent businessman and Crown Heights civic leader", who died "while struggling with police", and to the Hasidic anti-crime patrols, which "they maintain, are little more than a vigilante group set up to harass black men". In June 1978 "members of a Hasidic anti-crime patrol beat a sixteen-year old black youth and he fell into a coma", leading to a march of two thousand Black residents. Lubavitchers, for their part, said their appearance made them "inviting targets for robbery, bias crimes and other forms of anti-semitic harassment"; in January 1988 about 200 of them "'stormed' the 71st Precinct" to demand more protection.

The Black pastor and activist Herbert Daughtry, in a partisan first-hand account, describes the police car stationed outside the Rebbe's home: "We complained bitterly that this was preferential treatment." He attributes the explosion of August 1991 to "years of built up rage derived from a double standard and preferential treatment accorded the Hasidim — which includes everything from immigration laws and services to special treat­ment by law enforcement". A BlackPast.org entry states that "black residents had voiced resentment that Jews had received special protections from law enforcement due to a police redistricting decision in 1976".

The Village Voice's Michael Kamber, writing in 2002, cited a 1984 Carnegie Corporation report describing the neighbourhood as "awash in a sea of ethnocentrism, prejudice, and violent conflict", and listed "the Jewish Defense League patrols accused of randomly harassing Black residents, the struggles over housing, the fight for control of federal poverty grants, and an epidemic of street crime". The Chabad.org account, by contrast, stresses blockbusting and violent crime against Jews, including the 1975 murder of Holocaust survivor Israel Turner, at whose funeral there were shouts of "Heil Hitler".

The summer of 1991

In the weeks before the riot the City College professor Leonard Jeffries had been widely criticised for remarks about Jews. In July 1991, according to a reference biography, "he gave a speech in Albany, New York, that many considered antiwhite and, especially, anti-Semitic"; CUNY later cut his term as department chairman, and a federal jury in 1993 found this had violated his First Amendment rights. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), in a 1992 advocacy report, quoted an Amsterdam News editorial of 17 August 1991, two days before the accident, warning of "the conflagration that will surely come should any kind of incident occur, by accident or design, that threatens the well-being of Professor Jeffries". Philip Gourevitch, writing in the neoconservative Commentary in 1993, argued that "anti-Semitism was in the ether" and that Black newspapers including the Amsterdam News and the City Sun had defended Jeffries. The New York Times reported that in his Albany lecture of 20 July Jeffries spoke of "a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood," by "people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani". Among those Gourevitch lists as having defended Jeffries that August was Sharpton.

19 August 1991

The death of Gavin Cato

According to the Girgenti Report, at about 8.20 pm "an Hasidic driver, part of a procession escorting the Lubavitcher Grand Rebbe, struck and killed seven-year-old Gavin Cato at President Street and Utica Avenue. Gavin's cousin Angela Cato was seriously injured. People on the street reacted by attacking the car's occupants." The Rebbe was returning from visiting the grave of his father-in-law in Queens. Goldschmidt describes the sequence: "The police car and the Rebbe's car passed through the intersection of Utica and President without incident ... But the station-wagon entered the intersection through a red or yellow traffic light—depending who you ask—and was struck by a car heading north on Utica." The driver was Yosef Lifsh (also spelled Lifsch), a 22-year-old Israeli Lubavitcher.

Black and Jewish accounts dispute almost every detail. Goldschmidt records that "a number of witnesses claimed the car ... was hurtling down President Street at speeds up to 65 miles per hour", and some claimed Lifsh was drunk, whereas an accident reconstruction expert hired by his lawyers "estimated his speed at 30 to 35 miles per hour" and he and the police "vehemently denied the charge that he had been drinking". At the time, Deputy Mayor Milton Mollen said the driver "was tested and found not to be intoxicated". For many Black residents, Goldschmidt writes, "the Rebbe's police escort—the patrol car leading the motorcade—[was] a clear sign of the 'preferential treatment' Lubavitchers have long been thought to receive from local police and other state agencies".

Hatzolah and the ambulance dispute

What Hatzolah is

Hatzolah (Hatzoloh, Hatzalah) is a Jewish volunteer emergency medical service. The Girgenti Report describes it as "a privately funded, all-volunteer service started by the Hasidic community in New York City", adding that "some leaders in the black community maintain that the ambulance service caters exclusively to the Jewish community". A 2015 trade-press profile records that "Hatzalah started in Williamsburg in 1965, after a prominent member of the Hasidic Jewish community had a heart attack and died while waiting for an ambulance to arrive", and that "Hasidic communities in other neighborhoods — like Crown Heights and Borough Park — frustrated by slow responses to 911 calls, began to copy the model". The service is free, and states that its mission is to "treat all in need, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity", a claim some Black residents doubt: "I've never seen them pick up nobody of color," a resident of 39 years told the reporter. It is regulated like other volunteer ambulances, and in 2010 it received "a $445,000 grant from the New York State Assembly" for its dispatch system. Its all-male membership has also drawn criticism: in 2019 a regional council refused an ambulance to Ezras Nashim, an all-women Hasidic group in Borough Park, whose members said the board was "packed with sympathizers of Hatzolah", which had "forcefully opposed its female counterpart's right to exist"; a board member who voted against replied: "This has nothing to do with Hatzolah." The Chabad.org account traces the Crown Heights branch to the 1976 death of the community activist Samuel Schrage, after which his widow "spearheaded a campaign to purchase the first-ever ambulance for Crown Heights' nascent Hatzalah volunteer emergency medi[cal service]", following city paramedics who "came late and apparently under the influence of drugs or alcohol". Daughtry, a critic, records that Black residents objected to "the ambulance and the police car parked in front of the Lubavitcher headquarters and the home of the Grand Rebbe, respectively", and disputes that the ambulance was wholly privately funded: "part of the money came from the public".

The ambulances that night

According to the Girgenti Report, Chaim (spelled "Chiam") Blachman, "an emergency medical technician for Hatzoloh, a voluntary Hasidic-run ambulance service", heard the call, and "within minutes of the accident, the Hatzoloh ambulance arrived". One of the first police officers on the scene said an unidentified Black man "was already giving Gavin Cato cardiopulmonary resuscitation" and that "the Hatzoloh ambulance was on the scene when he got there. It left moments late[r]". The report's summary states: "The police ordered the Hasidic ambulance to carry away the car's Jewish occupants. This spurred a rumor that the Hasidic ambulance helped the Jews, and left the injured black children to die. That rumor, and others, fueled the disturbance for three days." Goldschmidt writes that "the EMS paramedics treated the gravely injured Cato children on the spot, while the Hatzoloh paramedics brought the mildly injured driver and passengers to a nearby hospital", a "division of labor [that] fostered a widely shared, but hotly contested, perception that the Cato children and the Hasidim were given unequal medical care".

The critics' case

For many Black residents the ambulance, more than the accident, was the grievance. A participant in the violence told Goldschmidt in 1998: "It was the disrespect of the Jewish ambulance coming along and totally disregarding two children lying under a car bleeding to death, and attending to the Jewish folks inside the car that had minimal damage. That's what created the whole scenario." The Rev. Heron Sam of St Mark's Episcopal Church told the playwright Anna Deavere Smith: "When the [Hatzoloh] ambulance came, they were more concerned to take care of their own than to worry about some boy—some Black boy—who lay dying on the street." The Girgenti Report found that this "widespread perception gave credence to the violence-inciting rumor". A sign at the accident site, reported by the JTA, asked: "Where is the 'white' Jewish man who was taken away in the 'special' ambulance — unhandcuffed and escorted by the New York Police Department's finest?" In his eulogy for Gavin Cato, as reprinted in the City Sun and quoted by Goldschmidt, Sharpton said: "It's an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights." Goldschmidt notes that Lubavitchers' neighbours "tend to see them as a privileged White minority operating an 'apartheid ambulance service'".

The Hatzolah and Jewish response

The JTA reported Jewish residents' account that "the Hatzoloh driver was told by the police to 'take your guys and leave'", while the city ambulance crew treated the children. Goldschmidt summarises the Hasidic position: the volunteers "arrived at the scene of the accident just moments—not minutes—before the EMS ambulances, and were explicitly instructed by the police to remove the injured Hasidim from the scene, out of a justified fear for their safety, and in an attempt to calm the angry crowd". Gourevitch, writing for Commentary, likewise states that Lifsh "was set upon by angry black bystanders who beat and robbed him before the police could reach the scene" and that "police, seeking to remove the object of the crowd's anger, directed the crew to take away Lifsh and his passengers". The Lubavitch view, as Goldschmidt puts it, is that "the death of Gavin Cato was a tragic accident, and nothing more".

The killing of Yankel Rosenbaum

About three hours after the accident, Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old doctoral student from Melbourne, was attacked a few blocks away. Volume II of the Girgenti Report states that "a group of young black men reportedly shouted, 'There's the Jew. Get the Jew.' Two of the stab wounds punctured Rosenbaum's lungs, causing him to bleed to death. The police apprehended a sixteen-year-old black man named Lemrick Nelson within moments of the crime." Rosenbaum died at Kings County Hospital, where, the defence later argued, negligence had caused his death; the report devotes a section to "The Negligence of Kings County Hospital". The JTA quoted Jewish community representatives stressing "that while both deaths both tragic, one was accidental and the other a deliberate murder".

The three days of violence

The Girgenti Report describes "the most extensive racial unrest New York City has experienced in over twenty years". It records that "members of the Jewish community were harassed and assaulted as roving bands of black youths traveled through the neighborhood, sometimes shouting anti-semitic slurs. Rocks were thrown through windows and passing motorists were attacked. Several stores were looted and numerous cars were damaged." It identified "twenty-seven bias crimes ... in the 71st Precinct, including twenty-one anti-semitic, three anti-black, and three anti-white incidents".

On Tuesday 20 August Sharpton and others led a march; on the way back, the report says, "there was another confrontation between blacks and Hasidim. Twelve police officers and a civilian were injured." Accounts of who threw first differ. The report quotes an observer that the "crowd of teenagers pelted the Hasidim one more time. This time the Jews retaliated with a fusillade of projectiles", records Sharpton's recollection that "rocks flew, but he was unsure who started it", and notes that the Amsterdam News reported "a barrage of rocks from Hasidic store owners". On Wednesday marchers again went to the Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway. The report says the police "could not control the marchers, many of whom pelted the building with rocks and bottles and chanted anti-semitic slogans"; the marchers also "burned an Israeli flag".

The JTA reported on 22 August that the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council counted, for one night alone, "18 Hasidim injured, 50 Jewish-owned cars vandalized, a Lubavitch 'Mitzvah tank' destroyed and 60 Jewish homes damaged", and quoted Rabbi Shimon Hecht: "It was like Kristallnacht ... People were afraid for their lives." Gourevitch reported signs reading "Hitler didn't do his job" and a rioter who told him: "Write this down. Jews are murderers. The black Hitler is coming this time." On 26 August a 68-year-old Holocaust survivor, Brokha (Bracha) Estrin, died after apparently jumping from her window; Rabbi Shmuel Butman said she "had told neighbors that the recent escalation in neighborhood tension had become too much for her".

The columnist Jimmy Breslin, who was beaten during the riot, later dismissed the scale of the events in an interview with the Village Voice: "There was no pogrom, there was no riot ... How many stores looted? Seven, seven stores, that's all."

Police and the mayor

Mayor David Dinkins did not visit Crown Heights on the Tuesday; "Deputy Mayor Lynch told us that the Mayor and his advisors felt his presence might exacerbate the disturbance". On Wednesday, after visiting the Cato family, he was met with bottles and rocks. The Police Department's approach for the first three days, the report found, "was one of restraint, predicated upon the desire not to make things worse. What it failed to do was provide a tactical response for ending the violence. On Thursday, the approach of the first three days was abandoned." About 1,800 officers were deployed on Thursday 22 August and order was restored.

Jewish residents accused the city of deliberately holding the police back. Gourevitch quoted a police captain saying his officers were "flipping out" and that "a lot of them feel that they're paying the price for Rodney King". The Girgenti Report addressed the charge directly: "We found no evidence, direct or implicit, of an order by City Hall to restrain the police."

The Girgenti Report

In July 1993 the state Director of Criminal Justice, Richard H. Girgenti, delivered a two-volume report to Governor Mario Cuomo. Volume I, on the city's response, concluded that Police Commissioner Lee Brown "did not meet these expectations and failed to fulfill his ultimate responsibility for managing the Department's activities to suppress rioting and preserve the public peace". Of the mayor, it found that "the Mayor, as the City's Chief Executive, did not act in a timely and decisive manner in requiring the Police Department to meet his own stated objectives". Volume II, on the Rosenbaum case, concluded that "it is most probable that Lemrick Nelson participated in the attack that resulted in Yankel Rosenbaum's death", but that "deficiencies in the initial investigation created problems with the evidence".

The trials

On 29 October 1992 a Brooklyn jury acquitted Lemrick Nelson of all counts; the Girgenti Report records that "the public reaction to the verdict by many, especially in the Jewish community, was immediate and angered disbelief". Goldschmidt summarises what followed: Nelson and Charles Price were convicted in federal court in February 1997 "of violating Yankel Rosenbaum's civil rights"; the convictions were overturned in January 2002 because the judge had "manipulated the jury selection process, in a well-intentioned but unconstitutional effort to en­sure a racially balanced jury"; Price pleaded guilty in 2003, and at a third trial in May 2003 Nelson admitted the stabbing, but the jury found "that the stabbing did not actually cause Yankel Rosenbaum's death", and he was sentenced to ten years.

A grand jury declined to indict Yosef Lifsh on 5 September 1991, "following two weeks of hearings and one hour of deliberations"; "Lifsch was on a plane hours later, returning home to Israel". In 2001 the city paid the Cato family $400,000. Writing for the Village Voice in 2002, Dasun Allah reported that "members of the Black community find it appalling that laws passed to protect Blacks from legal lynchings from all-White juries in the segregated South were used to convict a young Black man who had been acquitted by a racially diverse state jury", while "no one has been held accountable for the death of Gavin Cato". From the far left, the Socialist Workers Party weekly The Militant called the 2003 verdict a conviction "in frame-up", arguing that "the big-business press trumpeted the incident ... as an anti-Jewish riot" whereas "the outburst ... actually erupted in response to racist treatment of Black residents of that neighborhood by the cops and emergency personnel", and that using civil-rights statutes against Nelson "was a travesty of justice". Goldschmidt observes that the verdicts "included something for everyone in Crown Heights—and something for everyone to be angry about".

Al Sharpton

The Rev. Al Sharpton arrived on the second day, by his own later account at the request of Gavin's father, Carmel Cato. With Daughtry, Alton Maddox, Sonny Carson and Colin Moore he met police at the 71st Precinct, where they "again demanded Lifsch's arrest". The ADL, in its 1992 advocacy report, accused him of "polarizing relations and exacerbating tensions between Blacks and Jews" and quoted him in Newsday on 22 August: "This is no one-person thing. The emphasis is on Black survival in Crown Heights. Our people are under attack."

The eulogy

Sharpton delivered the eulogy at Gavin Cato's funeral at St Anthony's Baptist Church on 26 August 1991. Two contemporary wire reports agree on its core. UPI reported that he said: "They say they want peace. They don't want peace. They just want quiet", that the Black community would allow "no compromise, no sellout ... nothing less than the prosecution of the murderer of this young man", and that he attacked "Jews as 'diamond merchants'". The Associated Press version, printed in the Washington Post, has: "I hear the word 'peace' ... They don't want peace. They want quiet. If they want peace, look at the arrangements in Crown Heights and make it equal." At the same service Sonny Carson said of the rioters, according to the ADL, "You might not like this. But I'm very proud of them."

A fuller text was printed in the Black weekly City Sun a few days later, under the title "Gavin's Death Must Spark a Beginning"; Goldschmidt quotes from that reprint: "The world will tell us [Gavin] was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident. It's an accident for one group of people to be treated better than another group of people. It's an accident to allow a minority to impose their will on a majority. It's an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights." He adds that Sharpton "then went on to criticize the Hasidic community in terms many observers considered antisemitic—for example by linking 'diamond merchants' in Crown Heights and Tel Aviv to the apartheid regime in South Africa". A longer version of the eulogy was also printed by Gourevitch in Commentary (1993) and in the same wording by Slate (2003), which quotes Sharpton as saying: "It's an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. … Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid. … No compromise, no meetings, no kaffe klatsch, no skinnin' and grinnin'. Pay for your deeds." Neither of these two gives its source.

Later accounts

In a New York Daily News op-ed on 21 August 2011, a self-interested retrospective, Sharpton wrote that he had arrived "late in the evening the day after" and "did not know Yankel Rosenbaum had been killed by a mob on that first night". He said the "diamond merchants" remark referred to "the likes of the Oppenheimer family — which at the time was trading diamonds with apartheid South Africa", and that "Extremists seized upon that to say that I was calling all Jews diamond merchants, and I spent years defending the statement rather than recognizing that in hours of tension, one must be clearer than at any other time." He conceded: "Our language and tone sometimes exacerbated tensions and played to the extremists rather than raising the issue of the value of this young man whom we were so concerned about," and added: "I would still have stood up for Gavin Cato, but I would have also included in my utterances that there was no justification or excuse for violence or for the death of Yankel Rosenbaum."

The New York Jewish Week noted that his statement that he saw "brick-throwing on all sides" was "at odds with the contention of the chasidic community, that the violence was entirely directed at Jews". Rosenbaum's brother Norman said: "I don't hear the words 'I apologize' ... As far as I'm concerned it's just a cynical attempt to appease those who haven't forgotten the truth." Abraham Foxman of the ADL said Sharpton "comes close to doing the right thing" but "still hasn't come far enough to say 'I made a mistake, I acted in a bigoted way and I'm sorry'". Days earlier, withdrawing from a forum at the Hampton Synagogue, Sharpton had written: "I have made mistakes in my career, but the allegations around Crown Heights, which is proven to be patently untrue, was not one of them." In 2024 he told a sympathetic biographer: "Crown Heights happened in August 1991. I would have to be schizophrenic to do what they claim that I did."

Later rapprochement

In October 2001 Sharpton met Israel's consul-general in New York, Alon Pinkas; Haaretz called it "the first time Sharpton will meet an official Israeli representative". He then made a three-day trip to Israel, organised with Rabbi Marc Schneier of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and accompanied by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach; Schneier called it "a significant step in the strengthening of black-Jewish relations", and Boteach said: "We have to move forward. We cannot be trapped in the past." The trip ended in controversy when Sharpton met Yasser Arafat in Gaza. Schneier, who had withdrawn as a chaperone, said: "If I were looking to reconcile with the Jewish community, my first overture would not be sitting down with Yasser Arafat."

After antisemitic attacks in the New York area in December 2019, including the Monsey stabbing, Sharpton convened Black clergy with Schneier and said: "I am terribly disturbed by the recent anti-Semitic attacks on Jews, and particularly because they were perpetrated by members of the African-American community." A 2013 NPR profile described him as having "gradually ... become the consummate insider", while the Brooklyn politician Dov Hikind complained that he had "been kosherized by a lot of people who I don't think would give many of us a second chance".

In June 2020 the ADL's chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, appeared on Sharpton's MSNBC programme to promote a Facebook advertising boycott. This drew criticism from Jewish groups: Hikind asked why it was "OK to align yourself with Al Sharpton, a race-baiter and inciter of violence in the Crown Heights riots", and Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America said the ADL "should not align itself with Sharpton". After the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, Greenblatt told the Washington Monthly that "the first person to call me was Reverend Sharpton", who had driven a joint civil-rights statement condemning "this terrorist attack on Israel in which civilians have been targeted, killed, and kidnapped".

Pogrom or rebellion?

Goldschmidt sets out the two framings: "Black Crown Heights residents viewed this vio­lence as a 'riot'—or a 'rebellion'—triggered by Black frustration at White privilege, while Jewish Crown Heights residents viewed it as a 'pogrom' triggered by baseless Gentile hostility toward Jews." He argues that each side reinterprets the other's terms: "to define Blacks as Gentiles, criminals as Cossacks, and a riot as a pogrom", and, on the other side, "to define Jews as Whites, insularity as insult, and a pogrom as a riot". Rabbi Shmuel Butman, quoted by Goldschmidt, spoke of "a pogrom that we thought was only going to exist in books. Unfortunately we saw it right here, on the streets of Crown Heights", and Goldschmidt notes that "nearly all Lubavitchers in Crown Heights echo Rabbi Butman's assess­ment of a 'one side confrontation'".

Jewish and conservative readings

For Gourevitch, "it was a riot not by victims of racism but by racists, an attack on Jews because they were Jews", and "in this respect, the event was unprecedented in American history". The ADL, an advocacy body, called it "the most dramatic, sustained and disturbing anti-Semitic outburst seen in the United States in many years". Chabad.org describes "three days of unrestrained antisemitic violence" and quotes the historian Edward S. Shapiro calling it "the most serious antisemitic incident in American history".

Black, activist and left readings

Daughtry, a participant, rejected the Jewish framing: "to refer to the riots in Crown Heights as Khristelnacht and pogroms" risked "diminishing the importance of those dreadful experiences in Jewish history", since the events were "a narrowly con­fined, spontaneous eruption for several days in reaction to a traf­fic accident by people who feel, right or wrong, that they have been victims of years of a double standard". He wrote that "there was as much anger, if not more, directed toward the police as towards the Hasidim". The Village Voice in 2002 described "the four-day disturbance—an uprising, a riot, or a pogrom, depending on whom you talk to". A Black pastor quoted there asked: "They talk about the Black guys who started the riot, but they never talk about the Jewish driver who killed Gavin Cato."

The City Sun, a Brooklyn Black weekly founded in 1984, was the most combative Black paper of the period; the journalist Wayne Dawkins notes that its founder's news service had won a 1979 award "for its multipart series on black-Jewish racial tension in Crown Heights, nearly 15 years before the Brooklyn neighborhood became nationally known".

Fires in the Mirror

Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman play Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992; published 1993) is built from her interviews with Black, Lubavitch and other New Yorkers, performed verbatim; the words below are interview testimony as edited and arranged by Smith. The published text opens with a background note from the PBS American Playhouse production, which gives weight to both communities' grievances. It records that "Black leaders have charged that the Lubavitchers have enjoyed 'preferential treatment' in the community from police and other city agencies, including permission to close off major city streets during Jewish holidays", and that "Hasidic crime patrols, Blacks say, have indiscriminately targeted members of the Black community". It also records that "Lubavitchers point to the August fighting that included calls to 'Kill the Jews,' 'Get the Jews out,' and chants of 'Heil Hitler'", and that remarks about "Hasidic 'diamond merchants' and Jews as the 'devil leaders' of White people evoked old stereotypes". The note adds that "many young Blacks who took to the streets in August 1991 were less interested in targeting Jews than in fighting the police, whom many in New York City's Black community regard as an occupying army", that police "arrested between 150 and 300 young Blacks as a 'preventive measure' in what witnesses described as indiscriminate 'sweeps'", and that "Black media reports generally presented the conflict as an anti-racist struggle and dismissed or trivialized charges of anti-Semitism. Jewish newspapers often blamed 'black agitators' and spoke of 'pogroms'".

The play's opening "identities" sequence sets everyday encounters beside the riot. In "Static", an anonymous Lubavitcher woman describes asking a Black neighbourhood boy to switch off a radio her baby had turned on during the Sabbath: "he says, 'You see this little button here / that says on and off? / Push that in / and that turns it off.' / ... and we laughed that he probably thought: / And people say Jewish people are really smart and they don't know / how to turn off their radios." Sharpton appears in the same sequence talking not about Crown Heights but about his hair and his surrogate father, James Brown: "James Brown raised me. ... I always wanted a father / and he filled that void." Goldschmidt draws on later parts of the play for Black testimony about the night of the accident, including the Rev. Heron Sam's remarks on the Hatzolah ambulance (Smith, p. 77).

Aftermath and the 1993 election

The Girgenti Report was published in July 1993, four months before the mayoral election. Kamber wrote that the riot "severely damaged the reputation of David Dinkins, the city's first African American mayor; sparked a white voter backlash; and was instrumental in Rudy Giuliani's defeat of Dinkins in the next election". BlackPast states that Giuliani's campaign accused Dinkins of having "enabled an ethnic 'pogrom' by allowing rioters to roam in the street". Dinkins, speaking at the Jewish Theological Seminary after the Nelson verdict, rejected the charge: "There is not a single shred of evidence that I held the NYPD back—and there never will be." Three weeks after the riot he had called Rosenbaum's killing a "lynching".

The Rebbe's response

The Rebbe's motorcade was at the centre of the events, and Goldschmidt notes that the violence "cast doubt on the promise of America—a country the Rebbe had always called a 'land of loving kindness' for its just treat­ment of Jews". The Chabad.org retrospective of 2021 presents the riot as a test of the Rebbe's 1969 instruction not to leave: "The Jewish community still existed and was even growing, unlike the disappeared Jewish communities of Brooklyn's Brownsville, East New York, East Flatbush".

Memory and reconciliation

By 2002 the Village Voice found "a neighborhood largely indifferent" to the reversal of Nelson's conviction, and community organisations such as "Mothers to Mothers, Project CARE, and the Crown Heights Youth Collective" running dialogue projects, although "there is still little voluntary interaction between Blacks and Jews". Richard Green of the Crown Heights Youth Collective, an adviser to the Cato family, told Dasun Allah: "If the Hasidic community gets to buy a building, and we don't get together and buy that building, who's to be blamed for that?" Carmel Cato told the Daily Challenge: "It's still not over ... I want Yosef Lifsh ... to face justice for killing my child."

At the twentieth anniversary in 2011 the JTA reported Sharpton's partial admission of "mistakes". Isaac Abraham, spokesman for the Rosenbaum family, had earlier objected to calls to move on: "Do you think the African American community would be silent if this happened in the African American community?"

See also

• Menachem Mendel Schneerson
• Chabad-Lubavitch movement
• Crown Heights Jewish Community Council
• Hatzolah
• Al Sharpton
• Black–Jewish relations in the United States

Further reading

• Edward S. Shapiro, Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006).
• Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (New York: Anchor Books, 1993).
• Henry Goldschmidt, Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights (Rutgers University Press, 2006).
• Herbert Daughtry, No Monopoly on Suffering (Africa World Press, 1997).
• Brooklyn Historical Society, "Crown Heights Oral History – Bridging Eastern Parkway, 1993–1994", ArMs 1994.006.