The Crown Heights Riots and the Rise of Black Antisemitism

Michael Pack is a documentary filmmaker and served as CEO of the US Agency for Global Media under President Trump. He partnered with The Wall Street Journal Opinion section to create his most recent film, “Get the Jew”: The Crown Heights Riot Revisited.

This interview was edited for clarity.

Ari: I'm a very big history buff. I think it's really important to read about history, to understand it, specifically to be able to understand where we are today and how we got here. What can we pull from history that's relevant to what's happening today? So, my first question to you is, what made you want to create this documentary? What parallels did you see that would bring value to it and what's happening today?

Michael: This documentary is the first in a series that my company, Palladium Pictures, is doing in partnership with the Wall Street Journal opinion section. The series is called WSJ Opinion Docs.

The purpose of the series is to focus on events from the recent past that have been ignored, forgotten, or misreported, and that are relevant today. This film is the first, and it’s clearly relevant. There's a new wave of antisemitism now, but, really, the Crown Heights riot established a pattern that you see repeated, such as during the college protests last year, and even in the coverage of Hamas and Israel today.

Ari: I see those parallels. We’re seeing all this rhetoric on campuses, with a lot of young people repeating things we heard in the documentary. It’s not just young black groups — it’s a lot of young people. Was there any foreshadowing that we saw from the Crown Heights riots, and how does that apply?

Michael: I think so. Just for your readers, Ari, let me go over the events. As you know, it started with a traffic accident where a Chabad man, part of Rabbi Schneerson's motorcade, ran a yellow or red light, hit another car, and careened off that car, pinning two young black children playing in the street.

Tragically, one of them was killed. It was eight o'clock at night on a hot August evening in Crown Heights. Quickly, a mob of black men gathered and got whipped up, with people saying things like, “It was done on purpose; the Jews always get away with things.”

They started marauding through Crown Heights, beating people up, smashing store windows, and they found Yankel Rosenbaum three hours later — a young Orthodox, Hasidic (but not Chabad) doctoral student. They said, “Get the Jew! There's one; get him!” They beat him and stabbed him, and he died.

People began portraying these events as equivalent: one an accident, the other an intentional assault. The riot went on for three days. The key question is, why did it go on for three days? Why did the mayor and the police chief not stop it until they themselves were attacked?

Once they were attacked, they turned to the Deputy Police Chief, Ray Kelly, and told him to stop it, which he did in three hours. I see this pattern repeating on college campuses and elsewhere, this inability to stand up against antisemitic violence.

Ari: Especially until it affects them personally. There are so many cases like this happening. Over the past few years, I've noticed the resurgence of Louis Farrakhan’s influence among successful black people in entertainment and sports — like Kyrie Irving, Kanye West, and Candace Owens. How can we understand this resurgence of antisemitism, looking back at what happened in Crown Heights?

Michael: You’re right about the resurgence of that specific kind of antisemitism. Right before Crown Heights, Louis Farrakhan was very active. We focused some attention on Leonard Jeffries, the uncle of Hakeem Jeffries, the current Minority Leader in the House.

Leonard Jeffries had a vitriolic version of black nationalism, blaming Jews for the slave trade, claiming Jewish bankers controlled everything. I think that kind of rhetoric helped to whip up tension in Crown Heights. That rhetoric is dangerous. I actually met Leonard Jeffries around this time, and it was shocking. I’m Jewish, and he zoned in on that right away. It was a bit scary.

Today’s antisemitism has a different origin. It’s often tied to pro-Hamas, anti-American, anti-Israel sentiments. They call it “anti-Zionism,” but, as friends of ours in Chabad have said to us, it is all the same.

In Crown Heights, they were chanting things like, “Heil Hitler” and “Hitler didn’t finish the job.” We end the film with another recent stabbing of a young Hasidic man in Crown Heights, where the assailant shouted, “Free Palestine” and “Do you want to die?” The man stabbed, thankfully, didn’t die, but the feelings behind these actions are similar to ones over thirty years earlier.

Ari: Comparing the riot to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots from four years ago, are there any parallels in the psychology of how that forms? Specifically, are there sentiments in those communities that make them prone to that kind of outbreak?

Michael: The George Floyd protests, where there was also violence, shows something about the politics of America today that definitely has its parallels in the Crown Heights riot. In these Democrat-run, essentially one-party cities and states, the mayor or governor — usually a Democrat — often can't stand up to violence from the progressive wing.

So, if the people perpetuating the violence are perceived to be on the left, like during the George Floyd protests, the mayor, police chiefs, and governors often feel politically unable to confront it.

This goes back to Crown Heights and Mayor David Dinkins. He wasn’t antisemitic, and neither was his police chief, Lee Brown. They were both accomplished black men, clearly not antisemitic by their life histories, but they politically couldn’t stand up against a mob that came from outside and whipped up the crowd.

Al Sharpton claims he wasn’t responsible, but he and others — like Alton Maddox and Reverend Hebert Daughtry — were involved in stirring things up. The mayor and the police chief, in my opinion, just couldn’t politically stand up to them.

Now, that’s my opinion — not necessarily the view of the documentary we made, which tries to be fact-based and lets viewers decide for themselves.

But since we’re talking, I’ll give you my perspective. I believe that they couldn’t stand up to the left wing of their party, even when it turned violent. This is what happened in places like Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland during the summer of 2020.

And I think it happened again on college campuses last year when there were antisemitic chants from groups saying things like, “From the river to the sea,” and “Intifada revolution, there is only one solution,” and even physically intimidating some Jewish students. But, college presidents were reluctant to condemn it.

We saw this reluctance from the three college presidents who testified before Congress. But if you do a thought experiment and imagine that the chants were anti-black or anti-LGBT, those college presidents would probably have condemned them swiftly, and rightly so. Antisemitism, however, is harder for them to address, and I think that’s because it often comes from the left.

Ari: It feels like the Crown Heights riots are a microcosm for many of today’s issues. Even the same cast of characters, like Reverend Al Sharpton during the BLM riots, was encouraging people to “make their voices heard.” You ended the documentary showing that the problem is still there and has manifested into something else. It’s almost pessimistic. Do you think there are any lessons to be learned from the Crown Heights riots?

Michael: Well, two things. During the Crown Heights riots, a lot of major Jewish groups were slow to condemn the rioters. Abe Foxman, then head of the ADL, later apologized for this.

I think the feeling was that Chabad — these are Hasidic Jews, wearing black hats — doesn’t look like Jews on the Upper East Side or Upper West Side, so this could never happen to us. But I think there’s now a perception that it can happen anywhere, even at places like Columbia and Harvard.

I actually think this pattern can always be stopped. It just takes political leadership. Mayor Dinkins lost the next mayoral election to Rudy Giuliani, who then turned the city around on a law-and-order platform. These antisemites are usually not that powerful, at least at first. They can always be stood up to with political leadership.

Ari: I guess today, many groups, like the ADL, think the solution is through information campaigns and awareness. Do you think the answer really is just law and order?

Michael: I think both things are true. You can stand up against violence, and I think leaders like Mayor Dinkins or college presidents could do that. However, that doesn’t eradicate the underlying problem of antisemitism, which has been around for thousands of years.

I think information campaigns are great, but they aren’t sufficient. I never thought I’d see Protocols of the Elders of Zion for sale on college campuses today, but it’s there. That deep-rooted antisemitism is harder to deal with.

Ari: Speaking of leadership, what are your thoughts on Mayor Adams, especially in comparison to Giuliani and Dinkins? Some Jewish groups have praised him for speaking out about antisemitism.

Michael: I don’t know a lot of details about what Mayor Adams said.

But I think one of the sources of today’s antisemitism is the teaching on college campuses that Israel is a settler colonial state and that Zionism is evil.

In 1991, only people like Leonard Jeffries said that, but now it’s prevalent. There’s rarely a countervailing view in academia, and I’m not sure how to change that. At this time, it is deeply rooted in the American academy. However, we must try to change it.