A former
New York Times religion reporter has written a blistering attack on the
newspaper’s failure to attribute a riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, 20 years ago
to anti-Semitism. The violence resulted in the murder of Australian Yankel
Rosenbaum, a Lubavitch hassid, on August 19, 1991.
Ari L. Goldman, who
covered the story for the Times in 1991, wrote in the current issue of
New York
Jewish Week: “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.”
RELATED:The Amish get a hamish welcome NY teens hurl rocks at Jewish bus After the motorcade of Rabbi
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, then the Lubavitcher Rebbe, accidentally struck and
killed Gavin Cato, seven, the son of Guyanese immigrants, a wave of violence
erupted in Crown Heights. The neighborhood is the site of the Lubavitch
headquarters and is populated largely by Caribbean- Americans, African-Americans
and Orthodox Jews.
Lemrick Nelson, Jr., 16 in 1991, was sentenced to 10
years in prison in 2003 for stabbing Rosenbaum to death. Nelson and a group of
other young black men had encircled Rosenbaum as shouts to “Kill the Jew” filled
the air.
Goldman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a
former Fulbright Professor in Jerusalem, wrote, “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 pay phones and dictated our memos to a waiting band of
stenographers in the home office.”
He took his former employer to task
because “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.”
Goldman, who worked for the
Times for 20
years, continued, “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 hassidic man brandishing an open umbrella before a police
officer in riot gear. The caption read: ‘A police officer scuffling with a
hassidic man yesterday on President Street.’”
Goldman’s 1,649-word article has
garnered sympathy from prominent Jewish American commentators. Writing on the
website of
The Atlantic magazine, national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg said,
“Ari Goldman has filed an amazing piece for
The New York Jewish Week... about
the manner in which his former newspaper,
The New York Times, covered the Crown
Heights riots of 1991. It is astonishing, the lengths the
Times went to prove
that a riot that was anti- Semitic on its face wasn’t, in fact,
anti-Semitic.”
The editor-in-chief of
Commentary magazine, John
Podhoretz, wrote on the magazine’s website, “In an astonishing piece today in
the
Jewish Week, Ari L. Goldman recounts his experiences as a reporter for the
New York Times during the riots... Goldman — telling his story for the first
time on the 20th anniversary of the riots — reveals the absurd lengths to which
the paper for which he worked attempted to make it seem as though the
culpability for the riots rested equally between those attacking hassidim and
the hassidim who were defending themselves against attack.“
Commenting on the
failure to use robust police tactics, Podhoretz wrote, “All this happened while
the New York Police Department stood by and deliberately failed to intervene, in
one of the stunning moments of the mayoralty of David Dinkins that led to his
defeat two years later at the hands of Rudy Giuliani and the complete overhaul
of city policing strategy that led to the vertiginous crime drop, which proved
to the be the salvation of New York City.”
The Anti-Defamation League
accused African-American leader the Reverend Al Sharpton of fanning the flames
of anti-Semitism during the post-riot period.
While commenting on Cato’s
death, Sharpton said, “The world will tell us he was killed by accident. Yes, it
was a social accident... 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...”
Sharpton denied he was stoking
anti-Semitism.
Goldman cited two New York columnists who debunked the
narrative about the riots not being steeped in anti-Semitism and about the
alleged nonslanted reporting. In a commentary written two weeks after the riots
for the
Times, the paper’s former executive editor, A.M. Rosenthal, called the
unrest a “Pogrom in Brooklyn.”
After a group of young men severely beat
then-
Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, he said, “And someone up in the higher
echelons of journalism, some moron starts talking about balanced coverage.”