On 30th anniversary of Crown Heights riots, those who lived through it tell their story

View this email in a browser

INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT. SINCE 1897.

Give a tax-deductible donation

In today’s briefing: Chabad rabbi discouraging vaccinations, the last Jew in Afghanistan, Larry David's squabble with Alan Dershowitz, celebrating Groucho Marx and more.

OUR LEAD STORY ☝️

GETTY IMAGES

30 years later, Jewish leaders recall Crown Heights tensions with mayor

Over three days in the summer of 1991, riots raged in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, following the fatal stabbing of a Hasidic yeshiva student and an accident that killed a young Black child. Our senior political reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, spoke with aides to Mayor David Dinkins and Orthodox leaders about what they saw and how the city tried to heal after the event.

The anniversary comes shortly after the neighborhood’s Orthodox mobilized to help Eric Adams win the Democratic primary and likely become New York’s first Black mayor since Dinkins. Though many are worried about the recent uptick in violent antisemitic incidents, years of efforts to build relationships across the two communities are bearing fruit. Read the story >

The missing voices of Black Jews: Akedah Fulcher-Eze had a unique vantage point on the riots: she grew up Black and Orthodox in Crown Heights. “That night, Black Jews drove through Crown Heights, in their kippot, looking very Jewish, while Lubavitchers could not,” she recalled in an interview with our editor-at-large, Robin Washington. “My parents actually drove their Lubavitch neighbors to and from the hospital that night, covered in blankets on the backseat of our black Fleetwood Brougham Cadillac.” Read the story >

A people divided: Current Jewish residents of Crown Heights said that the anniversary, coming after a year of violence perpetrated against both Blacks and visibly Orthodox Jews, lays bare a rift. Not between them and their Black neighbors, but with non-Orthodox Jews who they felt abandoned them in 1991. Read the story >

From our archives: On the event’s 20th anniversary in 2011, journalist Samuel G. Freedman wrote that the most enduring lesson of the Crown Heights riots is that the Jews did not abandon the neighborhood after the violence. Read the story >

ALSO IN THE FORWARD 😷

A Chabad campus rabbi is discouraging student vaccinations: Rabbi Chaim Adelman, who runs a Chabad House near the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, is raising unfounded health concerns about COVID-19 vaccines and offering to facilitate religious exemptions to the school’s vaccine mandate. Told by a Forward reporter that the international Hasidic movement supports some vaccine mandates, he said: “I’m going to rethink what I did.” Read the story >

A century of baseball on radio, a century of Jewish announcers: Mel Allen Israel, Alabama born and bred, had a Southern drawl that endeared him to audiences nationwide. When he died in 1996, there were memorial services at both a synagogue and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Benjamin Ivry profiled Israel and many other sportscasters to mark the centennial of the first live broadcast of a Major League Baseball game. Read the story >

5 THINGS AMERICAN JEWS ARE TALKING ABOUT 🖐

DERSHOWITZ & DAVID: THEIR SQUABBLE SOUNDS LIKE A 'CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM' SCENE. (GETTY IMAGES)

1. Amid the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, we wondered what was happening to the country’s last remaining Jew, 62-year-old Zebulun Simantov. He lives in Kabul’s only synagogue and said earlier this year that he would leave before the Taliban arrived, possibly for Israel. But now Simantov has apparently changed his mind – perhaps to avoid granting his wife a divorce. (JTA)

2. In what is perhaps the Jewiest encounter to occur on Martha’s Vineyard this summer, Larry David got into a shouting match at a grocery store with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz over the latter’s ties to Donald Trump. “It’s typical of what happens now on the Vineyard,” Dershowitz told a reporter. “People won’t talk to each other if they don’t agree with their politics.” (Page Six)

3. An ancient Jewish coin from the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans will fly into space with Israeli billionaire Eytan Stibbe. Stibbe, a former pilot in the Israeli Air Force, is scheduled to join an upcoming SpaceX flight after Tom Cruise had to cancel. “This is a thrilling meeting between the ancient world and the height of human innovation,” Stibbe said of his plans to bring the coin, which is at least 1,900 years old. (Israel Antiquities Authority)

4. A 19-year-old student at an Orthodox yeshiva in Denver was shot and killed while standing outside his school building Wednesday. “At this time, it does not appear that it was a bias-motivated incident,” a police spokesperson said, though the department is not ruling it out. (JTA)

5. College basketball guard Bryan Knapp will move from Ithaca College to George Washington University for his senior year. He grew up in Washington, D.C., and said that at Shabbat dinners, “we'd catch up for 15 or 20 minutes, and then we dive straight into politics for the rest of the meal.” (Jewish Insider)

Mazal tov >Congrats to Jewish actress Scarlett Johansson and husband Colin Jost on the birth of a baby boy. And he shall be named Cosmo. Seriously.

Shiva call > Herman Edel, a former mayor of Aspen and one of the founders of the city’s original synagogue, died at 95. He helped secure a Torah rescued from the Nazis that remains at the Aspen Jewish Congregation. He later wrote a novel about the history of that Torah. (The Aspen Times)

What else we’re reading > Why does Congress pray every day? … The saga of Jewish refugees incarcerated by the British in Cypriot camps ... ‘Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl’ is one of Time magazine’s 100 best young adult books of all time.

NEW EPISODE ALERT 🎧

“Cautious Caregiver” wrote to our Jewish advice podcast about her father-in-law, who is in his 80s and refuses to hire help for his wife, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. “It is clear that he is overwhelmed and could use a caregiver to help with her daily needs,” the questioner asks. Hosts Ginna Green and Lynn Harris are joined by Carol Silver-Elliott, president and CEO of Jewish Home Family, who shares some insights on aging and death. Listen to the podcast>

FROM OUR ARCHIVES 🍞

How do you spell pumpernickel in Yiddish? This 1935 Manischewitz ad in the Forverts attempts an answer, calling the heavy loaf the “crown of breads.” (And, yes, Manischewitz used to be in the bread business.)

PHOTO OF THE DAY 📸

GETTY IMAGES

Itamar Einhorn of Team Israel (far left) with other cyclists during a leg of the 76th Tour of Spain. The race departed from Burgos and will finish in Santiago de Compostela in the first week of September.

ON THE CALENDAR 🗓

PHOTO: PICTORIAL PARADE/GETTY IMAGES

On this day in history: Groucho Marx died on Aug. 19, 1977 at 86. Our culture critic PJ Grisar looks at a forgotten chapter in the history of the Marx brothers, when their musical was stopped short by the Spanish flu. “While the plot of the play, and many of the songs, were not worth remembering,” Grisar writes, “the brothers themselves recalled one thing — the show was bad, and its failure wasn’t entirely due to the health crisis.”

It’s National Potato Day. Did you know that there are at least 10 Yiddish words for potato?

Support Independent Jewish Journalism

The Forward is a non-profit 501(c)3 so our journalism depends on support from readers like you. You can support our work today by donating or subscribing. All donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of US law.

Copyright © 2021, The Forward Association, Inc. All rights reserved. The Forward Association, Inc., 125 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

Click here to unsubscribe from this newsletter.

To stop receiving all emails from the Forward click here.