41845358-Antisemitism

220 ANTISEMITISM
while the Jewish ambulance service tended only to the Jewish driver, and that
the police refused to arrest him. Several hours later some twenty black youths,
shouting “Kill the Jew!” attacked Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting Hasidic
scholar from Australia. Stabbed by Lemerick Nelson, Jr., Rosenbaum later
died in the hospital. (With better care most likely he would have survived.) For
the next four days blacks, often spewing antisemitic slogans, including “Heil
Hitler,” surged through the Hasidic section, attacking homes, stoning and
beating people, setting fires, and looting stores. The terrified Jews appealed to
the police for protection, but Mayor David Dinkins and his black police commissioner
did not call out the police in force until the fifth day. It was speculated
that Dinkins, a black who always had congenial relations with Jews, felt
that a massive police response would have alienated his black constituents.
Some black spokespersons from the area said that the riots were a response to
years of mistreatment that they suffered at the hands of the insular Hasids. To
the Hasids, many of them Holocaust survivors, the riot was nothing less than a
pogrom, reminiscent of what their relatives had faced in tsarist Russia when
mobs periodically attacked Jewish neighborhoods while the authorities looked
the other way. Equally distressing to Jews was the relative silence of the black
community during and immediately after the outrages.
Also in 1991, Professor Leonard Jeffries, Jr., told an approving audience
of black educators and artists that the Jewish moguls of Hollywood had conspired
with the Mafia to spread negative images of blacks in their films and
that Jews were the principal financiers and organizers of the Atlantic slave
trade. In the furor that followed, several distressing things were learned about
Jeffries. He had been appointed in 1972 both chairman and full professor immediately
after receiving his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. (For an
unpublished scholar to receive a full professorship in a major institution so
soon after earning a doctorate is virtually unheard of.) He never published,
staffed the department with militant cronies, paraded about campus with an
entourage of posturing and menacing neighborhood blacks, was frequently
absent, late to class, and negligent in handing in grades, and propagated
bizarre racist theories about whites and historical nonsense about Jews. And
on campus, both inside and outside the classroom, Jeffries conducted himself
like a thug and a huckster.
James Traub, who sat in Jeffries’ classroom and wrote a revealing article
for The New Yorker, reported that he taught that white people are less humanistic
than blacks because they evolved in a cold climate that hardened their
hearts. According to Jeffries’ anthropology, black people, because they are
“sun people,” are endowed with a “humanistic, spiritualistic value system,”