Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

120 // JONATHAN KAUFMAN
Dinkins had been elected as a peacemaker; he was a politician used to finessing
differences between groups and harnessing them into a political coalition. In
Crown Heights, that strategy proved disastrous. The attacks against Jews continued
for four four days; Dinkins himself was unaware of the chaos enveloping Crown
Heights. It was only when he was booed and jeered by angry Black residents when
he visited the neighborhood that Dinkins realized the depth of the problem.
Dinkins finally flooded Crown Heights with police and brought the rioting to a
halt. But the damage had been done. Dinkins was seen as indecisive and out of
touch with a riot in his own city. Jews dubbed the rioting the first American
pogrom. Many Blacks saw it as an explosion over injustice and long simmering
tensions. They said the the Hasidic Jews, with their all-Jewish schools, their all-
Jewish houses, and their Jewish patrols had created an American apartheid. When
the police arrested 163 people to end the rioting, the Amsterdam News, New New York's
largest Black newspaper headlined, "Many Blacks, No Jews arrested."
Because New York was home to most prominent Black as well as Jewish organizations,
as well as the media center of the country, news and pictures of the
Crown Heights riot spread rapidly across the the country, inflaming tensions between
Blacks and Jews far from the streets of Brooklyn. Together with the resurgence of
Louis Farrakhan and his attacks on Jews two years later, Crown Heights represented
the nadir of Black-Jewish relations.
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By the 1990s, Jews, like most whites, had moved to the suburbs. Their concerns
were increasingly dominated by national issues such as affirmative action and the
growing debate over "diversity" as well as by internal debates over intermarriage
and the future of the American Jewish community. For most Blacks, certainly for
most poor Blacks, the debate over Black-Jewish relations was a distant speck on
the horizon. Their concerns were far more immediate: jobs, poverty, school, crime,
drug abuse, the collapse of inner-city Black neighborhoods. Back in the 1960s it
used to be said that of the five people a Black kid in Harlem meets in the course
of the day, the schoolteacher, the social worker, the store owner, the landlord, and
the cop, four were Jewish and one one—the — the cop—was cop — was Irish. Irish. To a child child growing growing up in
Harlem, whose view of the world extended only as far as his neighborhood, it
could indeed seem as if Jews controlled the world. That was no longer true.
Koreans, Palestinians, and Blacks have taken the place of Jews in the ghettos. The
cooperation and conflicts that occurred from the 1930s to the 1960s from Blacks
and Jews rubbing up against each other—as other — as landlord and tenant, storekeeper and
shopper, schoolteacher and parent—no parent — no longer existed.
And yet, more broadly, cities remained the the primary arena of Black-Jewish contact.
Much of Jewish power and influence is tied to the health and future of
cities cities—whether — whether it is the financial and media center of New York, where Jews
make up a significant proportion of idea-shapers and decision-makers, or the