‘Get the Jew:’ New Documentary on Crown Heights Riots

Watch: Wall Street Journal released a new documentary titled “Get the Jew: The Crown Heights Riot Revisited." The 20-minute-long documentary sheds light on the worst antisemitic riot in American history, which took place over three terror-filled days and nights in August 1991.

On Monday, Oct. 7, Wall Street Journal Opinion released a new documentary titled “Get the Jew”: The Crown Heights Riot Revisited. The 20-minute-long documentary sheds light on the worst antisemitic riot in American history, which took place over three terror-filled days and nights in August 1991.

It all began on Monday, August 19, when a station wagon driven by a Lubavitcher accidentally hit and killed a black boy named Gavin Cato and injured his cousin. A crowd quickly formed around the accident scene, growing ever more violent. “Get the Jew” interviews Mark Hoppe, a retired NYPD officer who was the first to arrive at the scene, who recalls the Chassidic driver trying to protect himself from the crowd’s blows.

Hoppe testifies that when Hatzalah arrived and began trying to assist, NYPD told the Jews to leave the area immediately. Almost immediately, someone started a rumor in the black community that Hatzalah refused to aid the injured black children, and instead left only with the Jewish man. This libel against the Jewish community is repeated in some quarters to this day.

“Was it a smart decision?” to tell the Chassidic Jews to leave the scene, Hoppe asks in the film. “20/20 hindsight says no, but it probably saved his life.”

“Get the Jew” carefully follows what happens next, including how black rioters—egged on by racial provocateurs—immediately set upon the local Jewish community in Crown Heights, leading that night to the stabbing murder of Yankel Rosenbaum by Lemerick Nelson. It documents how Jews were attacked in the streets, rioters set upon Jewish stores, homes and cars, all while Mayor David Dinkins and the NYPD allowed the riot to rage for three full nights, as many in the media played down or excused the rabid antisemitism at the heart of the violence.

“There was a lot of standing around, a lot of show of force, but not force,” Hoppe recalls. For years many claimed that Dinkins had said “Let them vent,” and though Hoppe never heard those words uttered by any higher-ups, he did remember that rumor flowing through the police force. “It could have been a rumor, but that’s what everyone went with.”

Wall Street Journal Opinon’s Elliot Kaufman, who wrote a lengthy piece on the Crown Heights Riots on its 30th anniversary, explains that while New York State’s Girgenti Report on the riots did not find evidence that Dinkins had ever actually uttered those words, the reality might even be worse. “He gave no orders at all for those days, no instructions at all,” says Kaufman. “He looked the other way when a riot was happening against a small, vulnerable Jewish community.”

The film also speaks with Rabbi Shea Hecht and former New York Times reporter Ari Goldman, and includes interviews with key players in the story, such as then-Deputy Police Chief Ray Kelly and Al Sharpton, who came to Crown Heights and helped egg on rioters. In the film, Sharpton says about a procession that he led that he was in front and could not have seen that people marching behind him were carrying antisemitic placards and chanting antisemitic slogans.

“There was some antisemitic chants going on,” Sharpton later admits in the film. “There was some hatred going on, and I think there were those who exploited what happened, and came in, that might not have even been from Crown Heights.”

When asked, Sharpton declined to name who the leaders of that vividly antisemitic group were. “I’ll leave that for your research, I do not want to get into that,” he says.

In telling the story the short documentary provides important background about the history of Crown Heights, highlighting how it was once a Jewish neighborhood that in the 1960s was in danger of disappearing, and that it was only the Rebbe who ensured it remained.

“Get the Jew” concludes by discussing the current wave of unchecked antisemitism in New York and other big cities, asking whether the lessons of the Crown Heights Riots have really been learned.

“Get the Jew”: The Crown Heights Riot Revisited was created by Wall Street Journal Opinion in collaboration with Palladium Pictures, and is the first in a new series of short documentary films that tells dramatic true stories from the recent past about important issues that deserve attention and examination.

Watch the entire documentary here:
Caution: graphic images

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