KILL THE JEW! KILL THE NIGGER!

“The crowd chased Mr. Rosenbaum, caught him on the corner and began attacking him. You are going to hear, ladies and gentlemen, through the defendant’s own statement, that he joined in with that violent mob that was beating Yankel Rosenbaum, not because he was angered or outraged by the earlier car accident, not because Mr. Rosenbaum was Jewish, but because at that moment on that night, on that corner, Lemrick Nelson got caught up in the excitement of what was going on.” —Opening remarks by Brooklyn Assistant D.A. Sari Kolatch

I, too, got caught up in the excitement on the second day of the Crown Heights riots. A chant erupted, reverberating in my ears like the brutal staccato of gunfire: “Jew-Jew-Jew-Jew!”

“Wey ’im dey?” asked a Jamaican woman, part of the mostly black crowd marching on President Street in a drizzle. The protesters were demanding the arrest of a Hasidic driver who’d accidentally struck and killed seven-year-old Gavin Cato and seriously injured his cousin Angela the night before. Any Jew would do.

“Look de Jew-man dey,” another woman pointed at an unwary Isaac Bitton and his 12-year-old son Yechiel, who were walking on Schenectady Avenue toward the crowd.

Suddenly, a torrent of stones and bottles rained down on the man and boy. Cops in riot gear ran for cover. It was too late for the Hasidim. A cinder block knocked the man to the ground.

“The kid! The kid!” I shouted at the attackers as I ran toward the boy. Except for the black yarmulke on his head, the fringed tzitzit, and his “whiteness,” the youngster looked like any other boy from the ’hood, with his X-tra large T-shirt and baggy pants tucked into Reebok pumps. He cowered beside his father, wailing. Miraculously, none of the rubble hit him.

The boy muttered some Yiddish words, but the fear in his eyes told me he was asking for help. “It’s all right,” I tried to assure him. “Stay down!” But he was afraid of me and other African Americans who were now offering assistance.

“Why you help de Jew-man, boy?” … I didn’t have the heart for ethnic cleansing. 

Isaac Bitton’s face was bloodied. He seemed to be choking or gagging. I tried to lift him but a bottle crashed beside me, so I dragged him by his coat and propped him against a wrought iron fence.

“Die-e-e-e-e, bitch, die,” a slender woman with an insatiable hatred shouted at the dazed Bitton. He grabbed my arms.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. A stranger picked up the man’s hat and placed it on his head.

“Traitor!” someone from the crowd shouted at me. The condemnation was jolting. I thought my faceless accuser was going to sic the mob on me.

“Motherfuckers he’s already down!” I cursed at my own people, begging them to stop. Shortly afterward, police in riot gear moved in and escorted the father and son out of the war zone.

“Why you help de Jew-man, boy?” the woman who had wanted Isaac Bitton to die asked, with tears in her eyes. “Why? You want what he get?”

I stared unflinchingly at her. I just didn’t have the heart for ethnic cleansing. Like Lemrick Nelson, the whey-faced altar boy with an IQ of 84 — who cops say was high on a “40-ounce” when he stabbed the rabbinical scholar — I got caught up in the excitement. But unlike Nelson, 17, I was high on outrage, not a 40-ounce.

Later that evening, at the corner of President Street and Kingston Avenue, I watched a crowd of black youths in a faceoff with the Hasidim. Homeboys were yelling, “Kill da muthafuckin’ Jews!” and “Kill de Jew-man!” Boychiks spat and shouted back, “Oh yeah? Kill the neh-gahs! Schwartzers!” “Neh-gahs! Neh-gahs! Neh-gahs!”

Thirteen months later, as the murder trial of Lemrick Nelson winds down in Brooklyn Supreme Court, I’m still caught up in the excitement. The specter of that woman condemning Isaac Bitton to hell haunts me. It is anguishing to admit that I empathize with the brutal expression of her rage, when I realize that there is no hope of justice for Gavin and Angela Cato.

But then the enduring image of a helpless Isaac Bitton looms and I’m once again rebuking the posse that had tried to lynch him, and the woman’s depraved indifference to human suffering.

“No one would have believed that the same person who appeared to be super-militant would be the staunchest defender of a Hasid.”

I’m ostracized as an “Uncle Tom Jew lover,” and Lemrick Nelson is on trial for murder. But he and I are not the only African Americans who got caught up in the excitement of Crown Heights and suffer dire consequences as a result. A month after the riots, the Metropolitan Council of the American Jewish Congress accused the Reverend Herbert Daughtry and other black activists of fanning the racial flames. “Only the Jewish community railed against the anti-Semitism of the hatemongers,” the group claims.

Daughtry responded to his Jewish accusers in a chronicle of his role in the events: “I challenge you or anyone to cite one instance where I said or did anything that can be honestly said to have ‘inflamed racial tension and hatred.’” If anything, Daughtry writes, “I try to prevent violent confrontation; I try to keep people from getting hurt.”

In fact, Daughtry’s role on the third day of the riots placed him in a situation similar to mine, “where there [was] human life riding in the balance.” It was about 6 p.m. on August 22. A crowd of black youths, under the intense observation of police, milled about the corner of President Street and Utica Avenue where Gavin Cato was killed. An argument erupted over whether they should march.

“There was one fellow in particular who vehemently disagreed with me,” Daughtry recalled in his chronicle. “He urged the crowd to move ahead. As we arrived midway in the block, an elderly Hasid came running through the crowd trying to reach one of the buildings. Some of the crowd began to move toward him. Others of us persuaded the crowd to leave him alone. He arrived at his destination safely. The dominant character arguing for the Hasid’s safety was the same one who opposed me and insisted on marching… No one would have believed that the same person who appeared to be super-militant would be the staunchest defender of a Hasid.”

The Jewish Congress, caught up in the excitement of blame, had pandered to the paranoid style in racial politics. It leveled unsubstantiated charges that could only reignite tensions. “It is incredible,” Daughtry writes, “how this local conflict has been elevated to the magnitude of Jews against Blacks and Blacks against Jews, with everybody jumping into the conflict, bringing their own ideological, religious, and/or racial baggage.”

Last spring, when the city was seething with bias attacks, Yankel Rosenbaum’s brother Norman arrived from Australia and hooked up with a group called New Yorkers United Against Racism & Anti-Semitism. They had called for a massive rally at City Hall and distributed a flyer with the banner: Kill the Jew. “This,” the flyer stated, “was the rallying cry of the mob who stabbed to death a young Jewish scholar…”

I saw this flyer on a wall near City Hall. When I read its accusations that “City leaders stood silent” in the face of rampaging youths, I remembered how Mayor David Dinkins, caught up in the excitement, almost lost his life on those streets. The authors’ allegation that “Jews throughout the city continue to be threatened, synagogues are desecrated, and buses of Jewish schoolchildren are attacked” suggested that African Americans were responsible for these attacks. By conjuring up images of African Americans acting out their prejudices, akin to the wilding neo-Nazis of Berlin, the authors were inviting Jews all over the city to project their fears onto folks like me.

Longheld perceptions are easily released. And it doesn’t take much to get caught up in the excitement: only the drop of a slur, a rumor, or a tabloid headline. I wasn’t on the streets of Crown Heights last Monday, when a Hasidic student was approached by a black man who asked for a cigarette. “He looked around, saw no one was there, and he hit me in the face with his fist,” the student later recalled. “I fell to the ground and he started choking me. He was calling me a Jew and a dirty Jew and I thought I was going to die like Yankel Rosenbaum.”

I would have tried to save him, too.

Research assistance: Robert Marriott, Delroy Davis, Hakim Mutlaaq.

— • —

AND JUSTICE FOR ALL?

Three hours after the death of Gavin Cato set off random bombings and looting in Crown Heights, John Anderson, a 24-year-old unemployed stock market clerk, was walking toward President Street and Brooklyn Avenue. He saw a car pull up at the corner, where between 10 to 15 African American youths were gathering. A Hasidic man got out of the car, said something to one of the youths, then “threw a kick” at him. That man, according to Anderson, was Yankel Rosenbaum.

The youths “began hitting” Rosenbaum, Anderson, a surprise witness for the defense, told a mostly African American jury last Wednesday at the trial of Lemrick Nelson. Anderson said he did not see the stabbing that apparently followed the attack. After hearing police sirens, the youths scattered. “I refused to run,” Anderson testified. “I didn’t do anything?”

According to Anderson, cops confronted him and told him to lie on the ground but he refused. He said the cops grabbed another youth and presented him to Rosenbaum, who was stretched across the hood of a car writhing in pain from the effects of multiple stab wounds.

“Yankel Rosenbaum spat on the kid,” Anderson said. “I told the cop if he spit on me I would leave.” He said Rosenbaum told the cops he could not identify any of his attackers. Then the officers produced Lemrick Nelson, whom Rosenbaum said had stabbed him. Anderson insisted that the people who attacked Rosenbaum were “grown men, not kids,” suggesting that Nelson could not have been a member of the mob.

“Why did you do this to me? You motherfucker.”

Two defense witnesses have contradicted Anderson’s account. But defense attorney Arthur Lewis Jr. hopes that Anderson’s testimony will discredit the prosecution’s claim that Rosenbaum “was walking by himself” and did not instigate the attack. During his opening arguments, Lewis claimed that Rosenbaum “sacrificed his life” on the first night of the riots. “The evidence will show that he was attempting to protect both the residence and world headquarters of … the grand rebbe,” Lewis said. “We believe he was attempting to prevent articles and religious artifacts from being vandalized.”

He said that Rosenbaum, “a karate blackbelt holder, according to reports, courageously and heroically fought off his attackers, and would have lived to enjoy the fruits of his victory and … to see peace on the streets of Crown Heights had it not been for certain acts of certain doctors at Kings County.” Lewis has also argued that a critically injured Rosenbaum accused Nelson of the stabbing only because police had presented the suspect to him in handcuffs. Lewis next called EMS technician Thomas Birch, who testified that an officer was standing next to Nelson holding his arm, as Rosenbaum struggled to make an identification. Birch’s partner, Sharon Defino, confirmed that she saw Nelson in the custody of police and that his hands were behind his back. She did not see any handcuffs.

But Defino was unwavering in her testimony that Rosenbaum identified Nelson as the person who had stabbed him. “He said, ‘Why did you do this to me? You motherfucker.’ He called him a coward. He was trying to get up to hurt him.”

Lewis has kept prosecutors and reporters guessing as to whether he will allow Nelson to take the stand in his own defense. —P.N.

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