Black-on-Jewish Violence in the U.S.A.

FrontPage Magazine ^ | July 10, 2012 | Daniel Greenfield

[SJackson]

On a late June Friday evening, Marc Heinberg, a 61-year old man, was walking home from synagogue along Gravesend Neck Road; Neck Road to the locals. Neck Road is classic Brooklyn; a scattering of modest brick houses along a tree-lined street, but a short walk down “The Neck” takes you to Nostrand Avenue and from there to the Sheepshead-Nostrand housing projects where crime is common and life is cheap.

Sheepshead-Nostrand, where drug deals go down, shots are fired and gruesome murders are a local tradition, and the tree-lined portion of “The Neck” where Marc Heinberg was walking home, are two worlds apart. They are also less than a dozen blocks apart.

As Marc Heinberg walked home from his prayers, the hymns welcoming the Sabbath, the Day of Rest, still humming in his ears, he heard someone yell out, “dirty Jew.” On the old farm road, half-a-dozen African-American teenagers surrounded him, screaming racial slurs and pummeling him with their fists. The two worlds had collided, as they so often did, leaving pain and violence in their wake.

This ugly attack was one of a series of anti-Semitic incidents in Brooklyn; not the first of its kind, nor the last. There are many Jewish New Yorkers of Heinberg’s age who still remember lives and childhoods in Brownsville and the Bronx cut short by similar violence. Farther out the abandoned synagogues of Detroit and Newark tell the same story of a painful exodus from a new life in a new country, as families fled the spiraling racist violence of the community organizers and agitators of the sixties and seventies.

Even though New York State’s African-Americans make up 17.5 percent of the population, outnumbering the state’s Jewish population by 2 to 1, hate crime statistics for 2010 show that while 31.5 percent of hate crimes were aimed at Jews, only 19.7 percent were aimed at African-Americans. There are few statistics kept on the races of perpetrators, but there is an ugly history recorded in ashes, concussions and speeches going back a long way.

In Brooklyn, a Jewish schoolteacher and father of four lost consciousness after being brutally beaten by two minority teenagers who shouted “Jew, Jew.” Upstate in Monsey, four black teenagers sought out a Jewish victim and hit him with a knife. Incidents like this have become part of the fabric of life. An unspoken reality that everyone knows, but few talk about. Sometimes, as with the Crown Heights Pogrom, the violence explodes. Mostly it jabs like switchblades and broken glass.

Brooklyn is the city borough with the largest growing Jewish population, and by the logic of hate, it is also the growth area for anti-Semitic attacks. The Jewish communities of Brooklyn are composed of refugees, not only from Europe, but from lost communities in other parts of Brooklyn and other boroughs. Some grandmothers and grandfathers have stories about childhood homes in Poland and Germany that they can never return to, while others have similar stories about tree-lined lanes full of modest brick houses, just like “The Neck,” in Brownsville, the Bronx or Newark, home to a community of 70,000 Jews before the race riots; now home to nearly none.

After decades of a declining Jewish population in New York City, the Jewish communities of Brooklyn have tilted against the demographics of decline. The growing anti-Semitic violence is a sign that the thugs of decline are pushing back against the families making their private stand for the future on quiet streets in neighborhoods like Sheepshead Bay.

Their war is a quiet and private thing. It is won when a family moves into a new home, when a grocery store stays in business and a school opens for another year. It is won by children playing in backyards and by old men walking home from synagogue. There are casualties in the war. Assaults, fires, vandalism and swastikas scrawled on windows—sometimes by teenagers whom the bearers of the Swastika flag would have considered subhuman. But in Brooklyn, the swastika does not stand for the Thousand Year Reich. It stands for hating Jews.

A swastika in 21st century Brooklyn means the same thing that it did in 20th century Berlin. “Get out.” Or as a leaflet from 1968 Brownsville put it, “Get Out, Stay Out… Or Your Relatives in the Middle East Will Find Themselves Giving Benefits To Raise Money To Help You Get Out From Under the Terrible Weight of an Enraged Black Community.”

The story of this quiet war is rarely told because it is a story that the gatekeepers of the media do not want to allow through their iron curtain of journalism. In the media narrative the race riots were cries for justice. But to the Jewish families who fled the mobs, they were cries of hate.

In the long hot summer of 1991, a New York Times reporter angrily called his editor, after witnessing black demonstrators chanting, “Death to the Jews.” “Jews are being attacked!” Ari Goldman told his boss, challenging the official media narrative. “You’ve got this story all wrong. All wrong.”

But the wrongness of the story has persisted over the years. The New York Post, one of the few papers to accurately cover the Crown Heights Pogrom, is also one of the few papers to have noted the recent crime wave targeting Jewish New Yorkers. And the wrongness goes back a long way.

In 1935, the Harlem riots destroyed hundreds of stores and began the process of pushing Jews out of the neighborhood. Crucial to that atmosphere of hate was Sufi Abdul Hamid, a Muslim convert, who was dubbed, “The Black Hitler.” From his stepladder on 125th Street, Hamid vowed to pursue, “An open bloody war against the Jews who are much worse than all other whites.”

60 years later, Al Sharpton’s thugs crowded 125th Street, continuing Hamid’s war by going after one of the few remaining Jewish stores. One of the protesters pulled out a gun, ordered the black customers to leave and set fire to the store.

Today the Black Hitler is remembered as an early civil rights leader and Al Sharpton poses for photos with Obama. The dead of Harlem and Crown Heights have been buried, but the hatred that killed them lives on and thrives. Until that hatred is addressed and exposed for what it is, its shadows will haunt the tree-lined streets of cities where multiculturalism has come to mean a bloody fist.

Attorney General Eric Holder accused America of being a “nation of cowards” on race. The attackers who shouted “Jew, Jew” while beating a schoolteacher unconscious, similarly claimed to have chosen their victims because Jews don’t fight back.

The Attorney General has said that we must “have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.” But if we are to have that frank conversation, it cannot be limited to Selma or Tuskegee. It must also take in “The Neck” and the “Black Hitler.” It must take in not only a few bombed black churches, but also the hundreds of abandoned synagogues whose worshipers were terrorized and driven out of their homes and neighborhoods. It must take in Holder’s own appearance at Sharpton’s convention, held under the thug’s motto of “No Justice, No Peace”; the same motto under which a Jewish community was terrorized and beaten in the streets with the complicity of black elected officials.

To do otherwise, to revisit the ghosts of Mississippi, without also revisiting the ghosts of Harlem, the Bronx and Newark, the ghosts of Brownsville and Crown Heights, would be a true act of cowardice.

[MrB]

I think we’re on the same page...

I don’t believe the State should do the culling, though.

Exodus 22:2
“If a thief is caught breaking in at night and is struck a fatal blow, the defender is not guilty of bloodshed;

[justiceseeker93]

This is an excellent, well-written article on a subject that the MSM will very seldom get into: black antisemitism in the US. According to studies conducted by the left-leaning B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League (but not well publicized by them, probably because of some irrational fear of retaliation), American blacks are three to four times as likely to harbor antisemitic feelings than are American whites. Some of this may be related to the fact that blacks who migrated from the rural South to the urban North in the twentieth century often settled in Jewish or recently Jewish neighborhoods in their new cities, so that Jews became convenient nearby targets for their lashing out at whites.

In 1935, the Harlem riots destroyed hundreds of stores and began the process of pushing Jews out of the neighborhood. Crucial to that atmosphere of hate was Sufi Abdul Hamid, a Muslim convert, who was dubbed, “The Black Hitler.” From his stepladder on 125th Street, Hamid vowed to pursue, “An open bloody war against the Jews who are much worse than all other whites."

Wow, I had now idea regarding that bit of history. From everything I thought I knew, that period in Harlem was kind of peaceful and the black community there was flourishing in the arts and culture; it was called the "Harlem Renaissance."

[bmwcyle]

Satan always uses the weak minds to do his bidding.

[justiceseeker93]

At least it rhymes.

Not quite. Wouldn't even give the ignoramus who wrote it that much credit. He also needs a brush-up lesson in history. Hitler's reign lasted only a bit more than twelve years (January 1933 to April 1945).

[Wurlitzer]

Ironic that for many American Jews, those who they tend to support, even to the detriment of the country, are the ones who will turn on them at a moment’s notice.

Blacks and Democrats have historically received a disproportionate amount of support from American Jews yet in return they get screwed.

Maybe it is time for American Jews who, in all other areas seem to be highly intelligent, recognize that their real friends are Conservatives and Christians.

The KWAT (Klan With A Tan) will never be supportive of the Jewish community.

[Netz]

Harlem was a very ritzy, upscale area at one time. I think at the beginning of the 20th century it was high class. Like many metropolitan inner cities it is an empty shell of it's one time greatness. Look at Detroit for example: From Boom 1950, to Bust 1967. Somehow, seeing grand and opulent, post-Victorian homes either burned out and gutted is a very painful sight.

[MrB]

They are liberals.
Liberalism is simply the political expression of Humanism.
Humanism is inherently anti-Christian.

Liberals will support leftists, regardless of personal detriment.

[uncbob]

Biggest threat to this country and the cause of its decline is the WHITE LIBERAL

They caused all this

[dervish]

Plenty of Muslims in that area of Brooklyn.

Black + Muslim equals double the grievances and Jew hatred.

[dennisw]

Mo’ black racism. No surprise here from the biggest racists in America right now. 50-70 years ago whites were racist and had segregation. Now blacks are the racist, aggressive, murderous, raping parties and whites wish they could go back to segregation. I’ll bet the white girls who were raped wish we were back in those segregation days and same for the white guys who get raped in prison by beefed up bulked up black convicts

[HiTech RedNeck]

What did Jews ever do to them? As far as I can tell, the Jewish “fault” is, by doing well in the world as is their tendency — given their bent to learning and enterprise — to make blacks envious. Jews are the anti-bums, in a way.

[Carriage Hill]

I agree that the states shouldn’t do the *culling of the herd*. Neither should the FedGov. A *supervised private contractor star chamber* could, possibly. But supervised by whom, is the question. Special courts? Civilian or Military courts? Or a combination? Brrrrrr; we’re getting into some seriously unfamiliar and potentially messy territory now, but it needs doing, IMO, if American Society is to be saved and preserved.

[Eleutheria5]

Also an appalling ignorance of history, mistakenly believing that Jewish suffering and persecution was limited to the Holocaust, when in fact that was merely the most severe episode of such in several millenia of persecution and suffering. Also, Julius Lester can’t have been over 40 at the time he wrote that poem, and he claimed to have lived and suffered for more than 400 years. Interesting that he later converted.

[sheik yerbouty]

As I recall, Lester said atthe time :”We have a right to name our oppressor.” Well Mr. Lester, so do we! Quid pro quo..

[rmlew]

Frontpage Magazine is down. I suspect that the Black supremacists, Muslims, anarchists, or communits have finally decided to silence them.

[SJackson]

Beginning in the late 19th century, and as late as the 1920s, one of the largest Jewish concentrations in the world. But behind the lower east side. Like Maxwell St and Lawndale, even Obama's south side neighborhood (don't quote me, I don't know exactly where the Iraqi guy got him his house) on the south side of Chicago. A nice quote from the JVL

On the West Side, in a district bounded by Sixteenth Street on the South and Polk Street on the north and the Chicago river and Halsted street on the east and west, one can walk the streets for blocks and see none but Semitic features and hear nothing but the Hebrew patois of Russian Poland. In this restricted boundary, in narrow streets, ill-ventilated tenements and rickety cottages, there is a population of from 15,000 to 16,000 Russian Jews. Every Jew in this quarter who can speak a word of English is engaged in business of some sort. The favorite occupation, probably on account of the small capital required, is fruit and vegetable peddling. Here, also is the home of the Jewish street merchant, the rag and junk peddler, and the "glass pudding" man. The principal streets in the quarter are lined with stores of every description. Trades, with which Jews are not usually associated, such as saloonkeeping, shaving and hair cutting, and blacksmithing, have their representatives and Hebrew signs. In a narrow street a private school is in full blast. In the front basement room of a small cottage forty small boys all with hats on, sit crowded into a space 10 × 10 feet in size, presided over by a stout middle-aged man with a long, curling, matted beard, who also retains his hat, a battered rusty derby of ancient style. All the old or middle-aged men in the quarter affect this peculiar headgear.… The younger generation of men are more progressive and having been born in this country are patriotic and want to be known as Americans and not Russians.… The commercial life of this district seems to be uncommonly keen. Everyone is looking for a bargain and everyone has something to sell. The home life seems to be full of content and easygoing unconcern for what the outside world thinks.… (Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1891).

That was 1891. Today it's a free fire zone. Progress for the race hustlers, I guess. No comfort for the bereaved.

[SJackson]

I suspect well under 40 at the time, an “activist”, but won’t bother to look his age up. All kinds of action at the time. I don’t disagree with your assessment, if he wanted be dead back in the day it’s best we didn’t meat, maybe I shouldn’t have posted his poem. But His thought at the time, relevant to the topic. Hope he’s changed.

[Eleutheria5]

He converted to Judaism. He’s now a Jew-boy with a yarmulke on his head. That’s certainly evidence of change. I have to eat breakfast right now, but I think I might google him later. Thank you for posting that poem.

[Eleutheria5]

Wikipedia:

Born on January 27, 1939, in St. Louis, Missouri, Julius Lester is the son of Rev. W.D. Lester, a Methodist minister, and Julia (Smith) Lester. The family moved to Kansas City, Kansas in 1941, and to Nashville, Tennessee,in 1952. In 1960 he received his BA from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee with a major in English and minors in Art and Spanish.[2]
In 1961 he moved to New York City where he married Joan Steinau. They had two children, Jody Simone (1965) and Malcolm Coltrane (1967). The couple divorced in 1970. Malcolm Lester coaches lacrosse and teaches English at St. Albans School in Washington DC.[3]

So in 1968 he was 28 or 29.

.....

In 1982, Lester converted to Judaism. At the age of seven, he had learned that his maternal great-grandfather was a German Jew, Aldolph Altschul, who had lived in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where, every summer, Lester visited his grandmother, one of Adolph’s daughters.[citation needed] Lester recounts the story of his spiritual odyssey to Judaism in his book Lovesong. From 1988 to 1991, he was one of the cantors for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at Congregation B’nai Israel, in Northampton, Mass.[citation needed] In 1992 he became lay leader of Beth El Synagogue in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, until resigning in 2006.[citation needed]
[edit]Creative endeavors

This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (January 2011)
Since 1968 Lester has written 43 books: 8 nonfiction, 30 children’s books, one book of poetry and photographs (with David Gahr), and three adult novels. His very first book was an instructional book on how to play the 12-string guitar, co-authored with Pete Seeger. Among the awards his books have received are the Newbery Honor, Boston-Globe Horn Book Award, Coretta Scott King Award, National Book Award finalist, ALA Notable Book, National Jewish Book Award finalist, National Book Critics Circle Honor Book, and the New York Times Outstanding Book Award. His books have been translated into 10 languages.[citation needed]

So in 1982, 14 years after reading Hey, Jew Boy! on WBAI, when he converted, he was about 43. Quite an odd-issey.

[Eleutheria5]

Wikipedia:

Born on January 27, 1939, in St. Louis, Missouri, Julius Lester is the son of Rev. W.D. Lester, a Methodist minister, and Julia (Smith) Lester. The family moved to Kansas City, Kansas in 1941, and to Nashville, Tennessee,in 1952. In 1960 he received his BA from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee with a major in English and minors in Art and Spanish.[2]
In 1961 he moved to New York City where he married Joan Steinau. They had two children, Jody Simone (1965) and Malcolm Coltrane (1967). The couple divorced in 1970. Malcolm Lester coaches lacrosse and teaches English at St. Albans School in Washington DC.[3]

So in 1968 he was 28 or 29.

.....

In 1982, Lester converted to Judaism. At the age of seven, he had learned that his maternal great-grandfather was a German Jew, Aldolph Altschul, who had lived in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where, every summer, Lester visited his grandmother, one of Adolph’s daughters.[citation needed] Lester recounts the story of his spiritual odyssey to Judaism in his book Lovesong. From 1988 to 1991, he was one of the cantors for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at Congregation B’nai Israel, in Northampton, Mass.[citation needed] In 1992 he became lay leader of Beth El Synagogue in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, until resigning in 2006.[citation needed]
[edit]Creative endeavors

This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (January 2011)
Since 1968 Lester has written 43 books: 8 nonfiction, 30 children’s books, one book of poetry and photographs (with David Gahr), and three adult novels. His very first book was an instructional book on how to play the 12-string guitar, co-authored with Pete Seeger. Among the awards his books have received are the Newbery Honor, Boston-Globe Horn Book Award, Coretta Scott King Award, National Book Award finalist, ALA Notable Book, National Jewish Book Award finalist, National Book Critics Circle Honor Book, and the New York Times Outstanding Book Award. His books have been translated into 10 languages.[citation needed]

So in 1982, 14 years after reading Hey, Jew Boy! on WBAI, when he converted, he was about 43. Quite an odd-issey.