Wall Street Journal Opinion and Palladium Pictures released their first in a series of short documentaries earlier this month, with the opening film shedding light on the unfolding of the 1991 Crown Heights riot. 

The film, titled “‘Get the Jew’: Brooklyn 1991,” was released on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The 23-minute documentary details the three-day episode, the worst antisemitic riot in American history, and explains how the media and leading political figures in the city “played down or excused the antisemitism at the heart of the violence,” according to a press release on the project. 

“Not to state the obvious, but there’s a resurgence of antisemitism, so it’s good to look back and see what happened in the past,” Michael Pack, president of Palladium Pictures, told Jewish Insider of the decision to make this the debut film in the series. “This is the worst antisemitic riot in American history and it went on for three days. One person was killed. There was a lot of property damage and terrorizing of Jewish people. Since it has lessons for today, this seemed a good time to look back on it.”

The riot began in August of 1991 with a car crash involving the motorcade of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, whose Chabad movement is headquartered in Crown Heights, that left one Guyanese American child dead and another severely injured. 

Despite being completely accidental and there being no suspicion of foul play, the situation escalated into antisemitic violence almost immediately, the result of a misunderstanding that led to Guyanese locals believing that the Hatzolah ambulance that arrived on the scene denied the children medical care. It was also the result of long-standing resentments in the community over a belief among Black residents that the police were more favorable to the neighborhood’s Jewish community. 

Black rioters and agitators, largely encouraged by local and national civil rights leaders at the time, spent the next three days attacking the homes and stores of their Jewish neighbors. Rioters also attacked Jewish residents on the streets of their shared Brooklyn neighborhood, injuring several and killing one, a 29-year-old Australian Jewish man in the U.S. on a student visa while conducting research for his doctorate. 

Three hours after the riot began, a group of about 15-20 Black men surrounded Yankel Rosenbaum, then a University of Melbourne student working toward his Ph.D. in history, after one of them shouted, “Let’s go get a Jew.” The men stabbed Rosenbaum repeatedly in the chest and back, and he died of his wounds at a nearby hospital. 

Halfway through the three-day riot, Rev. Al Sharpton and other community leaders held rallies across the neighborhood demanding the driver of the car that struck the two Guyanese American children be met with the same level of justice as those who stabbed Rosenbaum.

Despite the constant unrest, days went by before New York City Police Department officers began arresting lawbreakers, something then-New York City Mayor David Dinkins strenuously denied was the result of a mayoral order to police to stand down. Still, Dinkins and then-NYPD Commissioner Lee Brown, did not issue any directives to quell the violence until the mayor was attacked by some protesters while visiting the Brooklyn neighborhood. 

Dinkins and Brown faced significant criticism for their handling of the riot, including an admonishment from Albany in the form of a report ordered by then-New York Gov. Mario Cuomo in late 1992 on the situation. Numerous candidates challenging Dinkins in his unsuccessful 1993 reelection bid made the riot a major campaign issue, with Rudy Giuliani, who eventually won that contest, describing the violence as a “pogrom.”

“That’s the question – why did Mayor Dinkins not stop it until he himself was attacked and the police chief was attacked,” Pack told JI. “Mayor Dinkins was not antisemitic, and neither was the police chief. So why didn’t he stop it? I think at the end of the day, he was afraid of offending the wing of his party that would be sympathetic to the rioters.”

“You see that same tendency today. You saw that on college campuses last year, when college presidents were reluctant to take a stand against groups terrorizing Jewish students and chanting antisemitic slogans, when they wouldn’t be if they were anti-Black or anti-gay, and rightly so. It’s same pattern repeating itself. That’s one of the reasons I think the story is important today,” he added.

“When people talk about the history of New York City, the great crime increase from the late ’60s to the early 1990s, they say all the time, ‘It changed with Rudy Giuliani.’ I would tell them, ‘It changed with the Crown Heights riot,’” WSJ opinion writer Elliot Kaufman, whose August 2021 piece served as the inspiration for the documentary feature, said.