The lid has finally blown off the simmering cauldron. For about a month, there have been reports of “knockout attacks,” mostly in Northeastern cities. These reports have not looked too closely at the ethnicity of the attackers while generally characterizing the attacks as “random” and lacking the specificity of “hate crime” targeting.

But now Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section—a combustible mosaic of African Americans, mostly Hasidic Jews, and Latinos mostly “people of color” of Caribbean descent—has produced stories about ten attacks that recall the paradigm of black-on-Jewish violence indelibly imprinted on the neighborhood’s history back in 1991 when rabbinic student Yankel Rosenbaum was fatally stabbed during what amounted to an anti-Semitic pogrom in the wake of the accidental death of an African American child run over by a Jewish limousine driver. Back then, Reverend Al Sharpton was stirring up the cauldron. Fortunately, today he is calling for an end to “knockout attacks.”

In terms of violent street crime involving Jewish victims and African American perpetrators—almost never the reverse—the history goes back a hundred years to when Eastern European Jewish immigrants first interacted with mostly southern black migrants to New York City. (Some would consider as a counter-example “subway vigilante” Bernhard Goetz who in 1984 shot four black teenagers he targeted as muggers.) (more…)