Councilmember Laurie Cumbo from Brooklyn’s Crown Heights 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.) But until the Great Depression and World War II, black New Yorkers had always been on the receiving—not the giving end—of collective race riots, the most notorious being the Draft Riots of 1863. Those Riots—not too far removed from an anti-black pogrom by predominately Irish American immigrants and their children—were notable for the absence of documented Jewish participation except for one Jew who saved an African American family from being lynched. On the other hand, I know of only one instance—from the anti-black riot in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, in 1908—in which a Jew was accused (and then tried and acquitted) for inciting anti-black violence. A sea change from white-on-black to black-on-white violence, sometimes with an anti-Jewish component, began with the Harlem Riots of 1935 and 1943, and sporadic incidents during the 1960s. This was when black-on-Jewish violence etched itself into the American Jewish literary imagination with Norman Podhoretz’s 1963 essay, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” in “Commentary” recalling beatings and robberies that Jewish boys experienced at the hands of African American boys between the world wars, and Saul Bellow’s novel, “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” (1970), whose most shocking scene involved the humiliation of a Holocaust survivor by a black mugger. One has to go back to the days of African American slavery to find a time when Jews—the minority in a minority in the South who owned slaves—were in a position to regularly inflict violence in the form of physical punishment or worse on African Americans. Yet the urge to create a counter-narrative in which Jewish victims of crime in the modern and post-modern city—not the African Americans who sometimes victimize them—are responsible at least partly for their own plight has been around for quite a long time. The latest example comes from Laurie Cumbo, a new council member from Crown Heights. This is Councilwoman Cumbo’s take on Facebook on anti-Jewish “knockout attacks”: “Many African American/Caribbean residents expressed a genuine concern that as the Jewish community continues to grow, they would be pushed out by their Jewish landlords or by Jewish families looking to purchase homes. I relayed these sentiments at the forum not as an insult to the Jewish community, but rather to offer possible insight as to how young African American/Caribbean teens could conceivably commit a ‘hate crime’ against a community that they know very little about.” Needless to say, she’s against such attacks, and believes the perpetrators should be punished. It’s just that she thinks that Jews need to put themselves in other people’s shoes, especially when the other people are victims of social and economic injustice. Jews need to understand how it feels to have other Jews combine to take over predominately African American or Hispanic neighborhoods. Jewish gentrifiers beware! And perhaps Jews in general need a wake-up call to clean up their collective act—not by being punched senseless—but the kind of verbal chastisement that she’s just the neighborhood activist born to deliver. It’s only a step from Cumbo’s rationalizations to the still fashionable theories of Franz Fanon that violence by the colonial or racial underclass against so-called white innocents is not only just but therapeutic. Studies of Fanon’s post-independence Algeria suggest that such internal race wars inflict a terrible psychological toll on all sides. Fanon was merely amused by the Holocaust, and anti-Jewish sadism certainly was one dynamic feeding not only Nazi murderers but their European intellectual admirers such as Louis-Ferdinand Celine, author of “Bagatelles for a Massacre” (1937 and subsequent editions). One doesn’t want to be apocalyptic, but if “knockout attacks” continue and increase, it will be hard not to see in them more than a downward spiral in Black-Jewish relations. The fiction and film iconic work that could portend such a world, in fact, doesn’t at all involve African Americans and Jews. It’s Anthony Burgess’s and Stanley Kubrick’s versions of “A Clockwork Orange” (1962, 1971) in which the villainous antihero is addicted to an explosive blend of anarchic “ultraviolence” and Beethoven.