It was an outbreak of anti-Semitic violence. You wouldn’t have known it from the media coverage.
Thirty years ago, anti-Semitic violence erupted in Crown Heights, a neighborhood of New York City, as an angry mob of largely black and Caribbean-American residents descended on Lubavitcher Hasidic homes, businesses, and individuals in retaliation for a traffic accident.
If you read the New York Times in the days that followed, you wouldn’t have known.
It wasn’t because the paper of record hadn’t covered the violence. They had. But their reporting and that of other influential papers at the time was entirely divorced from what we now know occurred, consistently overlooking or obscuring the anti-Semitic nature of the attacks.
