“To get a headline
to get on the evening news
you have to attack a Jew.
Otherwise, you’re ignored.”
This play is “about” the racial tensions stimulated by a 1991 event and its aftermath. A Hasidic Jewish man was responsible for the death of a young black child as a result of losing control of his car. The reaction to this even ignited the already simmering tensions until they erupted into riot and the murder of another member of Hasidic group. The opening section is comprised of monologues by mostly famous people that touch upon this central incident in an oblique, symbolic way that situates the larger thematic dynamic. The third and final section feature monologues which focus specifically on the actual events or perspective upon those events. In between is a section that connects the more abstract thematic to the more concrete factual stories by providing a background information as a framework for understanding why tensions between the black population and the Jewish population were already ready to explode. Pogrebin, founding editor of Ms. Magazine is here making an argument that blacks and Jews actually get along better than most groups, but when you are ignored, you have to do something big. And so, the Jewish man who was murdered becomes, in his eyes, another classic example of the ancient tradition of the scapegoat.
“no crime in the history of humanity
has before or since
equaled that crime
The Holocaust did not equal it.”
Conrad Muhammed is a minister with the Nation of Islam. His monologue is one of the more controversial in the not play not because he is factually inaccurate—he is not—but because the manner in which he presents the facts is inflammable. To suggest that one genocide is lesser than another is guaranteed by definition to cause division. The point being, of course, that Muhammed is not the sole representative of this perspective.
“A car
driven by an individual—
a Hasidic individual—
went through the intersection,
was hit by another car
thereby causing it to go onto the sidewalk.”
These are the facts of the event which led to this play being composed. Or, at least, the events occurring to a man who wasn’t there. This is the first actual account minute-by-minute account of the accident and its immediate aftermath and according to the Rabbi, the driver did everything he could to keep damage to a minimum. Other “facts” according to Spielman: the driver was immediately set upon and beaten by black people, a black person grabbed a cellular phone from a passenger trying to call 911 and stole it, two hours later an Australian Hasidic Jew named Yankel Rosenbaum was walking down a sidewalk miles away totally oblivious and unaware of accident when he was set upon by twenty black youths yelling “Heil Hitler” when they stabbed him to death.
“That’s how we know he was drinkin’
cause he was like
Wa Wa Wa Wa
And I was like
“Yo, man, he’s drunk.”
Anonymous Young Man 1 was on not just on the scene at the time of the accident, but was actually watching the victim trying to learn to ride a bike with the assistance of his sister. As indicated from this significant divergence from the Rabbi’s account, his story of what happened is quite different. Notably, it is filled with references that, if not true, indicate a strong anti-Semitic perspective. On the other hand, if his references are true, it indicates a notorious inequality between how city services treat Jewish and black members of Crown Heights.
“The Crown Heights has been brewing on and off
for twenty years
since the Hasidic community
developed some serious numbers
and some strength in Crown Heights and as African
Americans and
Carribbean Americans came to make up the dominant
culture in
Crown Heights.”
Sherman is an activist for nonviolence. His monologue actually comes at the end of the second part of the play, immediately preceding that of Rabbi Spielman. This quote, however, seems better placed here as a kind of retroactive summing of the situation. The explosion of violence resulting from the racial and religious tensions in Crown Heights have, by the end, been reveled not to have originated full force in a vacuum, but were rather the almost inevitable results of demographics, bias, prejudice and preferential treatment.
