Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights (review)

This sometimes gripping ethnography begins with a wonderful vignette about misunderstanding between blacks and Jews—“intimate strangers”—in a hot, sweltering laundromat in Crown Heights, Brooklyn (6). The rest of the book unpacks how these two groups, Lubavitch Hasidim and mainly West Indians, who clashed so violently in 1991, make sense of their differences. Whiteness in Crown Heights, unlike elsewhere in the United States, is uniquely Jewish. But the Jews of Crown Heights see themselves as Jews, not whites. For them, the neighborhood consists of besieged Jews living amid aggressive Gentiles. Yet West Indians recognize a different neighborhood: disempowered blacks segregated from privileged whites. This difference, argues Goldschmidt, makes a difference. The thesis of the book is that Crown Height disrupts any simplistic or essentialized classifications of sameness and difference in contemporary America.

The introduction frames the study and briefly reviews literature on race, religion, and modernity. Chapter 1 begins with two well-known, dreadful deaths in 1991 and explores how the blacks and Jews of Crown Heights differed greatly in framing these events, drawing on widely divergent master narratives that organize their understanding of history and everyday experience. Was Gavin Cato, a young Guyanese boy, killed in tragic traffic accident or by the culmination of years of racial inequality? Likewise, was the fatal stabbing of Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian yeshiva student, an antisemitic murder or an isolated crime? Most blacks, situating the events in the history of US racism, saw “the Jews” as fundamentally white, and hence as the beneficiaries of an American apartheid. Many spoke of a justifiable uprising, and even the “blood of Shaka Zulu” (56). By contrast, most Hasidim, interpreting the conflict through the lens of European antisemitism, saw yet another hostile gentile majority—the “hands of Esau”—scapegoating Jews as the killers of Christian children (56).

Chapter 2 explores the history of Crown Heights, focusing on shifting, contested boundaries of race, class, and ethnicity. Today, blacks and Jews each draw on longstanding tropes to blame the other for neighborhood decline. They still occasionally clash on the streets. Blacks perceive “imagined” Jewish wealth; Jews focus on “imagined” black poverty. Goldschmidt also discusses Hasidic bloc voting and successful efforts to secure assistance from the police and city agencies, contentious efforts divergently, if predictably, seen as just fruits or unjust privileges. Likewise, what Lubavitchers understand as a religious obligation to expand the Jewish presence in Crown Heights, others construe as the creation of an exclusive community aimed at marginalizing poor blacks. Here again, Goldschmidt identifies the irreducibility of local frameworks for understanding difference in Crown Heights.

Chapter 3 probes various efforts at neighborhood integration, efforts destined to fail, since Hasidim pin their survival on the continuous presence of the very impermeable boundaries that blacks see as threatening Crown Heights. Most interesting is Goldschmidt’s contention that Hasidim do not think of themselves as possessing a culture or ethnicity, that is, a lifestyle anchored to history and social processes. Rather, they live according to immutable divine laws that transcend history. For them, the absolute requirements of Hanukkah and yarmulkes are utterly incompatible with, for example, the optional practices of Kwanzaa and dreadlocks. Thus, while Blacks in Crown Heights voice willingness to sample Jewish cuisine, Lubavitchers can never return the culinary favor. Multiculturalists can momentarily cross ethnic boundaries and return whole. Hasidim cannot. For them, multiculturalism threatens wholeness, which requires absolute confinement to Jewish religious strictures. During communal barbeques, for example, blacks, beholden to multiculturalism, learned to cook kosher food. But Hasidim, beholden always to theology, refused, even once, to taste pork. One group, embracing the cultural impurity of the public square, felt betrayed. The other group, shunning impurity altogether, felt compromised.

Chapter 4 addresses visible signs of identity, especially the distinctive garb of Hasidim. But appearances occasionally prove deceptive, as when a Hasid scuffled with a black—only to discover that he was an African American Orthodox Jew. Black Jews and Rastafarians disrupt normative categories...