Fire in the Mirror : the Cause of the Riot and Aftermath of the Riot

 ON “FIRE IN THE MIRROR”

BY

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH

The Cause of the 1991 Riots in Crown Height and Aftermath of the Riots

PRESENTED

BY

NANA OSEI

                                                     PROF: LAUREN KILIAN

   BROOKLYN COLLEGE

                                      CORC 3101 – ET6

                                        DUE: 05/23/2017

ON “FIRES IN THE MIRROR”

“Fires in the Mirror’, written by playwright Anna Deavere Smith, is a play and a book about the Crown Heights Riots of 1991. Smith delves into the many complexities of the events that took place and interview multiple people from each opposing side of the riots and community, capturing the first-hand events that unfolded through the eyes of those who were there. The racial relations between the blacks and Jewish community of the New York City borough of Brooklyn and the Crown Heights neighborhood within and is analyzed to an extent that allows us reader and audience to gather information, subjective and objective, to make an informed decision to contemplate the riots and what led up to them, and the events that followed.

           The main focus of the play is Crown Heights which consists of black majority with many different ethnicities in the makeup. The area has a population of undocumented black immigrants as well as the international headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidic Judaism. There was lots of strain between the Chabad-Lubavitch and the blacks who resided in the neighborhood even before the riots, the blacks has always believed that they were discriminated against by the Jews, whites, and that the Jewish received more benefits and gains from the police in the area and all these led up to a very thin lines of peace that were fractured as we can see through the play.

 It all started when Yosef Lifsh, a bodyguard for Grand Rebbe Schneerson, was driving a car when he ran a red light and was hit by another car and this in turn caused him to run across the road and striking a seven-year-old black boy, Gavin Cato.  This occurred on August 19, 1992 and when a Hasidic ambulance arrived, they left Cato on the curb for the NYC ambulance and took the driver. This was assumed to be by a request of a police officer who responded to the scene. Cato died later on and the riot began. Jews and police were targeted by angry and upset members of the neighborhood. Eventually, an Australian Yankel Rosenbaum who was in New York City as a scholar was murdered by a group of young black men whom Lemrick Nelson Jr. was arrested for the murder.

Black and Lubavitcher ethnic groups erupted into full blown of rioting the next day and the driver who killed Cato flew out of country back to Israel. The police responding to the incidents held back and despite their effort to calm them down, almost 20 officers were injured during the rioting.  Reverend Al Sharpton, a prominent leader and member of the black community called out for the detainment and arrest of Yosef Lifsh and followed through with protest and public outcry in Crown Heights. Al Sharpton eventually flew to Israel to inform Yosef Lifsh of a civil suit against him after a Brooklyn grand jury denied indictment of him, just shortly before Yom Kippur, a major Jewish holiday.

 Even though, the rioting faded on the 23rd but the tensions and stress between the two ethnicities still remained. On October 29 1992, the Jews protested outside the Lubavitch headquarters after announcement that Lemrick Nelson Jr. was acquitted of all charges against the murder and killing of Australian, Yankel Rosenbaum. The Lubavitchers filed a law suit against Mayor Dinkins and his administration citing them for the faults and lack of action during the riots that ensued Cato’s death and this bad publicity has been attributed to his loss to Rudolph Giuliani during the next mayoral elections.

Smith is a journalist by profession and like a storyteller, and has presented the whole event/scene as historian and in a historical form as she tries to obtain subjective experiences and accounts of the happenings that evolved in the Brooklyn neighborhood and try to put an objective message to it to help all who don’t understand or comprehend the event to understand it just a little better and to help give credit to those who were involved and sharing their story.        Smith tries to explore the fact of how history is recorded and we, as humans, scientists, and historians alike see those recording and interpret them. She delves into the fact that feelings, emotions, and anything that can be subjectively influenced, all have a play into how this historical information is recorded, replayed, and received by the people of the world, making sure to point out that the subjectiveness of history is prevalent.

Smith dives into the past events and background of the events that took place in Crown Heights by examining different theories and perspectives into race relations and how blacks and Jews communicated  and interacted with each other. She researches into how blacks and police interactions in Brooklyn were, citing different parts of America as well and discussing the events of the Holocaust, slave trade, and many other historical parts that Jews and blacks experienced. She uses these events to help try to understand the feelings and emotion that play through the residents and the leaders of each opposing side to help better understand them and put a finger on the areas that helped push and develop the events that unfolded. She only tries to comprehend and understand the situations, using cause and effect to take an objective standpoint and allow for the sharing of stories in an unadulterated way.

 “Fire in the Mirror’ begins it first act, titled “Identity”, with its first scene, “The Desert”. Ntozake Shange explains that identity and how it is perceived by individuals, saying that it is a unique feeling that one feels as if they belong to a certain group or lifestyle, yet at the same time they do not belong, they are distanced. Following that scene, a short story is told from a Lubavitcher woman’s point of view of when a small black child entered her house to shut off the radio, on Shabbats, a Jewish holy period. Continuing, George C Wolfe explains how he uses his story, “101 Dalmatians”, to explain how blackness and whiteness live interdependently of each other.