Speaker 1: And I am very pleased to have with me filmmaker
Speaker 1: Michael Pack. He's the producer and director of a new
Speaker 1: short film it's about twenty three ish minutes long with
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal entitled Get the Jew the Crown
Speaker 1: Heights Riot. And I was telling Michael Pack off the
Speaker 1: air that as I was watching his documentary this morning,
Speaker 1: actually I was sort of became really aware of how
Speaker 1: little I knew about the Crown Heights Riot. And I
Speaker 1: was a young teen when it happened, and we didn't
Speaker 1: have the twenty four hour news cycle. But it was
Speaker 1: almost a little embarrassed because it's this is a really
Speaker 1: serious thing that happened, and yet it seems to have
Speaker 1: just been I don't want to say forgotten, but maybe
Speaker 1: shoved under the rug a little bit. Michael Pack, first
Speaker 1: of all, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you for having me on.
Speaker 1: Well, tell my audience what this movie is about.
Speaker 3: Well, it is about what is in fact, the worst
Speaker 3: anti semitic ride in American history, which happened in Crown
Speaker 3: Heights in nineteen ninety one. And we did make the
Speaker 3: movie because I think many people have forgotten it.
Speaker 2: It's the first in a series.
Speaker 3: Of documentaries that my company is doing with the Wall
Speaker 3: Street Journal Opinion section, and the purpose of them is
Speaker 3: to tell stories that have been neglected, forgotten, or misreported
Speaker 3: at the time and that are newly relevant. And this
Speaker 3: one certainly fits that bill, but we planned to have
Speaker 3: several out every year, year after year. It so parallels
Speaker 3: what other leftis center periodical has been doing, like the
Speaker 3: New York Times op docs or The Atlantic or The
Speaker 3: New Yorker. So this one tells the story of this
Speaker 3: horrible anti Semitic riot, and it began on a hot
Speaker 3: August day in nineteen ninety one when in the Crown
Speaker 3: Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, which was a neighborhood which had
Speaker 3: once been all Jewish, many of the Jews left for
Speaker 3: the suburbs, and now by nineteen ninety one it had
Speaker 3: been only one small sect of Hasidic Jews, Bob Lubovich, remained.
Speaker 2: They were surrounded.
Speaker 3: By poor black people who and resentments that were on
Speaker 3: the rise, and whipped up by a certain.
Speaker 2: Amount of black nationalism that was in the air.
Speaker 3: Lewis Vara Khunt and others talking about Jews being responsible
Speaker 3: for the slave trade, Jews being almost another species and
Speaker 3: into that mix came a horrible event. On that August,
Speaker 3: the head rabbi of this group, Rabbi Schneerson, was coming
Speaker 3: back from a visit to the cemetery where his dead
Speaker 3: wife was buried, and he had a motorcade. He had
Speaker 3: a police escort in that car. It was a three
Speaker 3: car motorcade, and the police car first went through it.
Speaker 3: His car went through, and his assistants car ran either
Speaker 3: a yellow or red light and tragically hit another car,
Speaker 3: careened off that car and hit two young black children
Speaker 3: playing in the street, and sadly, tragically one of them died.
Speaker 3: But it was clearly an accident, right you don't hit
Speaker 3: a car on purpose to hit another, to hit a kid.
Speaker 3: But it was right away perceived as not an accident.
Speaker 3: The Jews get away with everything, and a instigator, Charles Price,
Speaker 3: whipped up the crowd and they went brought in for
Speaker 3: the neighborhood. And three hours later they found another Hasidic man,
Speaker 3: Yankle Rosenbaum, and they said there's one, there's the Jew,
Speaker 3: get the Jew, hence our title, and they beat them
Speaker 3: and stabbed them and he.
Speaker 2: Died in the hospital.
Speaker 3: And then then the next day of the riot riot
Speaker 3: went on from there and people came from.
Speaker 4: Outside, like Al Sharpen. The crowds was whipped up.
Speaker 3: And the real tragedy, I think is that the media
Speaker 3: misreported it and then the mayor and the police chief
Speaker 3: let it go on for three days before they ended it.
Speaker 3: And it wasn't until they themselves were attacked and they
Speaker 3: turned to their own deputy police chief, Ray Kelly, finally.
Speaker 4: Told them to end it, which he could do in
Speaker 4: three hours.
Speaker 1: And that was the part that was the most surprising
Speaker 1: to me. And I knew so little about this that
Speaker 1: Mayor Dinkins. David Dinkins was the mayor at the time.
Speaker 1: He really just kind of took a hands off approach
Speaker 1: to that is. Has anybody ever asked the mayor after
Speaker 1: he left office if he had any regrets or if
Speaker 1: there was something he would have done. Has he ever reflected,
Speaker 1: to your knowledge in public about his inaction during that time.
Speaker 3: He's been asked about it. I mean he's now deceased,
Speaker 3: of course.
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 3: Our film is in addition to being based on the
Speaker 3: reporting of Eli Kaufman, a Wall Street Journal opinion reporter,
Speaker 3: it's also based on the Giugenti report, which Mayor Cuomo
Speaker 3: had done and going to be thousands of people, and
Speaker 3: it's sort of the definitive look at the riots. And
Speaker 3: they talked to Mary Dinkins and Mayor Dinkins there was
Speaker 3: a rumor the police at the on site felt they
Speaker 3: had They were told, you know, let them vet, you know,
Speaker 3: don't take any action, and the police largely stood around
Speaker 3: for three days. Mary Dinkins has always denied saying that,
Speaker 3: and it's not clear that he did.
Speaker 4: But what he didn't do was tell him the opposite.
Speaker 4: He might not have said let them VT.
Speaker 3: He probably didn't, but he didn't take or direct as
Speaker 3: police chief to take aggressive action for three days, which
Speaker 3: I think is in a way more or less the
Speaker 3: same thing. I mean, So I don't know whether he
Speaker 3: or I'm not sure, you know, I hope he did.
Speaker 1: The notion of letting people vent, we just did this
Speaker 1: again in the Summer of Love of twenty twenty, right,
Speaker 1: it was like, just let people vent, let them it
Speaker 1: will make them feel better, and in the meantime we
Speaker 1: do forty billion dollars worth of damage. Right, So that
Speaker 1: whole let them vent thing only seems to go one way.
Speaker 1: If you're protesting for the right side, and by right,
Speaker 1: I'm putting that in air quotes, then you're just venting.
Speaker 1: But if you're protesting for the other side, then you're
Speaker 1: a criminal who needs to go to prison.
Speaker 2: Well that's right, you know.
Speaker 4: I think that the George Floyd riots for an example
Speaker 4: of that.
Speaker 2: The recent.
Speaker 3: Brohamas demonstrations and college campuses are like that. I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, they terrorized Youish students. They make it for
Speaker 3: them feel unsafe, and the media reports it pretty favorably.
Speaker 3: And then the heads of these colleges were not themselves
Speaker 3: and anti Semitic, just like David Dingins wasn't. They can't
Speaker 3: stand up to these students. They wait, they prevaricate, you know,
Speaker 3: as we heard when they testified before Congress, and then
Speaker 3: maybe finally in the end they act. But you know,
Speaker 3: there's an unwillingness to stand up to violent or threatening
Speaker 3: people on the progressive side. It's unthinkable that these college
Speaker 3: presidents would have not responded differently with anti black or
Speaker 3: anti gay's talks on their college campuses, and rightly, but
Speaker 3: this one, this one they're afraid to take on. And
Speaker 3: it's a terrible, terrible pattern, and I hope it doesn't
Speaker 3: repeat itself, and that's one of the reasons to do
Speaker 3: the films that people recognize the pattern and kind of
Speaker 3: and can make their elected officials break from it the
Speaker 3: next time it happens.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the role of Al Sharpton in this.
Speaker 3: Well, we interviewed Al Sharpton, and one of my main
Speaker 3: precepts as of filmmakers to be fair to everybody who
Speaker 3: interviews me. I'm not very fond of interviews that in
Speaker 3: filmmakers that make their interviewees look bad. So we want
Speaker 3: to give out Sharp a chance to make his case,
Speaker 3: which I think we do in the film, but we
Speaker 3: have other people who make the opposite case, and we
Speaker 3: leave it to your viewers to decide. And the purpose
Speaker 3: of these films is to tell these stories in a
Speaker 3: straightforward manner with enough facts for viewers to decide you're
Speaker 3: talking to this, So I may well express my own opinions,
Speaker 3: but we wanted to leave it to viewers to decide.
Speaker 3: And I think Al Sharpton makes a good puts the
Speaker 3: best face he care on it. But in fact he
Speaker 3: came in and surely others came in and whipped up
Speaker 3: the crowd with a lot of the anti Semitism current
Speaker 3: at the time, which was a lot of this black
Speaker 3: nationalism stuff. You know, Jews were responsied for the slave trade,
Speaker 3: Jews are you know, bankers are controlling things in the world,
Speaker 3: and Jews are responsible for aparthot in South Africa, and
Speaker 3: on and on and on, as we say sometimes, you know,
Speaker 3: the film ends with a more recent stabbing of a
Speaker 3: Jew in Crown Heights, shockingly enough, where this time stabbed
Speaker 3: by a man saying free Palestine.
Speaker 2: Do you want to die?
Speaker 3: So what had been in Crown Heights Hyle Hitler and
Speaker 3: Hitler didn't finish the job is now free Palestine or
Speaker 3: from the revert to the sea. If it's accompanied by
Speaker 3: violence and stabbing, it's of course okay to criticize the
Speaker 3: state of Israel, but it it often veers into obvious
Speaker 3: overt anti Semitism, and that has to be stopped.
Speaker 1: I thought that that was a very appropriate, full circle
Speaker 1: kind of punctuation mark for the end of the film,
Speaker 1: an unfortunate one.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: I love those movies where there's all the happy endings
Speaker 1: and everyone you know, learns from their mistakes and then
Speaker 1: they all have dinner together and maybe sing Kumbai Yah.
Speaker 1: But that's not real life, like this is a documentary,
Speaker 1: and I want to talk about documentaries just as a
Speaker 1: group right now. Documentaries this something I always try to
Speaker 1: let people know. They all have a point of view.
Speaker 1: Right when you, as a documentary filmmaker, start tell me
Speaker 1: about the starting proposition for this particular film. What was
Speaker 1: it you were trying to do and how were you
Speaker 1: trying to do it.
Speaker 3: I think it is true that all documentary filmmakers have
Speaker 3: a point of view, but I think the most the
Speaker 3: clearest way they expressed their point of view is the
Speaker 3: stories they choose to tell. We did a documentary in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty about the life of Clarence Thomas called Credit
Speaker 3: Equal Clarence Thomas in his own words.
Speaker 2: It was on PBS, Still Last Dreaming, on Amazon elsewhere.
Speaker 3: We chose to tell his story, and many many filmmakers
Speaker 3: had chosen to tell the Ruth Bader Ginsburg story. And
Speaker 3: I think that's fine to have both stories out there.
Speaker 3: But if you only have left of center filmmakers, they
Speaker 3: will only tell one kind of story. So yes, we
Speaker 3: have our perspective, and I actually think it's important to
Speaker 3: have documentary producers with a variety of perspectives. Like many
Speaker 3: parts of the media, the documentary role is dominated by
Speaker 3: the progressive left, and one of the reasons we're working
Speaker 3: with the Walls General Opinion section is to get these
Speaker 3: stories that have been neglected by that part of the
Speaker 3: media out there. And as I think I mentioned to
Speaker 3: you before we began, we also have an incubator program
Speaker 3: to train young or up and coming and all have
Speaker 3: to be young, right of center or at least non
Speaker 3: woke filmmakers, and because they're just not enough of them.
Speaker 3: There are a huge number of talented progressive filmmakers telling
Speaker 3: their stories their way, which I think is their right
Speaker 3: and I salute them when they do it well, but
Speaker 3: we need more on airsides. We have started this incubator
Speaker 3: program and any one of your listeners can go to
Speaker 3: our website and click apply. We're open to the next class.
Speaker 3: The first class of four has just finished their first
Speaker 3: war films, so.
Speaker 4: It's the beginning of a process.
Speaker 3: It needs to be way bigger, but I think it's
Speaker 3: a start, and we need to get our stories out
Speaker 3: there from the point of.
Speaker 2: View that we have.
Speaker 3: But I think whatever your point of view going in
Speaker 3: and everyone you are right, Mandy has a point of view.
Speaker 3: Good filmmakers still try to have multiple points of view
Speaker 3: in their film and not treat their interviewees, you know,
Speaker 3: not make the most stupid, not suppress their views. Sometimes
Speaker 3: they do, sometimes they don't. It's very hard for listeners
Speaker 3: and viewers to tell. I mean, that's why we tried
Speaker 3: to be fair to Al Sharpton, whose point of view
Speaker 3: was not ours.
Speaker 1: I think you were more than fair to Al Sharpton.
Speaker 1: After watching I was like, dang man, I just like
Speaker 1: I said, going back to my happy endings in my
Speaker 1: fairy tale ends, and I would love to live in
Speaker 1: a world where someone would be able to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was wrong. I really shouldn't have done that. You know,
Speaker 1: in hindsight, in retrospect, I have deep regret over that,
Speaker 1: But we don't really either allow it, I guess in
Speaker 1: our public figures, or they are too afraid of the
Speaker 1: repercussions to actually do that. I wanted him to do that.
Speaker 1: I wanted some variation instead of people said there were this,
Speaker 1: People said there was this, but oh no, that wasn't mine.
Speaker 4: I was in.
Speaker 1: I couldn't say it was a lot of I'm just
Speaker 1: going to say I was not impressed with the testimony,
Speaker 1: and I think that you treated him very fairly, perhaps
Speaker 1: more fairly than I would have treated him in a
Speaker 1: similar circumstance. What is coming up, because you're you're going
Speaker 1: to do a whole series of these for the Wall
Speaker 1: Street Wall Street Journal Opinion page.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right.
Speaker 3: We hope to do several, you know, four or five
Speaker 3: every year, year after year. The next one, which is
Speaker 3: coming out either at the end of November the beginning
Speaker 3: of December, is called The Prime Minister Versus the Blob,
Speaker 3: and it's about the shortest lived prime minister in British history.
Speaker 2: This trust was prime minister.
Speaker 3: When the Queen died, and she feels she was done
Speaker 3: in by their version of the ministrative state or the swamp,
Speaker 3: which they call the Blob. She feels she just had
Speaker 3: the politically incorrect views. She was sort of a Thatch right,
Speaker 3: and they were sort of Keynesian at least an economic policy,
Speaker 3: and she was pro fracking and energy and not net zero,
Speaker 3: and so she feels she was done in.
Speaker 4: So we have her maker case.
Speaker 3: And other people who don't agree with her, as as
Speaker 3: is our pattern here, make their case and viewers can decide.
Speaker 3: But I think Mandy it's particularly instructive to look at
Speaker 3: this kind of issue from a different perspective, from the
Speaker 3: British perspective. We're used to thinking about our fights with
Speaker 3: the administrative state here and thinking of it as unique,
Speaker 3: But to see it in the British context, I think
Speaker 3: cass light on our own dilemma.
Speaker 1: The big question is will the documentary be longer than
Speaker 1: her actual tenure as Prime Minister, because that's a pretty
Speaker 1: low bar to set there, Michael, that is that is
Speaker 1: fascinating to me because I when that when all that happened,
Speaker 1: it was like it was it happened with such whipsawce
Speaker 1: speed that I knew there was more to the story.
Speaker 1: So I'm very interested to see her view on what
Speaker 1: actually happened. And I highly recommend I put a link
Speaker 1: this this uh, this documentary Get the Jew the Crown
Speaker 1: Heights Riot is available now for free, and I put
Speaker 1: a link on my block where you can just click through.
Speaker 1: It's twenty three minutes long, it's not even not even
Speaker 1: a whole sitcom episode, and it is so worth your time,
Speaker 1: especially if you, like me, were not paying attention as
Speaker 1: closely as you should have at that point and didn't
Speaker 1: really know much of the story.
Speaker 4: Michael.
Speaker 1: I appreciate you doing what you're doing, and I appreciate
Speaker 1: you bringing the perspective from my side of the aisle
Speaker 1: to the screen. And you're right, we need to do
Speaker 1: much much more of this. So I hope young filmmakers
Speaker 1: continue to reach out about the Incubator and we definitely
Speaker 1: need to talk before the next one comes out.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, thank you very much.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: All right, that's Michael Pack with Palladium Pictures and his
Speaker 1: new documentary on the Crown Heights. Right, very very very good,
Speaker 1: very good, So please watch that and again you can
Speaker 1: link to it on the blog, and I also put
Speaker 1: a link to Palladium Pictures. If you know someone who
Speaker 1: would like to make a documentary from a right leading perspective,
Speaker 1: have them apply for one of these grants. That is
Speaker 1: probably the best way to do that. I shared all
Speaker 1: of that on today's blog. Al Sharpton's history of stoking
Speaker 1: anti Semitism is the headline on that one.