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