Sunday, August 14, 2011
'NY Times' slammed for refusal to acknowledge Black anti-Semitic attacks in Crown Heights 20 years ago
JPost reporting on Jewish Week Article
A former New York Times religion reporter has written a blistering attack on the newspaper’s failure to attribute a riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, 20 years ago to anti-Semitism. The violence resulted in the murder of Australian Yankel Rosenbaum, a Lubavitch hassid, on August 19, 1991.
Ari L. Goldman, who covered the story for the Times in 1991, wrote in the current issue of New York Jewish Week: “Over those three days I also saw journalism go terribly wrong. The city’s newspapers, so dedicated to telling both sides of the story in the name of objectivity and balance, often missed what was really going on. Journalists initially framed the story as a ‘racial’ conflict and failed to see the anti-Semitism inherent in the riots.”
UK violence raises questions about American unrest
A black man killed by police. Mobs of looters. Cities charred and shaken. The riots in London mirror some of the worst uprisings in modern U.S. history.
And there are more parallels: Stubborn poverty and high unemployment, services slashed due to recessionary budget cuts, a breakdown of social values, social media that bring people together for good or bad at the speed of the Internet. And finally, there are a handful of actual attacks, isolated and hard to explain, by bands of youths in U.S. cities.
As Americans look across the Atlantic, a natural question arises: Could the flames and violence that erupted in Britain scar this country, too?
Police, elected officials, activists and regular citizens offer varied answers, reflecting the unsettled mix of race, class, lawlessness, and the chasm between haves and have-nots that may lie behind the unrest. [...]
Autistic spectrum kids & their love of trains
Like many children with autism spectrum disorders, Ravi is fascinated by trains and buses, entranced by their motion and predictability. And for years, these children crowded the exhibitions of the modest New York Transit Museum, chattering about schedules and engine components and old subway maps.
“This is really their element,” said Ravi’s mother, Juliana Boehm, who brings Ravi and Oliver, his 8-year-old brother, who is also on the autism spectrum, to the museum almost weekly. “If I suggested another activity,” she added, “it may have provoked anxiety.”
Now, the museum, and others like it, are moving beyond accommodating the enthusiasm for trains and buses among children with autism and trying to use it to teach them how to connect with other people — and the world. [...]
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