But in the era of right is left and trash is gold, the struggle to turn a bloody legacy to lily white has already begun
It shouldn’t be too hard to say that David Dinkins was forever tarred by the 1991 Crown Heights riots and the blood of Yankel Rosenbaum, which still refuses to stop boiling. Anyone who lived through the Dinkins mayoralty from 1989 to 1993 is likely to forget everything else and just recall the three days that Jews lived in fear of a massacre, 45 years after the Holocaust.
Nobody denies it. Even Dinkins, who died last week.
“The New York Times probably has an obit there for me now,” he told the Times in an interview five years ago. “I always used to say, they’ll say, ‘David Dinkins, first black mayor of the City of New York,’ and the next sentence will be about Crown Heights.”
As it should be. Norman Rosenbaum, Yankel’s brother, alleged that Dinkins responded, “We allowed them to vent their anger” when confronted by then-governor Mario Cuomo two days into the violence. He insisted to me that investigators confirmed this quote, though the formal commission that investigated the riots did not find evidence Dinkins said it.
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