What Do Jews Owe Crown Heights?
Image by Getty Images
By The Scribe January 30, 2018
In 2012, Hannah Roodman endeavored to show Crown Heights, Brooklyn through the eyes of its Chabad and West Indian residents.
In the years since she directed Project 2×1, she’s had time to reflect on the changing neighborhood and our responsibilities as young Jews.
“My hope was that the Crown Heights Jewish community would acknowledge that their culture of segregation did not always serve them nor their neighbors,” she wrote. “I wanted them to be inspired to reciprocate the friendliness and curiosity that so many of my black neighbors expressed towards me and towards the project, even towards Jewishness overall… During the Crown Heights riots, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who was deeply pained by the violence, famously said, ‘There are not two communities, we are one community.’ How might we better protect, steward, and evolve our cultures towards this kind of deep truth?”
Read Hannah’s whole story in PROTOCOLS.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
