ABSTRACT
Somewhere mid-year, you show your students Anna Deavere Smith’s (1998) Fires in the Mirror. In this one-woman show, she, after interviewing a range of people directly or indirectly involved in a series of violent events around race and ethnicity in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, portrays their many perspectives through excerpted monologues. The video piques your students’ interests and they start a web search trying to learn more about what had occurred there. In particular, they’re interested in two young Caribbean Americans who died when the entourage of a Lubavitcher Rebbe ran onto the sidewalk as the result of an intersection crash, and the subsequent murder of a young rabbinical scholar.
