Trump and the Jews

Regarding “Pride and affirmative prejudice: Donald Trump and the Jews” (September 19), as a lifelong resident of the New York City area, I am fully cognizant of the role that Trump Towers played in preserving the integrity and stability of the Brooklyn Jewish community in the mid-20th century.

By the early 1960s, Coney Island had experienced a severe case of urban decay – drugs, violent crime and home destruction in the extreme. The Jewish community of that era was literally run out of the area. The middle-income communities of Sea Gate to the west and Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan Beach to the east were threatened by this oncoming blight. But for the financial risk taken by the Trump family in building the Trump Towers and recruiting sponsors to construct the neighboring Warbass Houses and Luna Park development, these communities, the bedrock of south Brooklyn Jewish communal life, would have been totally obliterated.

The investment came in the face of much misguided opposition by liberal political leaders who saw the future of this area for low-income projects such as those constructed on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which resulted in the permanent exclusion of a viable Jewish community in much of the area north of Delancey Street.

Because of the Trumps, both father and, yes, son, this did not become the fate of south Brooklyn. Also, it should be noted that the Brighton Beach area was to serve as the home to many Russian-Jewish refugees fleeing Communist oppression in the 1970s and ’80s.

ALAN JAY GERBER Cedarhurst New York

CORRECTION In “Eye of the storm” (Letters, September 27), the letter from reader Mark. L. Levinson about Culture and Sport Minister Miri Regev’s remarks at the recent Ophir Awards ceremony was improperly edited. It should have said: “She [Regev] said a sentence or two against him [Mahmoud Darwish], and then time marched embarrassingly on and on as the audience’s heckling failed to die down.” We regret the error.