Their Avenue of Dreams: Brooklyn’s Polyglot Highway of Tolerance

10/2/2007

Professor Emeritus Jerome Krase, retired chair of the Brooklyn College Sociology Department and an avid lifelong observer of people and places, describes Coney Island Avenue as a great, flowing river. And like the experienced scientist that he is, he would like to explore this great asphalt river, its environment, and its people, and to learn how those who live here get along.

So, under the aegis of the College's Center for the Study of Brooklyn, Krase and two colleagues-Assistant Professor of History Philip Napoli and Adjunct Lecturer in Sociology Kumru Toktamis-have put together a proposal to study the thoroughfare. The professors have dubbed it the "Tolerance Project." They hope to learn how the different ethnic populations of the Coney Island Avenue corridor have managed to create such harmonious mutual relationships. "In other places, in different circumstances," Krase says, "these groups would very likely have been at each other's throats," he says.

Krase, who has employed his academic skills to record sociological changes and the reactions to them in such foreign locations as Rome, Italy, and Poland, now wants to apply his experience to tracking the vast changes he has observed right on his own home turf. "For thirty years I've traveled along Coney Island Avenue on my way to and from Brooklyn College," he says, explaining that he hasn't been wasting any time during his commute, either. "While I'm going back and forth I do basically the same things that I do in my professional life-I observe and I photograph. These are the basic research tools of my trade, which is to record changes in the making in society, and how people react and adjust to them."

It was only after 9/11 that local newspapers, according to Krase, began to take note of what was happening on Coney Island Avenue, even though reports at first focused on how members of the large South Asian population, in particular young males, were being harassed by both law enforcement and their neighbors. Immigration from Pakistan and other Muslim countries, in fact, dipped significantly in the years immediately following 9/11, but has since rebounded. "Little Pakistan," a stretch of Coney Island Avenue north of Avenue J, is now growing faster than ever. The establishment of multicultural community-based organizations has helped to smooth over potentially divisive situations.

Last Halloween, for example, when five Jewish teens were accused of beating up a young Muslim man, the neighborhood imams and rabbis got together to hold a press conference, successfully defusing the incident. According to Moe (short for "Mohammed") Razvi, founder and executive director of Council of Peoples Organization, the religious leaders "stood in front of everyone and joined hands. We explained what had happened and said we were not going to let this type of thing turn us against each other."

Razvi has been collaborating with Krase and Napoli on the Tolerance Project, and he likes the idea of their study, even though his own explanation for the relative ethnic peace that reigns on Coney Island Avenue differs somewhat from those of the scientists. "Dr. Krase thinks that people here get along because they have to," says Razvi. "I think they get along because for the first time they have gotten to know each other."