The Merchant and the Lawyer

Once upon a time there was a man named Sinclair Louie. His life exemplified the American Dream as James Truslow Adams first wrote it: a land where life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability, regardless of the circumstances of birth. Louie was an immigrant who arrived from foreign shores with nothing and built a retail empire from humble origins. After acquiring significant wealth, he set his sights on buying a home in San Francisco’s most exclusive neighborhood, Sea Cliff.

There was just one problem: the white residents of Sea Cliff didn’t want him, a Chinese-American, there. It was only with the help of a Jewish lawyer named Ben Lehr, a man who was no stranger to discrimination, that he prevailed.

This is just one case of Chinese and Jewish Americans standing together against an establishment that barred both of them. Together, these groups built, funded, and fought for the coalition that won the Civil Rights Movement. But now, the same progressive institutions and movements that Asian and Jewish Americans built and bankrolled for half a century have, in turn, abandoned both of them: Asian Americans during the wave of anti-Asian violence in 2020–2023, and Jewish Americans now, amid a surge of antisemitic violence that has turned lethal. In both cases, the silence, and worse, came from the left. Louie and Lehr’s story is a testament to the possibility of solidarity—a commitment we must honor even as historical coalitions fracture.

A Fifty-Year Divergence

In Louie’s time, Sea Cliff stood as a fortress of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ascendancy, who controlled the banks, the white-shoe law firms, the universities, and the residential geography of every major American city. They frequently used racially restrictive covenants, deed clauses forbidding sale or occupancy to anyone who was not white. The Supreme Court had struck such covenants down in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, but in the 1950s the covenant survived as custom, enforced by realtors and residents.

So Sinclair’s wealth was immaterial to residents of Sea Cliff, who could not fathom a Chinaman growing as rich as they were. They were not fringe radicals; they were the respectable center of American life, the establishment itself, defending its monopoly on the Dream against the very people who best embodied it.

But Sinclair did not fight alone. Lehr—a man who had suffered many of the same forms of discrimination—took up his cause, and through his help Sinclair succeeded in purchasing the home. The story of the merchant and the lawyer became, in our community’s memory, something larger than a real estate transaction; it was an emblem of what Chinese and Jewish Americans, with Black and brown Americans beside them, were about to achieve in the most pivotal struggle of the American century, the Civil Rights Movement.

The Civil Rights Coalition began a war over the American Dream’s guest list, waged by Black, Brown, Asian, Jewish, and Queer Americans. We fought together and won together: homes in white neighborhoods, seats at elite colleges, entry into professions once closed to us.

But in the half-century since, the coalition’s peoples have traveled very different roads. When the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances broke out Asian households for the first time in 2022, it found the median Asian American family commanding $536,000 in net worth, against $285,000 for the median white household—nearly double the very establishment that had once written us out of its deeds. Jewish Americans, whom no federal survey counts but whom Pew consistently finds the highest-earning religious group in the country, traveled the same arc from quota to summit. The rest of the coalition never made the crossing: the same 2022 survey recorded median wealth of $44,900 for Black households and roughly $61,600 for Hispanic households, and the Black-white wealth gap has remained virtually unchanged since 1992. By Brookings’ arithmetic, for every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households held $15.

Two of the coalition’s peoples had benefitted from the Dream; the others were still waiting on it. That divergence has created fault lines in a once-unified front.

What We Gave

Chinese Americans built and bankrolled their own civil rights infrastructure from nothing: Chinese for Affirmative Action, the Asian Law Caucus, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, institutions raised on the donations of shopkeepers, garment workers, and restaurant families. The sums ran to the hundreds of millions across the decades, given quietly, without press releases, and without the expectation of thanks.

We funded and fought legal fights. We supplied the plaintiffs: Lau v. Nichols, the case that won bilingual education for the entire nation, carried to the Supreme Court by San Francisco Chinese families. We supplied the precedents: it was Yick Wo v. Hopkins, a Chinese laundryman’s case out of this very city, that established equal protection for all persons regardless of citizenship, a foundation stone every subsequent civil rights movement has built upon. We supplied the picket lines, from the San Francisco State strike that created ethnic studies nationally for the country to the redress movement that won reparations for Japanese internment and wrote the template for every reparations argument since.

Jewish Americans, an older and wealthier community, gave at an incomparable scale in raw dollars: they bankrolled the NAACP from its founding, built the Legal Defense Fund’s war chest, and by scholarly estimate supplied as much as half the white money and half the white bodies behind the movement organizations of the 1960s. That giving continued at a scale that beggars description—of the nation’s twenty-five largest philanthropists, nearly half were Jewish, giving hundreds of billions. Asian and Jewish Americans both gave everything their position allowed, to the same cause, expecting nothing in return.

The Silence

On January 8, 2019, an 88-year-old grandmother named Yik Oi Huang was performing her morning exercises in a Visitacion Valley when a man beat her ruthlessly and left her unconscious in the dirt with her pants pulled down to her ankles. She never recovered. She died a year later. Her murder marked the beginning of a dark era: San Francisco recorded nine victims of anti-Asian hate crime in 2020, and sixty in 2021, an increase of 567 percent in a single year. Six Asian Americans would lose their lives in this city between 2020 and 2023 in circumstances born of that crime and unrest. Nationally, the pattern replicated itself in every city with a Chinatown—dozens of Asian Americans killed, tens of thousands beaten, robbed, or intimidated, with millions living in fear.

One video showed 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee, a Thai grandfather, on his morning stroll through one of San Francisco’s safest neighborhoods to buy coffee before making breakfast for his grandsons. A 19-year-old drove him into the pavement at a full sprint. He died two days later. The news broadcast of that killing, anchored by Channel 7’s Dion Lim, shook me—then a regular San Francisco downtown finance worker—so profoundly that I started a nonviolent volunteer patrol group in Chinatown.

The grassroots upswell that followed became known as the movement to stop Asian hate, a national awakening to the vitriol unleashed by a pandemic that had originated in China. I found myself, essentially overnight, a Stop Asian Hate activist. Within months I had made the decision to leave my entire previous life and career behind to become a full-time advocate against anti-Asian hate and violence, work that I proudly continue to this day.

I attended the vigils. I attended the rallies. They were the loneliest hours of my life as an Asian American. The institutional coalition we had funded, staffed, and marched for across five decades did not materialize. Our dues had been paid in full, but while our grandmothers and grandfathers were being killed in the street, we stood alone. The Black, brown, queer, and even mainstream white progressive institutions of the Civil Rights era, sustained for generations by Asian and Jewish dollars, remained completely absent as attack after attack persisted, as one Asian life after another was lost.

The silence wasn’t inexplicable. George Floyd had been murdered months before, and much of the footage from our own crisis showed Black assailants and Asian victims — truths the prevailing narrative had no grammar to conjugate at once. Presented with the choice between nuancing its story and abandoning a constituency, the leftmost flank of our coalition elected abandonment, whether consciously or with averted eyes.

Silence was only the kinder half of the betrayal. As our elders were being beaten and killed, the furthest-left faction busied itself explaining that the violence we could see with our own eyes was not what it appeared to be: that attacks by Black assailants on Asian grandparents were, properly understood, artifacts of white supremacy; that the correct response was not prosecution but position papers and “de-carceral solutions to anti-Asian hate.” Money that might have protected our seniors was spent on messaging that recast their deaths as teaching moments. This was not neglect. It was an ideology stepping over our bodies to defend its thesis. And when the young man who killed Grandpa Vicha was arraigned, the District Attorney of San Francisco described the killing as the product of “some sort of a temper tantrum,” a phrase our community has never forgotten. Our dead were not mourned by that faction. They were explained.

The New Establishment

In both its silence and its complicity, the new establishment that had quietly taken up residence at the gate showed its hand. We, Asian and Jewish Americans alike, had committed the same offense Sinclair Louie committed in the eyes of Sea Cliff: we had succeeded without permission, demonstrating a replicable formula—industry, education, family, sacrifice—whose very success embarrassed the framework. The “model minority” became, in the progressive lexicon, the wrong species of minority: insufficiently oppressed, a residual to be explained away rather than defended. When the violence came, some saw it as a kind of correction, and did not rush to interrupt it.

No one embodied the doctrine more directly than Chesa Boudin, whose “temper tantrum” comment was not a slip of the tongue but a philosophy. When Patrick Thompson stabbed two elderly Asian women, one of them 85, at a downtown bus stop in daylight, Boudin declined the hate crime designation on the grounds that the evidence could not establish “that he knew they were Asian, much less that their identity is what motivated the crime.” The violence engulfing our elders was adjudicated as coincidence.

The reflex was everywhere once you knew to look for it. San Francisco’s Board of Education gutted merit admissions at Lowell High School, the crown jewel of Asian American educational aspiration and a bellwether other districts watched closely, in the name of an equity that somehow always seemed to require our children to pay for it. The board’s vice president, Alison Collins, had written the reasoning down years earlier: Asian Americans, she explained, “use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead,’” and being a house n-word “is still being a n-word. You’re still considered ‘the help.’” When the tweets surfaced, she did not resign; she sued the district for $87 million.

What Lowell was locally, Harvard was nationally. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the trial record showed an admissions office scoring Asian applicants highest on academics, then quietly marking them down on “personal” ratings such as likability, courage, and kindness—the old Jewish quota’s “character” test reiterated. When Asian plaintiffs won at the Supreme Court, among the loudest voices condemning them was Chinese for Affirmative Action, the very organization our shopkeepers built in 1969 to pry those universities open. The institution founded to storm the gate now stood guard upon it.

Taking Power

So we declined to disappear. Denied the coalition’s protection, we became our own, raising the money from our own shopkeepers and grandmothers, building the organizations no one would build for us, and standing the patrols no one else would walk. And we began to vote and organize.

In February 2022, we recalled three school board members, among them one who had published anti-Asian invective while styling herself a tribune of equity. In June 2022, we ended Boudin’s tenure as our city’s top prosecutor; Asian voters backed the recall at 67 percent, well clear of any other group, with our densest precincts clearing 80 percent. In November 2024, the same current swept the East Bay, removing Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price by margins approaching two to one. In September 2025, Supervisor Joel Engardio, having defied his own district’s overwhelming verdict on closing the Great Highway, became the first supervisor in San Francisco’s history to be recalled, delivered by the Asian families of the Sunset. Each result transmitted the same proposition: we are paying attention, we will hold you to account, and you work for us.

The spoils of our victories now hold office in City Hall. Brooke Jenkins, in the position Boudin was recalled from, prosecutes elder abuse and files the hate crime charges her predecessor would not. Mayor Daniel Lurie has seated Asian Americans throughout his administration, not as ornament but as government. Anti-Asian hate crime in San Francisco has fallen precipitously. A community was abandoned, that community took power, and the killing stopped. We repaired it ourselves, because no one else would and we walked out of those years knowing exactly how this is done.

The Same Story

But we did not entirely defeat this hatred. In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League counted 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States, the highest figure in the 46 years it has kept the audit, more than twenty-five incidents a day. Jewish Americans are two percent of this country and the victims in roughly two-thirds of its religious hate crimes. And they are, in the establishment’s old ledger, the other people who succeeded without permission.

Then 2025 supplied a darker refinement: physical assaults continued their ascent, and three Americans were murdered for no offense but being Jewish—two shot outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, one killed by firebombing in Boulder. It was the first year since 2019 in which antisemitic violence on American soil proved lethal. The harassment ebbed; the killing arrived. First the incidents, dismissed as isolated. Then the assaults, explained as something other than what they were. Then the funerals. Our community knew the trajectory. The response is following our sequence too. The same progressive institutions that fell silent while our grandmothers were dying now stand silent, or hostile, as Jewish Americans absorb this wave—determining that antisemitism is cognizable only when it issues from approved sources: a synagogue defaced by a white supremacist is a hate crime, while the same synagogue besieged by the ideologically fashionable somehow becomes a form of discourse. The community that funded the coalition and bled for its victories now stands accused of the oldest crime on the books: succeeding without permission. Jewish Americans stand alone at their own vigils. We know the exact temperature of that loneliness.

Completing the Circle

Sinclair Louie resides in Sea Cliff in our community’s memory because a Jewish lawyer judged his fight worth joining, at a moment when that lawyer’s own people were still being turned away from the same streets, the same firms, the same universities. He showed up, without asking for anything in return, because he understood what was actually at stake on that street: not one man’s house, but Adams’s sentence itself. He defended the American Dream by defending a man who proved it.

They gave the capital and the counsel when we had neither. They appeared for us when appearance carried a price. And now the Dream’s gatekeepers administer to them precisely the treatment once administered to us: abandonment when the violence complicates the narrative, interrogation of whether the pain is authentic. The people who spent a century proving the Dream true are being told, a second time, that it was never meant for them. We know, with the specificity of the twice-taught, what follows when nobody acts.

If we take one lesson from everything our community lived through from 2020 to 2023, it is this: showing up to save yourself, when no one else will come, is the loneliest experience on this earth. Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote the warning eighty years ago, and every schoolchild knows it: first they came for the socialists, and he did not speak out, because he was not a socialist. Then the trade unionists, then the Jews, and he did not speak out. Then they came for him, and there was no one left to speak for him.

Right now, Jewish Americans are living through what we have only just survived. So if you were aware of what our community endured—or if you simply recognize the pattern of abandonment playing out again—do not let it happen a second time. Reach out to a Jewish friend, a Jewish neighbor, or a Jewish colleague. Ask them one question: what can I do to help? Then just do it. When Sinclair asked his Jewish friend for help, did that man hesitate? A simple act of solidarity turned one man’s dream home into the inspiration of a generation. For the people, united, will never be divided.