The week after the September assault on Detroit’s Jews—which was addressed with dispatch by neither Michigan’s governor nor the city’s mayor—new violence was directed at homes, shops, and synagogues in Jewish neighborhoods in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, violence that Winchell’s enemies attributed to his deliberately challenging appearances in those cities after the cataclysm that he’d instigated in Detroit, and that Winchell himself—who, in Indianapolis, barely escaped being crushed by a paving stone hurled from a rooftop that had broken the neck of the bodyguard
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