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- [00:04]
Geraldine Gouttefin
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- [00:27]
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- [00:57]
Scott Zelligman
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- [01:05]
Geraldine Gouttefin
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- [01:15]
Scott Zelligman
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- [01:26]
Experian Advertiser
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:30]
Geraldine Gouttefin
Hello everybody and welcome to a new episode on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Geraldine Gouttefin. Today I'm thrilled to host the award winning writer and historian Scott Zelligman. Today we will discuss his latest book, the Chief Rabbi's the Untold Story of America's Largest Anti Semitic Riot, which was published by Nebraska University Press in 2024. Scott, welcome to the show.
- [01:53]
Scott Zelligman
My pleasure.
- [01:54]
Geraldine Gouttefin
So first I'd like to hear a little bit about your own trajectory. If I understand you your trajectory correctly, you worked in China for a while, you wrote in corporate communications and you ended up writing a number of books, some of which touched on the topic of Jewish history. So could you tell us a little bit more about your previous work and what got you to this?
- [02:16]
Scott Zelligman
Book writing is actually a second career for me, something I really picked up in my dotage. After I retired, I was, I worked in the business world for most of my career, had a great deal to do with China. I spent several times back and forth in Asia with several residences in Asia as well. I took early retirement when I was, I think about 56 and then was trying to figure out what to do. And because I've been in the PR business, I'd been writing my Entire career, but never for my own pleasure and never for my own bylaw. It was always speeches for CEOs and press releases and things like that. So I had the opportunity to, in my leisure, to decide that I'm going to do some serious writing. And I started out writing about Chinese American history, which was really an underserved area. You know, when I was growing up, American history was the history of a bunch of white guys talking to each other. We didn't pay attention to women's history or. Or any ethnic is. And certainly the Asian American history was really awkward. I mean, it's not like I invented it. I mean, there were. There was scholarship in it, but it was still relatively new and relatively unknown. And I wrote a book. I wrote a biography of a Chinese American activist named Wang Qingfu, who richly deserved a biography. And had he been Jewish, he would have had three of them. But there was an opportunity for me because nobody had really looked at it. And because I had lived in China, I could read some Chinese and studied American history. This felt like a good thing to do. And altogether, I wrote four books about early Chinese American history, narrative, nonfiction, and also biography. And I did one on African American history. And I decided, you know, why am I avoiding Jewish American history? This is my own tradition. And I had read an article, it was really a seminal article in American Jewish history by a now deceased author named Paul Hyman, who had written about a 1902 strike, essentially, I guess boycott is a better word by the New York Jewish community because of the price of potion meat. Because it had. It had gotten to the point where it was unaffordable for some of the Lower east side families that didn't have a lot of money. And she'd only read about 14 pages on it. And as I read more about it, I realized that nobody who had looked at the matter since her had gone beyond her source. And I figured, well, you know, I got. I've got leisure, and I've also got materials at my disposal that she didn't have in 1970 when she wrote about it. In particular, newspapers, old newspapers, historic newspapers, are now. Many of them are now online and keyword searchable. And that is an incredible advance for people who do this kind of research. You can do sitting in your study in a week what it would have taken you months and months hunched over a microfilm reader in my day. And so. And really, on any given topic, if you. Some of the sites are free, some of you have to subscribe to, but on any given topic, if you Sit in front of the computer for a week, you can get thousands of articles about whatever it is you're interested in. And so I decided to dig deeper into that particular story. And I wrote a book called the Great Kosher meat war of 1902, which was initially. I mean, I didn't even discover it. She discovered it from the literature, but I had Yiddish newspapers she didn't have. And I had all sorts of English newspapers. All the New York papers were searchable. And since it was a national reported nationally, I could also look at newspapers elsewhere in the country. There weren't very many memoirs because the women who had, who had organized the strike were obscure when they started and obscure really when they, when they finished it. I was able to put that book together. And that led him directly into the book that we're going to talk about today. Because in some measure this is a sequel. It picks up about two months after the. The strike was over. Some of the characters are the same, but it's a distinct event in Jewish American history because it moved from this boycott to essentially to a riot, which turns out to have been the single largest anti Semitic riot in American history, measured in terms of numbers of people injured.
- [06:28]
Geraldine Gouttefin
So let's jump into the story then. As you say in the intro of the book, you're telling three stories. The first one is the saga of the chief Rabbi himself, Chief Rabbi Jacob Joseph. Then the story of the riot and what exactly happened there, and then the story of how the community organized in response to the riot. So we'll talk about responses later, but for now, could you give us a little bit of an overview of Rabbi Jacob Joseph's story in America? And then what exactly took place at his funeral in 1902. And then since you mentioned the Great Kosher Meat War, how those two stories interact, because I think that is important, right?
- [07:07]
Scott Zelligman
Well, the truth is, in the kosher meat book there is a whole chapter on the rye. And I thought I had done it justice. And then there was an article. Andrew Silo Carroll did an article about it in New York, Jewish Week. And he followed up the following week with an article just about the rabbi. And I started thinking about it. I realized that that story needed a more fulsome retelling. It was really an important event in its own right and deserved more than a chapter in a book that wasn't specifically about. Rabbi Joseph came over in 1888. He was invited by probably something fewer than two dozen orthodox synagogues on the Lower east side of New York, Russian and Eastern European synagogues. To preside over the community as a quote, chief rabbi. Now the whole thing really in many ways was a fiction. There was no such thing as a chief rabbi of New York. And there couldn't have been because the Reform congregations weren't interested in an Orthodox overlord. And the Sephardic congregations, even though they were, many of them were Orthodox, they really weren't going to put themselves under the authority of an Eastern European rabbi. But the, the, the, the synagogues that did were serious about bringing him over. And his principal task was to supervise the, the meat industry. People had had good reason to believe that the meat that they were being bought, that they were buying as Osher may not have been strictly kosher because it wasn't well regulated. And unlike the old country where you had a cheap rabbi who could actually discipline the mashkiyats and the, and the shafts, you know, the, the, the supervisors of the slaughterers, that wasn't possible in the United States. It's because in, in Europe they, they had government sanctioned to do these kinds of things. Of course, in America that wasn't the case. So. And plus in, believe it or not, in the 1880s you actually had butchers that were selling both kosher and non kosher meat out at the same store. So the opportunities for corruption were liebzen. And so they brought the rabbi in for three reasons. The first reason was to supervise the kosher slaughter in the whole kosher system. The second was to preside over a bezdin, the religious court. And the third was education. There was concern in the community that the American born, their American born children were growing up fairly ignorant of Jewish law, Jewish traditional and even language to a certain extent. And so he was supposed to be also in charge of inspiring American youth and keeping them in the fold because some of them were leaving Judaism and some of them, God forbid, were becoming reformed, which was horrifying to some of the people on the Lower east side. And so those were his three tasks. He was a good man, he was a scholar, he was brilliant on Talmudic manners. But he was a horrible failure at this job through in some ways no fault of his own. Well, I mean, to a certain extent was his, his deficits. He didn't speak English, which was a problem. He really didn't understand the United States and everything he did turned against us in the kosher meat business. The knives were out for him the day he arrived because there was a lot of best interests in keeping the damn industry corrupt. And so, and when he instituted a, a system to assure Jewish women that what they were buying was in fact kosher under his supervision, which was the, they called it the plumba. It was the lead seal that they would attach to the leg of a chicken with better than sorted properly. Rather than see it as a service, the women saw it as a tax because they had to pay an extra penny for a chicken to get the seal. And it reminded them of a tax that the Russians had imposed back in, in, in the old country. So he got, he got a lot of pushback on, on that. Even though he was trying to do the right thing, he didn't relate well to the young people because maybe many of them still spoke Yiddish, which was his lingua franca, but they didn't speak his Yiddish. They spoke the Yiddish of the dinner table. He spoke Yiddish about, about the, the Talmud and about the Jewish history. And so he really misconnected with the. They saw him as an old fogey that actually that word was actually used in, in one of the newspaper articles. And as for the bezdin, I don't have a lot of information that didn't really make the newspapers and stuff, but I don't think there was a lot of objection in him there, except that there were issues, as you know from your research, issues of authority of Orthodox divorces, for example, versus civil divorces. And he actually met with some of the other rabbis, including my Reform rabbis, to discuss how they needed to handle the fact that a religious divorce was not considered legal in the United States. So there was that. But on balance, he was not a success. He came on a six year term. The term was over. The synagogues that were paying his salary decided it was exorbitant and they weren't getting from him what they needed. Plus they were paying for kosher supervision for everybody else in the city who wasn't paid. And so they let the contract lapse. He basically became a mashiach himself. While then he had a series of strokes, was bedridden, and eventually a couple of months after the kosher meet, Straya, he succumbed, he died. And what happened then really was truly remarkable because he was pretty much destitute when he died, even though he was making a huge salary by their standards. He was also a charitable man and he gave money away as easily as it came in. And he was pretty much destitute when he was on his deathbed and ignored because he hadn't really been a force in the Jewish community for several years since he had stroke. But once he died, it was as if the community wanted to give him the honor and death that they had denied him in life and all of it. As soon as it was announced, people started flocking to the front of his house on Henry Street. They wanted to pay a call, but after a while, the family had to basically say no. They couldn't let the entire community in. So they simply massed on the front of this. On the street front. And they so said prayers for it. And it just happened like that. And the, The. The. The funeral committee, which was basically his family, and the rabbis of the synagogues that had been under his aegis, they got together to decide what they were going to do about it. There was not a synagogue on the Lower east side that was big enough to host a funeral celebration. And so they decided they borrowed something that had been done. I gather in Europe once or twice, where a very popular personage dies and there's no facility big enough. They simply have a procession. And it stops at the porticos of several synagogues for prayers and for eulogies for five minutes or so. It doesn't go in. And then. And that was what they decided they were going to do for the rabbi. And the procession was going to snake through the Lower east side and work its way up to the pier at the end of grand street and then sail off to. On a ferry to Brooklyn, where. Where he was going to be impaired. And that was the plan. Should I go on?
- [14:08]
Geraldine Gouttefin
Yes. Well, you're getting to the most important part, Right, So what, What happened? So we have this procession. So if I remember the. The numbers correctly from the book you mentioned, that it might have been over a hundred thousand people.
- [14:22]
Scott Zelligman
So it was way over a hundred thousand. But. But how many hundred thousands?
- [14:26]
Geraldine Gouttefin
We don't know. Exactly.
- [14:27]
Scott Zelligman
We don't know. Okay, so depending on which newspaper you read.
- [14:31]
Geraldine Gouttefin
And so at some point, this procession took a wrong turn. So what happened?
- [14:37]
Scott Zelligman
Well, first of all, it's the largest procession they have ever seen on the Lower east side of New York. It starts off with singing Yeshiva bookers, you know, singing psalms. And there are. There are carts, carriages, horsemen, carriages for all the VIPs. They actually waited an extra day to bury him so that the VIPs from other cities could get into town to go to the funeral. And they each had a little sign on the side of the carriage of who this was, you know, what rabbi or what president of what congregation and stuff. And they were like dozens and dozens of those. And then there were people on foot. Not everybody had been under his hair, but a lot of people. And then that doesn't talk about the people on the side streets that were simply watch. It was a huge. It was a huge production. And the police had been asked to provide security, but they didn't provide enough security. It was actually a laughable number of people. They didn't really expect any problems. So it's proceeding according to plan. And it finally gets to the intersection of grand street. And I forget the name of the other one, where there is a factory. And it's a factory. It's a big factory. It's a printing press factory called the R. Hohen Company. Printing press factory. A very important company actually, in American newspaper history. They invented several technologies that actually make newspapers affordable. And then had been around for almost a century. And unfortunately it had a bad reputation. It hired a lot of illiterates. Not very many Jews. There were some Jews there, but not a lot. And it had an internship program, an apprentice program for young boys in the community. And the young boys were obstreperous, like young boys are. And they actually had a history of bothering the Jewish people on the street, especially the men who were going to worship on Sabbath and things like that. They would pull beards, they would throw things from the upper stories of the factory. You know, banana peels, apple cores, that sort of. But nobody thought that on a day like this with the streets filled with mourners and said that anything bad was going to happen. But it did. And they started. The carriage asked the. The front of the factory. It shook up a whole city. Blah. And first people started jeering at it. They called them sheenies, which was a term I learned from my grandmother. A derogatory term for Jews. I had never heard it as a child. So it started with name falling. And then they started throwing cotton waste from the factory. And then they started throwing heavier things. Bolts and nuts and bolts, pieces of wood, pieces of steel, lots and lots of projectiles. And then eventually a couple of. A small group of Jews ran into the front of the factory to get to the factory office to tell them to please stop your people from doing this. But they were arguing and they were yelling in Yiddish. And the factory didn't understand them. And they basically ejected them with a water cannon. And then the water started to flow from the upper stories as well. They had fire hose and they're spraying the moors. You have to understand, the streets are so jam packed with people that you can't move. There was no way to get out of the way of the projectiles. There was simply nothing that we got. So what some of the Jews finally did was they picked up the projectiles that had been thrown at them and threw it back up at the factory, which I think is pretty understandable. They managed to break every window in the factory on two facades. Robert Ho himself was in charge of the factory. He owned the factory, picked up the phone, call the police, asked for reinforcements, and they eventually arrived in from six different precincts, several hundred policemen, I think it was. You'll have to check me on that. I remember the number. And the police came. There was a particular police captain who was in charge of the police inspector, excuse me, who was no friend of the Jews. He had had tussles with Jews before. He was corrupt. A lot of the police were corrupt. And part of the. Among the people who had tried to accuse him had been Jews. So he didn't have any love for intuitive people. He didn't. He had a chat with Robert Ho. He did not make an announcement that people had dispersed by this time, the violence set aside. He did not make an announcement to disperse. He didn't do anything. He simply ordered his policemen to, and this is a quote, club the life out. And that's what they started to do with their billy clubs. They started beating, as one of the newspapers said, anybody who looked like him too. And people were injured. People who had not been injured by the projectiles were injured by the police. Police or in some cases injured. When the horses reacted to the violence, the hospital, the ambulances were called, the horse drawn ambulances. In those days, a lot of people were treated on site. Those who had serious injuries were taken, were ferried to the hospital. And there were several arrests, mostly of Jews. There were a couple of factory workers who were arrested, but basically it was Jews who were arrested. And a lot of people were injured. Nobody, however, died as a result of it. There was one man they thought was going to die, but he recovered. And so it wasn't. There was no. There were no deaths associated with it. There were a lot of injuries. And then we move to the courthouse where these people are brought up on charges. The judges are not terribly sympathetic. Some of the judges were openly anti Semitic on the Lower east side. The one they got was he just was giving out fines and he was. He held some people over for trial. And. And of course, if you were held over for trial, you were put in jail. Even if bail was offered, you probably couldn't afford, you know, $10 bail was a week's salary for a Jewish family. And. And then that night the Jewish community did. Some of the leaders in it no, I'm sorry I said something. The attorneys who showed up to defend them in court. This was very interesting because I don't think anybody ever figured this out. Before I did the research, I looked up the lawyers. They were. The newspapers listed probably a half a dozen, maybe a little more than that. Attorneys, Jewish attorneys who just showed up because they'd gotten the phone calls to defend the people in port. And what was really interesting about them was they were not all Russian Jewish lawyers, which I expected that they would be. There were uptown lawyers. There were German Jewish lawyers that were there as well. Now, if you know anything about the history of New York Jewry, you know that there wasn't a lot of love lost between the uptown German community, the earlier arrivals and the Lower east side than the. Of the Eastern Europeans and the Russians. They all understood they were part of the same trial. And there were, in fact, efforts by the German Jews to Americanize Lower Manhattan Jews, not only out of the goodness of their hearts, but actually out of selfishness, because they were embarrassed by it. Here you had German Jews who had achieved a certain measure of success and a certain measure of acceptance among the Gentiles. And influx, this huge influx of unwash. Of Russian and Jews that don't seem to want to assimilate, particularly they speak Yiddish, they don't speak English. They're living in real poverty. And I think that a lot of the Germans felt that this was a real threat, whatever acceptance they had been able to achieve. So they did do philanthropic efforts to try to bring these people up and Americanize them, but they didn't welcome them in their synagogues and they didn't welcome them in their clubs. And. And conversely, the Russian Jews would, if they walked into one of the synagogues of town, one of the Reformed Synagogue, they thought that we're in a church, you know, men and women sitting together, organs, the whole bit. So the two communities were somewhat at odds. But here you had a situation where Jewish people were at that and they came together. I was able to chart just by going through census records and looking up the lawyers and looking up where they had come from or where their parents had come from. I was able to prove that they were, in fact, from all walks of Jewish life, except I didn't find any separate. But there really weren't very many.
- [22:33]
Geraldine Gouttefin
I think that's. Yeah, that's a question of number, probably. Yeah.
- [22:37]
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- [23:04]
Geraldine Gouttefin
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- [23:38]
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- [24:09]
Scott Zelligman
So then we move on to a meeting that takes place that evening of Jewish lawyers and doctors and basically professionals. And they did. And, and they are already alarmed because Robert Ho and because Inspector Cross, the inspector that I mentioned before, have both told the newspapers that the Jews came armed to start the riot they had started. They had already blamed the whole thing on the Jews. And this was not the first time Jews got blamed for things that they hadn't done. And they wanted to make sure that that didn't stay in that the blame was then ideally they were looking for punishment for the people who had done it, both the factory workers and also the police. But at very least they wanted some authority to, to, to, to make it clear that the Jews were innocent victims here. And they set up a couple of organizations. This was before the American Jewish Committee, before the American Jewish Congress, before the Anti Defamation League. They, they, they set up ad hoc committees whenever they had a problem. It was there had been an ad hoc meeting committee for the kosher me business and they were ad hoc committees for the rent strikes and things like that. So this was an ad hoc committee just for this. But they realized that if they did their own investigation it wouldn't have credibility. And so they, they, they went to the mayor. Now typically in the past, the Jews couldn't count on a lot of help from the elected officials. But things were changing. By 1902 there were a lot more Jews who had been in the States for five years and could, could become citizens and could register to vote. And the mayor, Seth Rowe, who had taken over on January 1, 1902, realized that he actually owed his election to the Jewish community. He won by like 30,000 votes and a lot of those votes were Jewish. And he was one of, he was an exception. He was not a Tammany hall machine candidate, he was a reform candidate. And they approached him and they asked for a committee to investigate the riot. And he understood a political debt when he saw it. And he also was a something of a philo semi. He had been president of Columbia University. They had worked with him on making sure that tests weren't given on the Jewish holidays and things like that. And he'd also. And when he was mayor of Brooklyn before the consolidation, he would go to the openings of the Jewish temples and things like that. He really was a prestigious man. Yeah. And he recognized the political. Then he said, I absolutely appointed a five member commission, two members of which were Jews. Nathan Peecher and Lewis Marshall, who I'm sure you probably. Of course, he was of course the Spanish whole Jewish attorney. And they, and they conducted an investigation. I've skipped a little bit. The police did their own investigation and nobody trusted it because Inspector Cross was. So they finally got this committee together and the committee exonerated the Jews and it pointed and even. It even accused the judgements of not giving, giving short shrift to the Jewish appendix. Sometimes they didn't even listen to them. They just, they just sentenced them, they just fined. So they got everything they wanted in that report. The upshot was that there were really not very many serious punishments that came out of it. There wasn't enough evidence in court to convict people so they didn't get convicted. But there were, there were repercussions. The, A lot of the policemen who had been involved in it were transferred out of the Lower east side. Several of them took early retirement so that they wouldn't be disciplined. The chief of police who was incompetent was dismissed. I think he was police commissioner, I think it was his title, the assistant commissioner who was loath vibing juice because of his actions during the kosher meat boycott. He lost his job as well. So it wasn't like there weren't repercussions for it. And I think the argument you can make is that this was sort of a early example of Jews organizing and also using what political capital they had in the political firmament to get some measure of justice for their people. And I think that was the importance of the story.
- [28:10]
Geraldine Gouttefin
So you mentioned uptown Jews and downtown Jews coming together after the episode. Was there any sort of longer lasting alliance after this? So this is just. Yeah, it was. I want to return briefly to the police because I think there's a lot to say about this. And you know, we're talking about police brutality today and how certain groups in the United States are targeted by police violence. So I pulled a quote, a quote from the New York Times that you have in the book from September 16, 1902, that really stuck with me. The New York Times wrote, it appears that the police are, a considerable proportion of them regard the Jews of the Lower east side not as claimants for protection, but as fit objects of persecution. These unhappy Jews are not only not protected by the police, they are in need of protection against the police. So I wonder if you could take kind of a longer, like, broader view of the relationship between Jews in New York or Jews in the Lower east side and the police to kind of situate this particular episode you tell in the story within kind of broader dynamics between the police and Jews and also the police and other minority groups. Like you said, you worked on Chinese Americans before, so I don't know how those issues played out with Chinese Americans.
- [29:27]
Scott Zelligman
They were even worse than the Chinese. First of all, you have to accept that the police department was highly corrupt at this point. They would. They were charged with enforcing the law, but they were actually getting payments by various people for not. And it was, was almost expected because you had to pay for promotions. You had to pay to get into the police, but you had to pay for promotions. Not the department itself, but somebody in Parity hall was going to sponsor you and in order to get promoted, you had to pay even more. And if you didn't have the money, then you had to get it someplace. So you borrowed it and then you decided that you were going to get it from your policing. So if a bar was supposed to be closed on Sunday nights and you let it be open, you got squeezed, you got a payment. And it's similarly a house of prostitution. They all paid the police in order to not be shut down. So start there. The Jews had particular, particular problems with police, first of all, because Tammy hall didn't like strikes, they didn't like labor. Unions, very much. And of course, a lot of labor unions were Jewish. And so if there was a strike going on, you could pretty much decide town on the fact that if they didn't have a permit for a, you know, for an assembly, the police were going to come in with the batons, which they could. And the Jews couldn't get justice out of the police department. There was one situation, I think it was in the 1890s, where several had been arrested and they complained that they had been inappropriately arrested and they managed to get the police department to agree to an investigation, but it was run by an anti Semitic police inspector. And he actually said to them, you know, you may as well go home, because I would never believe a Jew under oath. So, you know, they weren't going to get him there. When that committee was set up to look into the Jacob Joseph riot, actually their mandate was broader than that. The mayor told them they could listen to any issues that they had with the police. And it was like you opened the floodgates of people who wanted to tell the committee about earlier problems they had had with the police where they'd been beaten up for no good reason, just arbitrary. Then the other thing I haven't mentioned is ethnicity. The police were mostly, not most, maybe not mostly mostly. If not predominantly, I guess, Irish. It was the Irish. And the Irish police didn't like the Jews very much. It was almost as if, you know, they had been the lower, the low people on the totem pole before the Jews showed up. Now there was somebody who was even more despised than the Irish had been, so they were going to take it out on the Jews. So there was some ethnic tension as well. Now the other thing I should add though is that the police were equal opportunity head bashings. They did it to blacks, they even did it to other Irishmen if they were out on this breed strike. So it wasn't just the Jews, but the Jews really got the brunt.
- [32:08]
Geraldine Gouttefin
So after, you know, after all those investigations were launched and you had some sort of justice restored, what are the structural changes that were made in New York to actually address this police brutality? Like, did it actually change, you know, in the, you know, in the long run, the kind of interaction that police had with. With different minority groups?
- [32:30]
Scott Zelligman
Yeah, in the long running, in the short run, I really didn't. The reforms of the police department actually started earlier in the mid-90s, when actually when Theodore Roosevelt was chief of police, which he was before he became governor of New York, before he went back to Washington. And there were There were, there were, there was more technology brought in, police phones where you could call for help and things like that. But as long as Tammany hall was really running the police department, it wasn't going to change very much, and it didn't for a long time. There weren't even police manuals in those days. But eventually, you know, things got better.
- [33:01]
Geraldine Gouttefin
Right.
- [33:02]
Scott Zelligman
But not in the, not in the, not in the period I had to search.
- [33:05]
Geraldine Gouttefin
Right. Right.
- [33:06]
Scott Zelligman
I did not see a lot of a group.
- [33:08]
Geraldine Gouttefin
So I wonder if you could situate this particular episode within the broader history of anti Semitism. And I think now, you know, there's a lot of talk about anti Semitism in the United States, in the world. So how do you see your book contributing to our broader understanding of antisemitism? And also how do you understand the fact that this episode, really, until the book, has been largely forgotten or neglected by American Jewish historians? What's your understanding of the fate? That's.
- [33:38]
Scott Zelligman
I'll come to the second question first, because I really don't have a good answer for the first question. It's a good question why it was forgotten, the kosher meat strike. I didn't find any direct references to it after about 1920 in the newspapers. It was very much quoted, certainly with the rent strikes that followed it. They talked about how they'd taken a page out of the book of et cetera, but by the 1920s, it was, it was forgotten. It was kind of a flash in the pan. Both of these things were. They were over in a couple of months, and the people who had been behind them were obscure. They went right back into obscurity after the thing was over. And it just didn't register until people like Paula Hyman, many decades later, rescued it from history. So I don't have a good answer for that, but I know it's absolutely true. How does it fit into the broader scheme of antisemitism? I think it's beguffed my above my pay grade, to tell you the truth.
- [34:29]
Geraldine Gouttefin
That's fair.
- [34:31]
Scott Zelligman
Pamela Nadell has just put out a book, or putting out a book like next week on. It's called Anti Semitism An American Tradition, where she really looks at that whole question longitudinally. And I'd really refer you to one of the scholars whose job it is to do that. And I'm more of a stone teller than I think, than a scholar as far as this is concerned.
- [34:49]
Geraldine Gouttefin
I actually do want. I haven't read her book yet. I wonder. Yeah. If she discusses this particular episode much in the book and what her views are.
- [34:58]
Scott Zelligman
So yeah, I think so. I share a little bit of material with her. I should also give a commercial for Pam Nadella who I, who I did not know before I wrote the Kosher meat book and she lives here in Washington as I do and she owed me absolutely nothing when she got a disembodied letter from me as a sort of an independent writer, could I ask her about sources. And she took me under wing. There was nothing in it for her to do it. She has read all of my manuscripts, all of my Jewish related manuscripts since then, given me wonderful feedback and criticism on. It is in generosity of spirit about this woman that I'm. I'm. For which I'm deeply grateful.
- [35:34]
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- [35:49]
Scott Zelligman
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- [35:50]
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- [35:56]
Geraldine Gouttefin
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- [35:57]
Scott Zelligman
Brad, you're on mute.
- [35:58]
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- [36:04]
Geraldine Gouttefin
That'S wonderful. So let's talk about sources. Actually, that's a very nice jumping point. Yes. To talk about the kind of sources you used, you mentioned newspaper earlier. So can you tell our listeners a bit more about the kind of newspapers you gravitated towards, where you found them? You know, you said a lot of them are online. So tell us a little bit about the process of writing the book.
- [36:27]
Scott Zelligman
Okay. The first thing I do when I, when I decide, when I. Before I've decided on a topic is I'll do some dipstick research on the newspapers. If. If it's not a topic that's going to have a thousand articles in the newspapers, it's probably not what I'm going to find enough information on. Newspapers are my basic sources. I have a real prejudice for primary sources. Again, probably by the fact that I don't see myself much as much of a scholar here. But the newspapers, and not just the English newspapers, but the Yiddish papers as well, have become increasingly useful to me. And I actually figured out a way to actually go to the National Library of Israel website, download a Yiddish paper and actually do optical character recognition and translate. It's incredible.
- [37:14]
Geraldine Gouttefin
That's incredible. You're talking about that. You're talking about the historical Jewish press, right? That's. Yeah. Which is, which is a wonderful, incredible resource and truly transnational. I mean, it, it just gives people access to so many different kinds of Jewish newspapers. It's, it is a fabulous resource.
- [37:30]
Scott Zelligman
Yes. In the early days, I would have to go to the center of Jewish history or have some. Actually had somebody else do it for me because I don't really read Yiddish very well. But now it's. It's really. They're all online, and it's not just Yiddish and it's not just English. It's French and it's German and it's Italian and it's Ladino and it's. It's Hebrew. It's all of. All of the languages Jews have ever used. So it's really, really useful. The American newspapers are online on various websites. The Library of Congress has a free one called Chronicling America. And there are other ones. There's one that specializes in the New York papers. But basically, if you want to find out something that happened in New York, you can read pretty much all of the extant Jewish newspapers from that time period and, and, and find articles that are relevant. The Times, the Tribune, the sun, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the Brooklyn Standard, Union, they're all. And for not very much money. So there's that. Memoirs, I find a relatively few, but you can find them. The other thing I have found sometimes is very useful is not just the newspapers, but journals. You know, the, the ones that came out once a month. Frank. Frank Leslie's Weeping Monthly, whatever it is. They're really good. And they're all online@ either archive.org, the. The Internet Archive, or the Happy Trust website, which has all sorts of books that you. Clearly, they went into libraries and decided they were going to scan books that nobody has read in 30 years or 50 years or something. And they're wonderful. You can find great things up there if you know what you're looking for. And then reading their Googling. And then the other thing, and I did not use it for this particular book, but I'm starting to use it now is AI. And, you know, that's a longer conversation because AI is as useful as it is dangerous. Yeah.
- [39:14]
Geraldine Gouttefin
I actually do wonder because I'm thinking also a lot about it and how to use it, you know, efficiently for and for what purpose and. Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about this. I'm curious about how you have found it useful in your own research.
- [39:27]
Scott Zelligman
Yeah, not in again, not in this book and not in the next one, but in the one I'm working on right now, I have found it very useful. Well, first of all, you can use it as Google on steroids because it searches way more things than Google and does a certain amount of organizing of the information as well. So it's useful to you. Plus, it. Usually it's some of the AI source. I think ChatGPT or Flexity or probably other ones, they actually give you a link back to the original source. And I've had lots of fights with ChatGPT and perplexity where the link back to the original source doesn't say what they said. It said. Yeah, so you'll have to check everything. I once asked that for a quote for by a Lewis Marshall quote. I said, I think Lewis Marshall commented on this. Can you give me a quote? And it gave me a quote, quotation marks and everything. And it was bogus. They made it up. He had never.
- [40:18]
Geraldine Gouttefin
It's hallucinations. AI hallucinations. If we have any students listening to this podcast episode, they should be aware of that.
- [40:27]
Scott Zelligman
Now, my rule is I will never take a sentence wholesale from any AI source and put it into one of my books. I will not do that. I'm the author and they're not the author.
- [40:38]
Geraldine Gouttefin
Right.
- [40:38]
Scott Zelligman
That sounds. You can also ask it, but you can back up and ask it more. Searching questions like how did this fit into the whole trajectory of, you know, that sort of thing? And you see what it says in my. My advice is always double check it. Don't take anything that it says at face value, even facts. It gets wrong. I'll give you an example. When ChatGPT first came out, I asked it who Scott D. Seligman was. It didn't know. I said, who's the author? Scott Seligman. And it gave me a list of five books that I had ostensibly written, two of which I had never written. And so I argued with it and I said, seligman didn't write those books. And then it apologized to me and it said, you know, and it gave me another list again with the book I didn't write. And I don't know where it gets this stuff, but, you know, you can't trust it. But it can really lead you in some wonderfully productive.
- [41:27]
Geraldine Gouttefin
Yeah, that's. Yes, thank you for this. Yeah, we should definitely have a whole conversation devoted to this topic. But to get back to the newspapers, I feel like the diversity and number of newspaper articles available is, on the one hand, an incredible Resource. But on the other hand, you know, when you have such a maze of sources, how do you actually figure out what you want to say or where to stop? You know, because you could spend really, your entire life on those papers. Sorry. On those websites, looking for historical newspapers. So how did you sort out information, and where did you decide? Okay, that's it. You know, I have enough to tell the story, and I'm not going to spend more time on those websites.
- [42:11]
Scott Zelligman
Yeah, well, I think, first of all, it depends on what keywords you use. I'll give you a great example. I had just written a book on the history of the Chinatown Tongs in New York City, and I wanted to write another book about Chinese American history. And I figured, well, what the hell? I'd written a book about a Chinese American hero. I'm going to go to the Chronicling American. I put in two words, Chinese and murder. And I came on an incredible story of a murder that took place here in Washington, D.C. of three Chinese diplomats. No one I know had ever heard of this. And a Chinese man was accused of it. He ultimately was tried, he was convicted. They appealed it. The case went to the Supreme Court. Brandeis wrote the opinion, and it was one of the cases that had laid the pipe several decades later for the Miranda decision. And I found it by putting in Chinese and murder in a web in a search error.
- [43:05]
Geraldine Gouttefin
So incredible. Wait, don't you have another book about a murder in Manchuria?
- [43:11]
Scott Zelligman
A Murder in Manchuria? Yeah, that's the one that takes place in China. That one was a pain in the neck because of all the languages, there were like six languages that the sources were in because the Russians were there, the Japanese were there, the Chinese were there, the French were there, the Americans were there. That was a real cacophony.
- [43:29]
Geraldine Gouttefin
I can't imagine.
- [43:30]
Scott Zelligman
But a lot of it depends on the keywords that you use and your search strategy. Because, frankly, when you're dealing with foreign languages, especially Chinese in the United States, you can. You have to sometimes deliberately misspell something in order to get the hit that you're looking for. Because there were no standard romanization systems back then. They. They said it the way they sounded. And to a certain extent, that's true of Jewish records as well.
- [43:55]
Geraldine Gouttefin
Yes, because names, for instance, can be written in so many different ways. Right. Like when you have Yiddish names, the. The transliteration can take so many different forms. So you always have to kind of. I have to play around with that a bit.
- [44:06]
Scott Zelligman
I was researching somebody named Jacob the other day, and I Decided what the hell, I'll put in Yankel. And sure enough, I found him with his Spanish nickname. Right now, the only thing I hadn't talked about is genealogical resources. And they are fabulously useful. You go to a website like Ancestry.com or the Mormons have a site, there's several of them. And you can get, you can, if you're doing American history in particular, you can get census records that go back to the beginning of the census. And they have been indexed, not necessarily accurately. Sometimes the surname is misspelled. You'll never get it if you put in the surname the way you know it. But if you put in a Jacob married to a Rivka or came from Russia, you know, other kinds of things, you can actually find what you're looking for. That helps you go backward back in time. You can find out who the ancestors were. You can also find out who the children were. And in the case of the kosher meat book, I went forward in time and I did genealogical research on the women who had organized it. And I contacted descendants hopeful of getting a photograph or a story or something that could link me back to these women who otherwise were only two dimensional figures from a newspaper. Or in most cases, they didn't know that Bubby had been involved in this, but they were glad to hear it. And I wound up knowing more about it than they did. And I gave them information, but still. And you make friends doing it and they're interested in your work and sometimes they can help you in other kinds of ways as well.
- [45:30]
Geraldine Gouttefin
It's a collective journey.
- [45:31]
Scott Zelligman
Yeah, it's a wonderful, it's a, it's a fun journey, especially if you're retired like I am and you have all sorts of time to do it. But the, the, the various technological websites, they're not just census records, they're immigration records. And sometimes in some cases the, the manifests from Europe as opposed to the manifests when they arrive in the United States States, there are, and then court records. I haven't talked about if it was a court case. You can, generally, the court cases are not online, but you can write it to the court or write to the archive where the, where the court records are stored and get information. In the case of the Chinese, the government actually kept files on Chinese Americans who wanted to go back to China because they wanted to make sure that if they came back, they were the same people that had left. So they asked them very intrusive questions before they left and made sure that the person who came back answered them exactly the same way in order to let them back in. And so these documents that were collected for fairly obnoxious purposes back then are gold to historians and genealogists because they're really detailed questions about their lives.
- [46:33]
Geraldine Gouttefin
And were those available? The National Archives.
- [46:36]
Scott Zelligman
National Archives. They're decentralized. It depends on where the person was living. The ones from San Francisco over in California. The ones from New York are in New York. Some of them are here in D.C. or D.C. baltimore, here.
- [46:47]
Geraldine Gouttefin
Yeah, I see. Wow, how fascinating. I do want to return to this particular book and ask you if maybe you can share with the listeners the story of one or two characters from the book that you felt particularly drawn to because you gave us this wonderful, rich overview. But what I loved about the book, since you have so many different characters, right. Attorneys and police and. Yeah. So is there maybe one or two that really stood out to you that you found intriguing or particularly fascinating?
- [47:20]
Scott Zelligman
Give me a second. I want to look at my dramatist Persona. Well, Abraham Saracen, I think, was a good one. He was. He really wound up leading the charge. He became the head of what they called the east side Vigilance League. He was. I'm trying to remember where he was room. But he was an attorney and he, he, he was. He was a member of that first group of businessmen that got together to said, we need to do something about this. And he wound up running the whole damn thing. He was an activist. He was, he was a good man. I'm sure he lost a lot of money on just all the. The time that he had to throw into this. But he, you know, a lot of people were very upset about what had happened to the Jews, and they wanted to see some measure of justice. The other interesting guy was Jerome. He wasn't Jewish. He was the District Attorney of New York County. He was on the right side of most of this stuff. He ran for district attorney together with Seth Low, the mayor, and he appealed to the Jewish community. He promised them that he would work on some of their issues, including the Sunday laws, which were terrible for the Jews. You know, you couldn't do business on Sundays, but they couldn't do business on Saturdays. And so they only had five days a week to do the business, and they felt that that was discrimination against them. But the most interesting thing he did was he pled that if he won the election as district attorney, he was going to move his family to the Lower east side. And he did. He was as good as his word. His horrified wife watched as they moved to this house to the Lower east side. It was a. They had the entire house. It would have. If it had been a tenement, it would have housed, you know, probably a hundred Jews or seven, you know, twenty Jewish families. Whatever it is, they had the entire house. The piano comes in by the louvers. They're living the same lifestyle. They would have lived uptown, but they're living at downtown. And during the kosher meat business, he actually walked the streets of the Lower east side and tried to get people to stop the violence and stuff. I mean, he really was as good as his word.
- [49:14]
Geraldine Gouttefin
There's a biography, and I was. Oh, there's a biography of him. I didn't know that his name actually did come up in my research about marriage and divorce, because I've seen cases in which. Yeah, he. He pretty much. He was, on the one hand, understanding of the newcomers, but on the other hand, really conveying in no uncertain term that they should Americanize and respect.
- [49:38]
Scott Zelligman
Well, he was right. He was a Brahmin. I think he was related to Winston Churchill, if I'm not mistaken. I never. Fascinating, Fascinating. And then, well, Marshall. I'm working on Marshall now. And something else. I didn't realize the extent of his involvement in Jewish affairs when I was writing this particular book, but I've This. In fact, here. It's. Here's a biography right here from. From M.M. silver, who. Who is reading over my latest manuscript. Actually, that's the other thing. I have found scholars to be extremely. With one or two exceptions, to be extremely helpful and willing to help somebody like me who has no university affiliation, who can't get them tenure, you know, who. Just. People will just give their time to make sure that because their. Their commitment is to good scholarship, it's not necessarily to anything else. And people have been willing to read over my stuff and give me comments on it and stuff. I'm very, very grateful.
- [50:35]
Geraldine Gouttefin
So actually, you're. You're bringing us to the end of the conversation. So since you mentioned Marshall, do you want to tell us a little bit more about this current project you're working on? And then as a final, final, final question, I wonder if you have any thoughts about today and maybe what the book can teach us about today, if anything, or what kind of resonance it has given the period we're in and what you would like readers to take away from this particular reading.
- [51:03]
Scott Zelligman
A little premature to talk about the Marshall work because I'm really just getting involved in it, but I will tell you about the next book that I've got coming out on November 1st. First. How's that?
- [51:11]
Geraldine Gouttefin
That sounds great.
- [51:13]
Scott Zelligman
I. In some ways, I consider it the third of the third volume in the trilogy of Come From Me, and then this one, and then the new one. It's called the Great Christmas boycott of 1906. It's probably the last one I'm going to do about the Lower east side, you know, in the first decade of the 20th century. But this was another one that popped up during my research and I got interested in it. And again, it was a seminal article about it that appeared in American Jewish History. I get a lot of my great ideas from. From that journal and. Which are all online, by the way. You can. You can read them for free. But this one was in 1906. The story starts with a. A Presbyterian school principal in Brooklyn, Who.
- [51:59]
Geraldine Gouttefin
Who.
- [52:00]
Scott Zelligman
It's 1905. It's December 1905, Christmas season. He calls an assembly of his school, which is almost all Jewish, and he tells them. Reads from a book with biblical quotes, and then tells them that because it's the Christmas season, that he wanted them all to be more like Jesus. And that Jesus. What did he say? Jesus loves everyone but hypocrites, and the hypocrites are only the people who don't believe in him. And this one little Jewish girl decides that she thinks she was a hypocrite. And she challenges him and asks why he thinks it's appropriate to talk about Christianity in a public school. And he tells her to go back and sit down or leave the room if she prefers. But she comes home and tells her father, who's a prominent Jewish attorney, and he gets the Orthodox Union involved. There's a man named Albert Lucas who is the secretary of the board of the Orthodox Union. He is fresh from doing battle with the settlement houses on the Lower east side, which make no bones about the fact that they're trying to convert the Jewish children to Christianity. And he is of the opinion that the schools are doing nothing less than that with Bible reading in the public schools and with Christmas celebrations in the public schools, because it was traditional that there would be a Christmas pageant on December 24 before the winter vacation began. And so they bring the principal up on charges, and he goes through the whole process, and eventually he gets a. Gets a. They wrap and they wrap his knuckles. That's really all they do. And Lucas, who was very serious about this, he says he petitions the Board of Education. He said, you need to give us guidelines here because there's pictures of the Madonna in the public schools. There are Christmas carols that people are singing about the birth of the nativity and the birth of Jesus. And this is inappropriate for us. Besides, the law is on our side. You know, you shouldn't be doing this. The rules of the Board of Education said, you can't do this. The constitution of the state of New York said, and he's knocking on the door of the Board of Education. He actually brings a whole delegation of rabbis and testify, and they do nothing because they're between a rock and a hard place. They give the Jews what they want, they're going to get pilloried on from the. From the Christ. And so it gets to the point where right before Christmas of 1906, this has gone on for a year. They petitioned the board again for some rules. The board punts and they said, well, look, this is a. This is. We're at the end of our rope here. And they decide that they're going to boycott the public schools on December 24th. And they and the Jewish families, by and large keep their kids. All which finally gets the attention of the Board of Education and they finally give them something they were asking for. But the anti Semitic backlash that bubbles up in the form of letters to the editor and editorials to newspapers is something unbelievable. And eventually the board backtracks on one of the concessions that it gave. And it's not a heroic story like the other two, but it's illustrative of what they were fighting back then. Right then I actually trace it to the present day. I look at the whole issue of Christmas celebration at the public schools even today, in light of some of the Supreme Court decisions we're getting now and that sort of thing. So that's the next one that's up.
- [54:58]
Geraldine Gouttefin
That's great. Thank you for sharing. This sounds great.
- [55:01]
Scott Zelligman
And I'd be happy to come back and talk about that at some point.
- [55:04]
Geraldine Gouttefin
That sounds fabulous. Thank you so much, Scott. It was such a pleasure to host you today. And I want to thank, really thank you. And thank you to our listeners for listening to this episode. Have a great day, everyone.