Scott D. Seligman, "The Great Christmas Boycott Of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle Over Christianity in the Public Schools" (U Nebraska Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Rabbi Mark Katz
Guest: Scott D. Seligman
Episode: The Great Christmas Boycott Of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle Over Christianity in the Public Schools
Date: December 24, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode focuses on Scott D. Seligman's new book, The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle Over Christianity in the Public Schools. Through an engaging dialogue with host Rabbi Mark Katz, Seligman discusses a largely forgotten but pivotal episode in Jewish-American history: a broad-based boycott by New York's Jewish community protesting overt Christian religious activities, especially Christmas celebrations, in public schools.

The conversation situates the event in its historical context, explores the boycott’s effectiveness, the subsequent backlash, and the lasting implications for church-state separation in American public education. The episode also draws connections to contemporary questions about religion in the public sphere, showing the ongoing relevance of these battles.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Brownsville, Early 20th Century

• Demographics: Brownsville was "probably even more Jewish than the Lower East Side." Mostly Russian and Eastern European immigrant families, relatively poor, and generally more Orthodox than earlier German-Jewish arrivals. Most men worked manual jobs; women managed the household.
  (03:57) Seligman: "Some ... had left the Lower East Side ... others came directly from Europe ... mostly Russian and Eastern European Jewish families ... relatively poor ... a lot more Orthodox ..."

2. Trigger Incident: The Harding Affair

• What Happened: In December 1905, Principal Harding at P.S. 144 addressed mostly Jewish students with a Christian message, encouraging them to "be more like Jesus Christ" and referencing damnation for non-believers.
• Immediate Response: Gussie Herber, a Jewish student, reported the incident to her father, leading to Jewish community mobilization spearheaded by activist Albert Lucas of the Orthodox Union.
  (05:32) Seligman: "He ... told the children ... he wanted them all to be more like Jesus Christ. ... Jesus forgives all but the people who don't believe in him."

3. The Road to Boycott: Inaction and Escalation

• Community Petition: Jews petitioned the local school board to remove Harding. The board held a hearing but took minimal action.
• Orthodox Union's Demand: Lucas saw this as systematic Christian proselytization, paralleling missionary settlement houses, and pushed for clear policies excluding religion from schools.
• Board’s Paralysis: Despite legal backing, the Board of Education delayed a decisive ruling, hesitant to offend either Jews or Christians.
  • (08:25) Seligman: "They did what deliberative boards throughout history have done ... They did absolutely nothing."
• Call for a Boycott: With public schools planning Christmas pageants for December 24, 1906, and no redress forthcoming, Yiddish newspapers called for a boycott, urging Jews to keep their children home from school.
  • (12:05) Seligman: "They called for a boycott on December 24 ... as a way to signal the board of education that they were serious."

4. Boycott's Impact & Varying Reports

• Mixed Results: The effectiveness varied by source. English-language media reported 25,000-30,000 boycotting students (under 50%), while the Yiddish press reported much higher participation, even empty schools.
• Not Uniform: Some schools already minimized religious elements or canceled celebrations after earlier feedback. The boycott, however, was significant enough to force the board to respond.
  • (12:12) Seligman: "It was not entirely effective ... depended on which newspaper report you read ..."

5. Immediate Aftermath: Guidelines and Backlash

• Partial Policy Shift: The Committee on Elementary Education eventually banned religious hymns and forced compositions about Jesus/Christmas, but did not ban Christmas trees or religious iconography.
  • (13:27) Seligman: "The board explicitly prohibited sacred hymns ... not appropriate to ask Jewish kids to write compositions about Christmas and Jesus."
• Jewish Unity & Limitations: Reform and Orthodox rabbis mostly agreed, with exceptions. Some Reform leaders thought the controversy was overblown.
• Antisemitic Reaction: There was a wave of public antisemitism, with accusations of a "Hebrew attack on Christmas" and claims Jews should be grateful to Christians. Some said the protest itself would cause further antisemitism.
  • (16:53) Seligman: "'They should be glad they’re not in Russia ... They have no business attacking the status quo.'"

6. Retreat and Reversal

• Reversal of Ban: Facing public outrage and pressure from Christian groups and textbook publishers, the board rescinded its ban on religious hymns, passing responsibility back to local principals—a status quo that persisted for decades.
  • (20:02) Seligman: "The only thing it could think of ... was to dump it right back in the lap of the principals."

7. Broader Themes, Enduring Relevance & Later Developments

• 50s and Supreme Court Interventions: The fight over religion in schools persisted. The postwar era saw a push for school prayer as a defense against "godless communism," which ended through Supreme Court cases in the 1960s that banned school-led prayer and Bible readings.
  • (22:22) Seligman: "They said it was illegal, but the Supreme Court may well reconsider it."
• Present Climate: Jewish organizations now focus on guiding schools to be inclusive rather than campaigning to exclude Christmas; demographics, attitudes, and the nature of Christmas itself have changed.
  • (24:35) Seligman: "Much has changed. Christianity has changed ... Christmas itself has changed ... not as much of a threat to a Jewish community ..."

8. Reform vs. Orthodox Jewish Responses

• While united against state-sponsored Christianity in schools, Reform leaders took issue with tactics and worried about the blowback, sometimes blaming the boycott's organizers for increasing antisemitism.
  • (19:05) Seligman: "If you were smarter ... maybe you wouldn't have launched such a ham-handed effort that failed so badly."

9. Why This History Was Forgotten

• Unlike the better-known Kosher Meat War, the Christmas Boycott was brief and quickly faded. However, Seligman argues these early, forgotten struggles helped forge community organizing strategies used by Jews and other minorities in later activism.
  • (31:12) Seligman: "They were over in a couple of months. They weren’t remembered ... But ... the confidence ... that they had the ability to change their environment, that was remembered."

10. Role of Women in These Movements

• While the 1906 boycott was male-led, Seligman highlights women’s leadership in other Jewish protest movements of the era, showing how organizing strategies developed.
  • (33:02) Seligman: "The women star in the earlier book, The Great Kosher Meat War ... It was the women who ... took to the streets ..."

11. Contemporary Lessons and Ongoing Struggles

• The battle over religion in schools remains unresolved—pendulum swings continue, with current legal and social challenges echoing the past.
  • (34:32) Seligman: "If you think ... there isn't any more Christmas celebrations in the public schools ... I'd like to sell you some real estate in Gaza ... This issue is still a hot burner issue ... probably not going to get solved in my lifetime."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Public Perception:
  • "There was this sense that it was a Hebrew attack on Christmas ... But they didn't prevail in that interpretation." — Scott D. Seligman (16:33)
• On Jewish American Identity:
  • "What really set this apart, I think, was the sense that being American had been conflated with being Christian." — Seligman (29:12)
• On Forgotten History:
  • "They were over in a couple of months. They weren’t remembered as such. But ... the confidence that they had the ability to change their environment ... was remembered." — Seligman (31:12)
• On Ongoing Issues:
  • "This issue is still a hot burner—120-something years after the Christmas boycott in New York." — Seligman (36:26)
• On Legal Shifts:
  • "The establishment clause [of the Constitution] was in no way relevant in 1906 ... not binding on the states until well into the 20th century." — Seligman (25:36)

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Key Timestamps

• 01:34 — Seligman introduces himself and discusses how personal experiences shaped his interest in church-state battles in schools.
• 03:57 — Sociocultural and economic description of Brownsville’s Jewish community.
• 05:32 — Triggering incident at P.S. 144; role of principal, Albert Lucas, and the Orthodox Union.
• 08:25 — Board of Education’s failure to resolve the issue; lead-up to the boycott.
• 12:05 — Call for and execution of the boycott.
• 13:27 — Board’s partial concession and community reaction.
• 16:33 — Discussion of antisemitic backlash in the press.
• 19:05 — Jewish community debates over tactics and consequences.
• 20:02 — Board’s reversal and lasting consequences (“dumped responsibility” back on principals).
• 25:36 — Constitutional context and Supreme Court history of religion in schools.
• 29:12 — Why the schools became the critical battleground for assimilation and American identity.
• 31:12 — On why the boycott was forgotten and its lessons for later activism.
• 33:02 — Gender dynamics and the role of women in early Jewish activism.
• 34:32 — Seligman’s takeaways for contemporary educators and relevance for today’s debates.

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Conclusion & Takeaways

Scott Seligman’s research uncovers a crucial but neglected chapter in the struggle for religious freedom and minority rights in America’s public schools. The story of the Great Christmas Boycott of 1906 exemplifies both the potential and perils of communal mobilization, the limits of early 20th-century American pluralism, and the complicated interplay between legal rights, public sentiment, and minority protection. The episode closes with a reflection: while circumstances and strategies have changed, the core issues—how religion interfaces with public life and education—remain hotly contested.

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Transcript

[A]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Hi, and welcome to New Books and Jewish Studies Channel of the New Books Network podcast. I'm your host, Rabbi Mark Katz, and I'm here today with Scott D. Seligman, author of the Great Christmas boycott of 1906, anti Semitism and the Battle Over Christianity in the Public Schools. And so I want to welcome you and begin the way that I often do with just asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in the topic.

[C]

Well, I'm a. I was a nice Jewish boy from Newark, New Jersey, just across the river from New York, but it was a different experience. And actually, when I first happened on this topic and I did it, I found out about it in the course of research for two earlier books. When I first happened on, I knew it was something I wanted to write about because I was always the kid in school who didn't understand why Christmas was a legal holiday in the United States and didn't understand why I was being taught in the late 50s, before the Supreme Court decisions, to pray. As a Christian, I mean, I can recite the King James version of the 23rd and 24th Psalms verbatim. And we were taught to essentially to fold our hands and bow our heads in the public school when we were saved, plus the Lord's Prayer, which is, of course, entirely New Testament. So when I found out about this, I knew I wanted to write about it. And it's actually sort of, by default, become the third book in a trilogy. My first one was called the Great Kosher meat war of 1902. And that was the story of Jewish female consumers who united to oppose rising prices of kosher meat. That actually made it unaffordable for a lot of. A lot of people. And then that was followed just by a couple of months by another topic that I thought also was worthy of a book. The book was called the Chief Rabbi's Funeral. It was about. Actually about the largest anti Semitic incident in American history. So this one's four years later. But it also involved kind of a couple of things. It involved a mass movement of Jews in New York at the turn of the century. And it also marked a sort of coming of age of the Jewish community. Jews were now in America in sufficient numbers to wield some political clout and to change things about their situation that they didn't like. And so in that sense, the three books are related.

[B]

So let's really start talking about the story here. You tell this story in Brownsville in the early 20th century, 1905, 1906. Before you tell us in broad strokes about the boycott and what that looked like and what caused it, can you situate us in New York, in that neighborhood in Brownsville at the time? What was it like? Who lived there? How did the Jews coexist with the people around them?

[C]

Well, Brownsville was probably even more Jewish than the Lower east side was. There was more coexisting than went on on the Lower east side. But it was later. It was a later settlement. Brownsville owed its popularity in part to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1888. Because somehow Brooklyn became much more accessible with the bridge. And then later on, there was a second bridge that was built. It was overwhelmingly Jewish at the turn of the 20th century, about like my neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, which was pretty much the same. Some of those were people who had left the Lower east side, the tenements of the Lower east side, for the tenements of Brownsville. Others were people who came directly from Europe, but they were mostly Russian and Eastern European Jew Jewish families. They were relatively poor, and a large percentage of them were. Some were more Orthodox, I guess, than you could say, than perhaps the German Jews who had come earlier were living uptown in Manhattan. So that's sort of the group. They were mostly laborers. They didn't make a lot of money. Probably a typical household, the breadwinner maybe made 10 or $12 a week. That's really all. Most of the women did not work outside the house, but they had side gigs that also brought in money. But it was, I mean, to overgeneralize. But it was generally the men that were out working in the working world and the women who were raising families.

[B]

So now that we understand the world they inhabited, tell us a little bit about the boycott in broad strokes. What happened and what caused it.

[C]

What, what caused it was a particular principle. And it was. He was in P.S. 144, he was Christian. And in the, in the winter, In December of 1905, before the Christmas celebrations. And there were celebrations of essentially of Christmas in the public schools. Generally speaking, the Christmas pageant was on the 24th of December, right before what they used to call Christmas vacation when I was a kid, which we now refer to as winter vacation. And so he was. He had an assembly before him of almost all Jewish kids, not all, but most them. And he, he went off the reservation. He was reading from a book that was not an official approved book of the, of the Board of Education. And it had quotes from Old and New Testament. And he basically told the children that in this time of. Of Christmas that he wanted them all to be more like Jesus Christ. And he went on to explain that Jesus forgives all but the people who don't believe in him. He considers them hypocrites. And so he urged them all to. To be like. Be more like Jesus. Well, that didn't sit well with a lot of the Jewish kids. But one in particular, Gussie Herber, went home and told her father about it. He was a fairly prominent Jewish lawyer in New York and he knew just food to contact about this. He found that he. He had a friend by the name of Albert Lucas who worked for the Orthodox Union, which itself had just really been formed a few years earlier, was late 19th century. And Lucas, who, who had a separate income as an importer of specialty groceries, but basically spent most of his time and most of his energy working for the Orthodox Union. His role in life, his job in life was to make the world safe for Jewish people to live Jewish lives. And he actually was expecting. Lucas had just been fighting a rear guard action against what they called the settlement houses in the Lower east side. And the settlement houses were mostly set up by Christian missionaries. And they were. They did good things. They provided after school activities and food sometimes and job training and English language lessons to the immigrants to help acculturate them and americanize them. But several of them also made no bones about the fact that they intended to try to convert the jewish kids to christianity. And Lucas found that unacceptable. He was fighting with them when this happened in brownsville, and he recognized this also, probably not entirely accurately, but basically saw in what principal harding had done as an effort, parallel to what the settlement houses were doing, to try to recruit Jewish children to Christianity. And he thought that the board of education was behind this, and that's really what set this off.

[B]

And so keep taking us through the story. What happens next?

[C]

So what happens next is a petition circulates in brownsville to get rid of principal harda because he was essentially trying to convert jewish kids. And the petition is lodged with what you might call the local board of education. New york had an overall board of education in Manhattan that was in charge of the entire city of greater new York, but there were local boards as well that were subordinate to it, that were in charge of just certain districts. And so the petition went to the one that was in charge of brownsville, and after putting it off and putting it off and hoping that the whole thing would go away, they finally decided to hold a hearing on it. And it was essentially like a trial of frank Harding. He testified, the children testified, Other teachers testified, and they decided that they really didn't think there was enough evidence against Harding, that maybe the children had misheard him. And harding also denied him what he had clearly done. And so they recommended no action against Harding. But they were not the final authority that went to the board of education. And the board of education ultimately slapped Harding on the wrist for having done what he did, because it was against the rules, but it was. They didn't really do much else. And at that point, Lucas realized that the board had really punted on the important issue. And the important issue, as far as he was concerned, was what religion is acceptable in the public school school. They had Christmas trees. Were they acceptable? They had pictures of Jesus and the madonna posted in some of the classrooms. Were those excellent? What about Christmas carols? What about Christmas pageants? What about vivo? And he essentially asked the board for more clarification on what was and was not acceptable, so that nothing like the harding incident would happen again. And this really was the meat of the book, was was the board took about a year to ruminate about this. And the truth was, they were between a rock and a hard place. The jews had the law on their side. The state of constitution of state of new York prohibited religion in the schools. The charter of the city of New York did, and even the rules of the board of education did. But that wasn't necessarily what was going to solve what was going to adjudicate the issue, because they knew that if they ruled in favor of the Jews and they kicked Christmas out of the public schools, that they would be held to pay with the gentiles, and similarly, that if they didn't do anything, that the Jews were going to be unsatisfied, they were going to make trouble. So they did what deliberative boards throughout history have done when they're between a rock and a hard place. They did absolutely nothing. And now we are close to Christmas 1906. This whole thing has gone up about a year. And Lucas & Co. Said, well, you know, if you're going to have Christmas exercises this year, we would like the Jewish kids to be excused. And nothing was done on that. And when the children were all told to dress in their finest clothing for December 24th because there were going to be Christmas pageants in the schools, that was the straw that broke the camel's back for Lucas and for the orthodox union and the Jew. The. The Yiddish newspapers called for a boycott if they weren't going to. They felt that they had done everything by the book. They had done the appeal the way the appeal should have been done. They got no satisfaction, really, with harding. But if this was going to be the position of the board essentially to not rule on the issues that they felt they had a right to have a ruling on and continue to do what they had done before and essentially allow another repeat of the repeat of the Harding extent, that was a bridge too far. And so they called for a boycott on December 24. They wanted to keep their kids home as a way to signal the board of education that they were serious and that they had some.

[B]

Clout. Now, one of the questions you raise in the book is how effective the boycott was and how many people actually really listened. I'm curious if you can talk to.

[C]

That. It was not entirely effective. And frankly, how effective it was really depended on which newspaper report you read. The New York times said something like 25,000, 30,000 kids on the lower east side were kept home, which wasn't probably less than 50%, but the Yiddish paper said it was much higher than that and that there were certain schools that were completely empty on the lower east side. And then in Brooklyn, the figure was probably closer to 50 or 75% of the kids stayed home. The irony was that some of the schools didn't really need boycott that the. The principals had already gotten the message that the Jewish kids were going to be pretty unhappy with anything that goes as religious in the celebrations. Some of the schools had no Christmas celebrations at all, and other ones, the principals had worked hard to keep anything overtly religious and sacred out of the celebration. But nonetheless, it happened, and it was certainly large enough that the board could not help but remark on it and realize that they had a problem and. Which was Lucas's proud.

[B]

Goal. So how would you characterize what came from this. You know, what. What changes happened because of the.

[C]

Boycott? Well, what immediately happened, very shortly after, I think it was January, February of the following year, is the board is the. The Committee on Elementary Education. The board finally offered up some. Some guidelines with what was and was not going to be allowable. And the Jews kind of got half of what they were looking for. The. The board explicitly prohibited sacred hymns. You couldn't really sing of it, singing anything with religious content to it. So presumably, deck the halls with bows of holly might be okay, but a little town of Bethlehem would not. So they were going to get the religion out of the hymns. And the other thing they agreed on was that it was not appropriate to ask Jewish kids to write compositions about Crispus and about Jesus. And they came to this conclusion essentially after they had testimony from the Jewish community, this committee. Lucas had been pushing for that, and they listened to. And in fact, he brought in a whole panel of important Jews in the New York area, including a lot of rabbis. Interestingly enough, Reform and Orthodox rabbis were on this panel. And I should say parenthetically, that Lucas had no use whatsoever for the Reform move. In fact, the part of the charter of the Orthodox Union was to oppose Reform Judaism. But this was an area where, with a few minor exceptions, the Reform committee and the community and the Orthodox community really saw eye to eye. There was no reason for either of them to think that it was appropriate to have Christianity in the public schools. There were a couple of Reform rabbis who thought that the Jews were making. That Lucas was making a mountain out of a molehill, that this was not terribly damaging to the Jewish community and that maybe this was not a smart move to make a big issue out of this. But by and large, the communities themselves were very much for it. So they got something what they wanted. They didn't get a ban on religious iconography. They didn't get a ban on Christmas trees, but they got sah. And had it. Had it stayed like that, I think it probably would have ended the whole dispute, because there was at least some sort of progress that had been made by the boy. But it didn't stay like. What happened was the by by the time Christmas came around and people realized that there had been a significant change and that religious hymns would not be allowed in the public schools, essentially it engendered a tremendous anti Semitic backlash. And we know this from just reading the letters to the editor in the mainstream newspapers. Really ugly comments. For example, the Jews shouldn't be making waves. They should be glad that they're not in Russia and suffering from pogroms. They have been allowed into the United States by the goodness of Christian hearts and they have no business attacking the status quo. And they should just buckle under, knuckle under, excuse me. Another one was if the Jewish. If parents don't want their kids to sing Christmas Cows, they should just keep them home that day. But there was this sense that it was a Hebrew attack on Christmas, which it was. Nobody goes against Christmas. They were simply against government force feeding religion in the public schools. But they didn't prevail in that interpretation of the art. The overall impression in New York was that the Jews were what were fighting at Christmas and it was a silly move for them to do. And that they. And my favorite, which is something we hear whenever Jews push for their rights, was that if you do this, there will be more anti Semitism directed in your direction and you will have only your stilts, which we still hear today. And actually this argument came not just from gentiles, but also within the Jewish community. Always shows.

[D]

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[E]

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[C]

You and.

[A]

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[B]

Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching.

[A]

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[C]

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[B]

Massachusetts. Yeah, I want to pursue that because you alluded to the fact that you know, on the surface reform and orthodox leaders were aligned, but for, for them the, let's call it the pragmatic effect of fighting this was the thing that they disagreed about. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit more toward.

[C]

That. And when it was all over, essentially when the, I haven't gotten to the point where the board rescinded, more or less rescinded the ban on religious Christmas carols, but after that happened especially the Jews had relatively little to show for the battle. There really had been very, very little achievements. And yet there's this outpouring of anti Semitism. And so some of those reform leaders who had opposed this from the beginning pointed fingers at Lucas and said, you see, this was not a battle worth fighting. If you were smarter and maybe more acculturated and if, maybe if somebody like Lewis Marshall, who was a German Jewish attorney had been involved, you wouldn't have launched such a ham handed effort that failed so badly. So there were recrimination and some of them came from a few people who had predicted that this was not a good move. But others just piled on after, after there was no.

[B]

Victory. So take us to the end of the story. So it gets reversed, then what.

[C]

Happens? Well, it gets reversed. The board behaved really very badly. They had very clearly stated that there would be no religious hymns in the school. But once some of the staff in the Board of Education started to talk about publicly to the textbook manufacturers and say, look, you need to change your textbooks or we can't buy. But once that got out, it was a huge hue and pride that really led the whole anti Semitic barrage. And as a result the board basically denied that it had done what it had done and it was this, it, it, the only thing it could think of to do with this horrible hot potato was to dump it right back in the lap of the principals where it had started in the first place and then wash their hands of it and walk away. And that's what they did. And that really was the status quo in New York until the middle of this 20th century, the principles decided and of course the middle of the 20th century. And this book does actually trace the Christmas dispute to the present day with, with various stops along the way, various decades. The 50s were the most interesting one because the 50s, the 50s were the time, if you think about it, this was. America was fighting what they thought was godless communism. And that's when they inserted the words under God in the Pledge of Allegiance. And they really began to believe that part of the problem in the United States was that they weren't getting any more moral education in the public schools and that so they. They really needed more religion in the public schools. This is when the Christian nationalist movement began to really take off. They felt they needed more religion, not less religion in the public schools. And they trying to figure out all sorts of ways to deal with it, including this thing called released time, which was initially, it was some religious education for a couple. Little bit of the school day, one day a week. But that was. That wasn't appropriate because they were using school premises. So they gave the kids a couple of hours off on Wednesday afternoons to go and worship if they wanted to worship. So it was. It was another bite at the apple that the church has got. And some of the rabbis were for this as well. So they said it was that. But they were here in the 1950s when. And even the New York Board of Regents writes its own prayer in order to. And it's a single line. It's intended to offend no one. It certainly wasn't offensive to Jews. This one line prayer didn't mention Jesus or anything. But that prayer was the centerpiece of the case that was raised that came to the Supreme Court where it banned school prayer entirely. It was the Regent's Prayer and specifically somebody in New Hyde Park, New York who complained about it. And then right after that was the banning of Bible reading came, I think, the following year or something like that. And, and I remember it because I was a student in the 50s and, and I learned how to pray in public schools and I learned the, the. The Lord's Prayer, which is right out of the New Testament. And all of a sudden we weren't doing any of that. And so that really changed things. But if you sort of fast forward it to the present day, I found that the muscle behind Lucas's battle was entirely lacking. You do not find the major Jewish organizations pushing the banned Christmas in the public schools anymore. You did for a while in the 50s. There were, there were some, some, you know, advice given to, To Jewish communities if they, if they had problems in their communities with the Christmas pageants, how they should handle it. Much more walking on eggshells than it had been in Lucas day. But if you fast forward to today, if you look at the websites of the major Jewish organizations, and none of them are really saying, let's get rid of Christmas in the public schools. What they are saying is if they're going to be holiday parties and holiday pageants in the public schools, here are the things to avoid so you can don't run afoul of the law. And as I said in the book, I think the reason for that is there are several reasons for that. I think that as we look at it today, much has changed. Christianity has changed. There are many fewer Christians in the United States, despite the fact that some Christians are far more vocal than they were. There are many fewer Jews and many few who are religious Jews, especially in the United States. A large percentage of Jews consider themselves to be ethnically Jewish, but not particularly particularly religious. Christmas itself has changed very relatively few, a relatively small percentage of Americans think of it as the birth of the Savior. It's much more about Santa Claus and presents and Christmas trees and shopping malls. And so it's not as much of a threat to a Jewish community that is itself not as orthodox as it was. And I think that essentially what the Jewish organizations have done is they have moved on to what they believe to be more winnable battles against Christian nationalism. But this one was never going to go anywhere because if you're, if you're pushing for minority rights, you're probably not going to get much satisfaction from elected officials. You're going to have to go to the forts and the courts did what they were going to do in the 50s. And if you're watching now, watch for school prayer to come back. Because with the Supreme Court, anything like.

[B]

That. Well, I want to actually return to school prayer for a second because I actually think it's one of the tenets of Chabad is that there should be school prayer now, that prayer should be moments of silence. It should allow people to say whatever prayers they want to say. But it's a return to kind of religious sensibility. And it seems actually that the Jewish world is not united anymore in the kind of separation of church and state fight that they used to.

[C]

Have. Well, remember though that there's nothing that bars private prayer in the public school today. It's absolutely legal for a kid to say a prayer on his own time in his own way. What is illegal is state sponsored prayer. What is illegal is something that has the imprimatur of the board of education or the government on a particular form of prayer. Because what the Constitution says, the establishment clause and the Constitution says is that the government not only can't establish a religion it shouldn't favor one over the other or favor religion over non religion. That's really what it's about. Interestingly enough, one point I didn't make earlier was that the establishment was of the Constitution was in no way relevant in 1906 because the bill of Rights was meant to restrict the authority of the federal government. It was not binding on the states. And individual amendments were not found to be binding on the states until well into the 20th century. And the First Amendment was one of the bonds that came later. And so in 1906, it was not a federal problem at all to be saying prayers in the public schools. It is.

[B]

Today. So returning back to 1905, 1906, what were the biggest problems that Jews had about the public schools? Was it Bible? Was it prayer? Was it doctrine? Was it Christmas? I know these are all connected, right? But what seemed to be the things that was keeping the Jewish community up that caused them to have to push.

[C]

Back? Well, what set this one off was Christmas. And it was Christmas in particular because Christmas was being seen as a vector for conversion of Jewish kids. That really was what 1905, 1906 was about. Bible reading did come up, especially since Frank Harding read from the New Testament as well as the Old Testament, which was not acceptable to the Jews. Interestingly enough, before the Jews showed up on the scene, this was a Catholic Protestant scrimmage. The schools were basically Protestant in orientation because that's when they were set up. Everybody was Protestant. Once the Catholics started coming in large numbers in the middle of the century, they started objecting because the King James Bible is not their Bible. Their Bible, the Douay Rheims Bible has different books and different interpretations and different translations. And they try to lobby for a while to get their Bible accepted as an alternative. But eventually the Catholic and there have always been Catholic at the public schools. They're always will. But what the powers that be decided was that the public schools were irredeemably Protestant. And they got to the point where they didn't want change in the public schools. All they wanted was public money for the parochial schools that they were busy setting up Catholic schools. The Jews, on the other hand, they loved the public schools. The public schools were ways to Americanize their kids. They were a quick path to acculturation. They taught English, they were free. There was nothing not to like about them. All they wanted was for religion to be out of the pitch. But I think at this point it was really mostly Christmas. And with Christmas went hymns and baby Jesus and the manger and all that sort of the iconography a little bit less about the Bible. The Bible reading sort of came later, I think, as a major concern.

[B]

Concern. So what do you think it was about the schools that caught fire in the way that it did? You could imagine a world, for example, where the thing that really set them off was a creche in front of town hall. Why was the schools the thing that really elicited so much passion for so many.

[C]

People? What really set this apart, I think, was the sense that being American had been conflated with being Christian. There was no reason for Protestants ever to doubt that earlier on in the history of the United States because they were in charge. They were really the only ones who had a vote. But by the time the Catholics showed up and then the Jews showed up after that, it was different. And Protestantism wasn't synonymous with Americanism anymore. And a lot of people didn't want it to be. But you saw this in loca parenthesis. What you saw was the schools acting more in what they thought, what they believe were best, in the best interest of the students. And it wasn't always what the parents thought. And there's actually a chapter in the book about the. The. The doctors who came into the. To the. To the schools to essentially operate on children's adenoids. The adenoids were believed to actually, believe it or not, cause retardation and various other things. And it was a very simple operation, snip them out. And the schools, to their credit, they did always send a note home to the parents that said, this is going to happen tomorrow. Your kid's going to have this surgery, just so you know about it. But they didn't write them in Yiddish. They wrote them in English. A lot of the parents didn't know what was happening, but the schools felt that it was their responsibility. If they were going to require element to school public schooling, then they had to protect the kids who were in the public schools. And if this was a contagious disease or something like that, they. It was their job to deal with it. And they felt they knew better than the immigrant parents, which is, I think, why a large part of this.

[B]

Problem. So why do you think the great Christmas boycott of 1906 has a little bit been lost to history? Right. You were recovering something that, you know, we don't learn about in history classes in rabbinical school. And, you know, it's not. It's, you know, every Jew knows what the Triangle shirtwaist factory is not every Jew knows what the great Christmas boycott of 19 oh, 6 is why do you think that.

[C]

Is? And would you say they know about the great kosher meat.

[B]

Boycott? You know, I had heard that before more than I had heard of.

[C]

This or the chief rabbi's funeral that probably you did learn in rabbinical school. All of these things that I picked up were fairly, fairly small incidents that were forgotten. The kosher meat boycott by the 1920s, I couldn't find any more references in the, the newspapers to it until the 1970s when a Jewish scholar, Dr. Paula Eiman, who was up at Yale, rescued it from the history book and then began to theorize about what it meant for Jewish consumers and for their confidence that they had the ability to change their environment. So I think the same thing is true to really all three of those things that I've written about. They were over in a couple of months. They weren't remembered as such. But I would argue that the tactics that they use and the confidence that they built up in Jews, that they had the ability to change their environment, that was remembered. So when you saw some of the struggles in the 1960s and also even earlier the 60s, when you saw push for suffrage and things like that, you were looking at tactics that had been honed earlier on in some of these things. How do you organize a community in spite? And how is it different from organizing a workforce, for example? And it was the going around to the tenements and knocking on the doors and standing on the soapboxes and all that kind of stuff that really had been pioneered in this era that became tools that were used later on in other.

[B]

Struggles. Now, one of the other things that you can draw a parallel at least with this, and let's say the fight for suffrage is the role of women. And your book does a really good job of not just telling men's stories, but telling women's stories during this time. Can you speak a little bit to.

[C]

That? Actually, this isn't the book in which women really star his particular role. The women star in the earlier book, the Great Kosher Meat War, that was a female led protest. If you go back to that era, again with the risk of overgeneralization, mostly it was the women who were in charge of the households. They got the pay envelope at the end of the week from their husbands, and it was their job to figure out how they were going to stretch the money to feed their families and pay the rent and all that sort of. And when the price of kosher meat started to go up precipitously, it was the women who were first aware of it. It was the women who decided that they had to do something about it and they took to the streets and they, they launched a boycott to in order to get the price of meat down. And in that case, there were several women who really were took, starring gold. And I chronicle several of them in the book, what their backgrounds were, what they might have learned in the old country before they came to the United States. They were pretty savvy about how to do this for people who had never really participated in the economy before. But I didn't see so much about women in this book except for the Adenoids issue where it was the women who were knocking on the doors of the schools trying to get their kids out because they were afraid your throats were already.

[B]

Cut. So when you think about this book, what do you hope your readers, especially educators, policymakers, take away from this.

[C]

Story? Well, I guess what's timely about this book is that we're still fighting this battle. There was a whole chapter in the book about that took place outside of New York, but looked at this dispute in other places and it wasn't always the Jews who were upset about religion in the schools. Sometimes it was the atheists. And it was a tremendous hodgepodge around the country as to how they were going to deal with this, whether it was in different states, different and different states. Supreme Courts ruled completely differently on this and we're still in the middle of that. We still have a hodgepodge of systems. If you think that there isn't any more Christmas celebrations in the public schools in the United States, and I've got some, some real estate in Gaza that I'd like to sell you because it does go on and it goes on mostly in areas where there aren't people to complain about. So we still have a problem and it's a bigger problem today because of the move toward Christian nationalism. The Supreme Court may well listen to the may well hear the case of the Ten Commandments being posted in public school classrooms. They already decided this in my Life podcast and they said it was illegal, but the Supreme Court may well reconsider it. They also they decided a case a few years ago about a football coach who wanted to say prayers on the 50 yard line with his team. And the court found that it was protected speech. The Warren Court would never have found that in the 1950s. So this is the fact that this issue is still a hot burner issue in the United States today, 120 something years after the the Christmas boycott in New York suggests to me that it's probably not going to get solved if my lifetime. That what happens is the pendulum swings this way, it swings that way. And no, no solution is ever a permanent one. It just keeps.

[B]

Moving. So tell us what's next for you. What, what project are you working on or thinking.

[C]

About? Well, I've got one that I don't really want to announce yet because we don't have a published report. It may never see the light of day. But having written three books about the Lower east side and the the Russian Jews from whom I have descended, this one is a little bit more about the uptown Jews, the German Jews who came earlier. They may have started out on the Lower east side, but by the by the middle, by the 19th, end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th, a lot of them were living high on the hog midtown. They had started their own synagogues, many of which were Reformed synagogues. They recognized that they were of a people with the Lower east side Jews, but they didn't like them very much and they were kind of embarrassed by them. Actually, I think it's very interesting. The relationship between these two Jewish communities is very interesting because the German Jews were and to a certain extent the Sephardim, but mostly the German Jews, they were very helpful on the Lower east side. They put a lot of money into the Lower east side to try to Americanize and help the poor among the Russian and the Eastern European Jews. But they also did it for selfish reasons, because these folks who came in and weren't acculturated and spoke Yiddish and didn't seem like they wanted to change much about their lifestyle just because they were living in America, they were a colossal embarrassment with the German Jews who had already achieved a certain acceptance among the Gentiles. And look at it from the other perspective. The Russian Jews went up town and they walked into a Reformed synagogue and they saw men and women sitting together in no qui pote and organs, and they thought they were in a church. So the relationship, I think, has been very interesting. But this next book, if it does see the light of day, is going to concentrate a lot more on what the German Jews were.

[B]

Doing. Well, as a Reformed rabbi, I look forward to reading it. So again, I've been here speaking with Scott D. Seligman, author of the Great Christmas boycott of 1906, anti Semitism and the Battle Over Christianity and the Public Schools. I'm your host, Rabbi Mark Katz, author of Yohanan's Gamble, and I look forward to speaking with.