When Jews really did wage a 'war on Christmas'

"On a frigid winter's day in 1906, tens of thousands of Jewish parents in New York's Lower East Side and Brooklyn kept their children home from school. It wasn't a snow day, but a protest: Activists and the Yiddish press had called for a boycott of the Christmas assemblies and pageants that they knew Jewish children would be obliged to attend on the day before the holiday."

""As soon as I stumbled on the story, I knew there'd be a book," said Seligman, who grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1960s, when schoolchildren were still made to recite the Lord's Prayer. "I was that kid in public school who always wondered why we were praying like Christians, and even why Christmas was a legal holiday.""

"The book is the third installment in what's become a trilogy about Jews engaged in mass action during the first part of the 20th century. " The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902" (2020) recalled a successful consumer uprising led by Lower East Side Jewish women fed up with the high cost of beef. In " The Chief Rabbi's Funeral " (2024), Seligman explored how a vicious anti-Jewish riot on the Lower East Side led the city's fractious Jewish co"

In 1906 tens of thousands of Jewish parents in New York's Lower East Side and Brooklyn kept their children home from school to protest obligatory attendance at Christmas assemblies and pageants. Activists and the Yiddish press organized and promoted the boycott. Mainstream newspapers characterized the action variously as a defense of religious freedom or as an attack on Christian traditions. The local dispute escalated into a broader test case over religion in public schools and the boundary between church and state. The episode echoes later controversies about school prayer and religious accommodation in public education.

Read at The Forward