On July 30, 1902, tens of thousands of mourners lined the streets of New York’s Lower East Side to bid farewell to the city’s chief rabbi, the eminent Talmudist Jacob Joseph. All went well until the procession crossed Sheriff Street, where the six-story R. Hoe and Company printing press factory towered over the intersection. Without warning, scraps of steel, iron bolts, and scalding water rained down and injured hundreds of mourners, courtesy of antisemitic factory workers. The police compounded the attack when they arrived on the scene; under orders from the inspector in charge, who made no effort to distinguish aggressors from victims, officers began beating up Jews, injuring dozens.To the Yiddish-language daily Forverts (Forward), the bloody attack on Jews was not unlike those that many Russian Jews remembered bitterly from the old country. But this was America, not Russia, and the Jewish community wasn’t going to stand for such treatment. Fed up with being persecuted, New York’s Jews, whose numbers and political influence had been growing, set a pattern for the future by deftly pursuing justice for the victims. They forced trials and disciplinary hearings, accelerated retirements and transfers within the corrupt police department, and engineered the resignation of the police commissioner. Scott D. Seligman’s The Chief Rabbi's Funeral (U Nebraska Press, 2024) is the first book-length account of this event and its aftermath. Scott D. Seligman is a national award-winning historian and biographer with a special interest in the history of hyphenated Americans. He holds an undergraduate degree in American history from Princeton University and a master’s degree from Harvard University. Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Mentioned in the podcast: Leonard Bloom, “A Successful Jewish Boycott of the New York City Public Schools –Christmas 1906,” American Jewish History 70 (December 1980): 180-188. Mary Cummings, Saving Sin City: William Travers Jerome, Stanford White, And The Original Crime Of The Century (Pegasus Books, 2019). Paula E. Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” American Jewish History 70, no. 1 (1980): 91–105. Pamela S. Nadell, Antisemitism, an American Tradition (W.W. Norton & Company, 2025). Scott D. Seligman, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City (Potomac Books, 2020). Scott D. Seligman, The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle over Christianity in the Public Schools (Potomac Books, 2025). Matthew M. Silver, Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America: A Biography (Syracuse University Press, 2013). Historical Jewish Press American Newspapers Collection (Chronicling America)
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