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The Lower East Side anti-Jewish riot that changed the way Jews do politics

4 25
05.01.2025

You might be forgiven for never having heard of the worst anti-Jewish riot in American history. It happened on the Lower East Side over a century ago, and largely slipped from history. Jewish memory was overloaded with subsequent calamities, from Kishinev and Auschwitz to Pittsburgh and Oct. 7.

But as Scott Seligman argues in his new book, “The Chief Rabbi’s Funeral,” the mob attack on July 30, 1902, that left 196 Jewish mourners beaten and bloodied also left a legacy of Jewish political activism that remains a model for today. The attack on the funeral procession of Rabbi Jacob Joseph led a fractious Jewish community to organize, seeking justice for the victims and punishment for the perpetrators.

“The lesson of the 1902 riot is that when antisemitism crosses the line and it morphs into violence and intimidation against Jews, then it needs to be punished, and our best response is to unify and to organize,” Seligman, a historian based in Washington, D.C., told me this week. “Which is what they did, using whatever political power and influence they had.”

Seligman and I last spoke in 2020, after the publication of his book “The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902,” which formed the germ of his latest book. Actually, he told me, an article I wrote about the earlier book, focusing on the rabbi whose funeral inspired the riot the same year, inspired Seligman to dig deeper into that part of the story.

Joseph was a Vilna Talmud scholar who was brought to New York in 1888 to serve as a sort of chief rabbi to the city’s teeming Jewish community (and rationalize its corrupt and unreliable kosher meat business). It turned out to be easier to merge all of New York’s boroughs into a single municipality than get the Jews to agree on a chief rabbi. By 1895 Joseph was no longer being paid by the groups........

© The Jewish Week


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