1902 New York riot that sparked Jewish-American activism
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ASPartOfMe
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06 Jan 2025, 5:36 am
The Lower East Side anti-Jewish riot that changed the way Jews do politics
Quote:
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 October 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.
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 who brought him over, and his authority was recognized only by a handful of downtown Orthodox congregations. Before suffering a stroke in 1898, he worked as a hired kosher supervisor for some wholesale butchers.
When he died in 1902 at the age of 62, a penitent Lower East Side decided to give him in death the respect that had eluded him in life. Hundreds of thousands of mourners joined his funeral procession, which wound past neighborhoods in lower Manhattan before his body was put on a ferry for burial in Brooklyn.
The trouble begins0
The trouble began when the procession passed by the R. Hoe printing press factory at Grand and Sheriff Streets. Workers there hurled debris at the mourners and sprayed them with water hoses. The crowd fought back as best it could, throwing projectiles back at the factory and breaking windows.
What happened next would be a watershed in Jewish political and communal activism for a community riven by internal divisions: A day after the violence, various leaders formed the East Side Vigilance League to demand a fair investigation and punishment for the offending officers.
At the same time, Jewish lawyers rushed to the courts to defend Jews unfairly singled out in the violence. “They were uptown and downtown,” Selgiman said of the lawyers. “They were Democrat and Republican. They were Reform, and they were Orthodox.”
Over the next few months, the calls for justice would be surprisingly and unprecedentedly effective. Until then, Jews had little recourse against the largely Irish police who disdained them. But NYC Mayor Seth Low, narrowly elected on a reform platform aimed at the corrupt Democratic machine known as Tammany Hall, was sympathetic to the Jews who helped turn out the vote.
By the time police arrived, the clashes had largely ended, but, taking their cue from the factory owner and a commander who instructed police — according to a newspaper account — to “club the life out of them,” the cops began beating Jewish mourners. No Jews died in the assault, but many were arrested and hauled before the Essex Market Police court.
Low named a blue-ribbon committee to conduct an independent review, which ultimately exonerated the Jews and found the police negligent in the violence.
“This was the first, as far as I can tell, semi-successful attempt [by New York’s Jews] to get justice,” said Seligman. “A lot of people didn’t get seriously punished for this, but there were transfers out of the department. There were resignations in the department. They did get something for their efforts.”
The East Side Vigilance League didn’t last long (such committees “never lasted beyond the problem,” said Seligman), but it set a precedent. In 1908, after a police commissioner named Theodore Bingham used bogus statistics to claim Jews were responsible for half of the city’s crime, Reform Rabbi Judah Magnes helped establish the New York Kehillah, a federation of Jewish self-defense organizations (Bingham withdrew his statement).
The Kehillah lasted until 1922, but other national organizations, including the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, proved more durable. Jews learned the art of making their concerns known to ambitious politicians. The 1913 lynching in Georgia of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank led to the establishment of the Anti-Defamation League, still the most important of the groups helping to create a strategy for fighting antisemitism.
A century and more after the funeral riot, unity remains illusory. For decades, Israel proved a reliable cause around which to rally Jews while antisemitism receded into the background. That formula has flipped, with antisemitism once again the one communal concern on which Jews can approach something looking like consensus.
But even there, huge cracks are apparent: A year of campus activism has divided as well as united Jews, and the ADL faces competitors who think its approach to antisemitism is variously too soft on the left or too beholden to the right.
Ironically, one of the most polarizing debates in Jewish life in recent years involved the Black Lives Matter movement, which aimed to address the kind of police misconduct to which Jews were subject in the early 20th century. When one of the main BLM groups took up the Palestinian cause, it further divided Jewish groups and power brokers.
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.
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 who brought him over, and his authority was recognized only by a handful of downtown Orthodox congregations. Before suffering a stroke in 1898, he worked as a hired kosher supervisor for some wholesale butchers.
When he died in 1902 at the age of 62, a penitent Lower East Side decided to give him in death the respect that had eluded him in life. Hundreds of thousands of mourners joined his funeral procession, which wound past neighborhoods in lower Manhattan before his body was put on a ferry for burial in Brooklyn.
The trouble begins0
The trouble began when the procession passed by the R. Hoe printing press factory at Grand and Sheriff Streets. Workers there hurled debris at the mourners and sprayed them with water hoses. The crowd fought back as best it could, throwing projectiles back at the factory and breaking windows.
What happened next would be a watershed in Jewish political and communal activism for a community riven by internal divisions: A day after the violence, various leaders formed the East Side Vigilance League to demand a fair investigation and punishment for the offending officers.
At the same time, Jewish lawyers rushed to the courts to defend Jews unfairly singled out in the violence. “They were uptown and downtown,” Selgiman said of the lawyers. “They were Democrat and Republican. They were Reform, and they were Orthodox.”
Over the next few months, the calls for justice would be surprisingly and unprecedentedly effective. Until then, Jews had little recourse against the largely Irish police who disdained them. But NYC Mayor Seth Low, narrowly elected on a reform platform aimed at the corrupt Democratic machine known as Tammany Hall, was sympathetic to the Jews who helped turn out the vote.
By the time police arrived, the clashes had largely ended, but, taking their cue from the factory owner and a commander who instructed police — according to a newspaper account — to “club the life out of them,” the cops began beating Jewish mourners. No Jews died in the assault, but many were arrested and hauled before the Essex Market Police court.
Low named a blue-ribbon committee to conduct an independent review, which ultimately exonerated the Jews and found the police negligent in the violence.
“This was the first, as far as I can tell, semi-successful attempt [by New York’s Jews] to get justice,” said Seligman. “A lot of people didn’t get seriously punished for this, but there were transfers out of the department. There were resignations in the department. They did get something for their efforts.”
The East Side Vigilance League didn’t last long (such committees “never lasted beyond the problem,” said Seligman), but it set a precedent. In 1908, after a police commissioner named Theodore Bingham used bogus statistics to claim Jews were responsible for half of the city’s crime, Reform Rabbi Judah Magnes helped establish the New York Kehillah, a federation of Jewish self-defense organizations (Bingham withdrew his statement).
The Kehillah lasted until 1922, but other national organizations, including the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, proved more durable. Jews learned the art of making their concerns known to ambitious politicians. The 1913 lynching in Georgia of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank led to the establishment of the Anti-Defamation League, still the most important of the groups helping to create a strategy for fighting antisemitism.
A century and more after the funeral riot, unity remains illusory. For decades, Israel proved a reliable cause around which to rally Jews while antisemitism receded into the background. That formula has flipped, with antisemitism once again the one communal concern on which Jews can approach something looking like consensus.
But even there, huge cracks are apparent: A year of campus activism has divided as well as united Jews, and the ADL faces competitors who think its approach to antisemitism is variously too soft on the left or too beholden to the right.
Ironically, one of the most polarizing debates in Jewish life in recent years involved the Black Lives Matter movement, which aimed to address the kind of police misconduct to which Jews were subject in the early 20th century. When one of the main BLM groups took up the Palestinian cause, it further divided Jewish groups and power brokers.
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Gentleman Argentum
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Today, 4:35 am
ASPartOfMe wrote:
The Lower East Side anti-Jewish riot that changed the way Jews do politics
Quote:
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 October 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.
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 who brought him over, and his authority was recognized only by a handful of downtown Orthodox congregations. Before suffering a stroke in 1898, he worked as a hired kosher supervisor for some wholesale butchers.
When he died in 1902 at the age of 62, a penitent Lower East Side decided to give him in death the respect that had eluded him in life. Hundreds of thousands of mourners joined his funeral procession, which wound past neighborhoods in lower Manhattan before his body was put on a ferry for burial in Brooklyn.
The trouble begins0
The trouble began when the procession passed by the R. Hoe printing press factory at Grand and Sheriff Streets. Workers there hurled debris at the mourners and sprayed them with water hoses. The crowd fought back as best it could, throwing projectiles back at the factory and breaking windows.
What happened next would be a watershed in Jewish political and communal activism for a community riven by internal divisions: A day after the violence, various leaders formed the East Side Vigilance League to demand a fair investigation and punishment for the offending officers.
At the same time, Jewish lawyers rushed to the courts to defend Jews unfairly singled out in the violence. “They were uptown and downtown,” Selgiman said of the lawyers. “They were Democrat and Republican. They were Reform, and they were Orthodox.”
Over the next few months, the calls for justice would be surprisingly and unprecedentedly effective. Until then, Jews had little recourse against the largely Irish police who disdained them. But NYC Mayor Seth Low, narrowly elected on a reform platform aimed at the corrupt Democratic machine known as Tammany Hall, was sympathetic to the Jews who helped turn out the vote.
By the time police arrived, the clashes had largely ended, but, taking their cue from the factory owner and a commander who instructed police — according to a newspaper account — to “club the life out of them,” the cops began beating Jewish mourners. No Jews died in the assault, but many were arrested and hauled before the Essex Market Police court.
Low named a blue-ribbon committee to conduct an independent review, which ultimately exonerated the Jews and found the police negligent in the violence.
“This was the first, as far as I can tell, semi-successful attempt [by New York’s Jews] to get justice,” said Seligman. “A lot of people didn’t get seriously punished for this, but there were transfers out of the department. There were resignations in the department. They did get something for their efforts.”
The East Side Vigilance League didn’t last long (such committees “never lasted beyond the problem,” said Seligman), but it set a precedent. In 1908, after a police commissioner named Theodore Bingham used bogus statistics to claim Jews were responsible for half of the city’s crime, Reform Rabbi Judah Magnes helped establish the New York Kehillah, a federation of Jewish self-defense organizations (Bingham withdrew his statement).
The Kehillah lasted until 1922, but other national organizations, including the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, proved more durable. Jews learned the art of making their concerns known to ambitious politicians. The 1913 lynching in Georgia of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank led to the establishment of the Anti-Defamation League, still the most important of the groups helping to create a strategy for fighting antisemitism.
A century and more after the funeral riot, unity remains illusory. For decades, Israel proved a reliable cause around which to rally Jews while antisemitism receded into the background. That formula has flipped, with antisemitism once again the one communal concern on which Jews can approach something looking like consensus.
But even there, huge cracks are apparent: A year of campus activism has divided as well as united Jews, and the ADL faces competitors who think its approach to antisemitism is variously too soft on the left or too beholden to the right.
Ironically, one of the most polarizing debates in Jewish life in recent years involved the Black Lives Matter movement, which aimed to address the kind of police misconduct to which Jews were subject in the early 20th century. When one of the main BLM groups took up the Palestinian cause, it further divided Jewish groups and power brokers.
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.
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 who brought him over, and his authority was recognized only by a handful of downtown Orthodox congregations. Before suffering a stroke in 1898, he worked as a hired kosher supervisor for some wholesale butchers.
When he died in 1902 at the age of 62, a penitent Lower East Side decided to give him in death the respect that had eluded him in life. Hundreds of thousands of mourners joined his funeral procession, which wound past neighborhoods in lower Manhattan before his body was put on a ferry for burial in Brooklyn.
The trouble begins0
The trouble began when the procession passed by the R. Hoe printing press factory at Grand and Sheriff Streets. Workers there hurled debris at the mourners and sprayed them with water hoses. The crowd fought back as best it could, throwing projectiles back at the factory and breaking windows.
What happened next would be a watershed in Jewish political and communal activism for a community riven by internal divisions: A day after the violence, various leaders formed the East Side Vigilance League to demand a fair investigation and punishment for the offending officers.
At the same time, Jewish lawyers rushed to the courts to defend Jews unfairly singled out in the violence. “They were uptown and downtown,” Selgiman said of the lawyers. “They were Democrat and Republican. They were Reform, and they were Orthodox.”
Over the next few months, the calls for justice would be surprisingly and unprecedentedly effective. Until then, Jews had little recourse against the largely Irish police who disdained them. But NYC Mayor Seth Low, narrowly elected on a reform platform aimed at the corrupt Democratic machine known as Tammany Hall, was sympathetic to the Jews who helped turn out the vote.
By the time police arrived, the clashes had largely ended, but, taking their cue from the factory owner and a commander who instructed police — according to a newspaper account — to “club the life out of them,” the cops began beating Jewish mourners. No Jews died in the assault, but many were arrested and hauled before the Essex Market Police court.
Low named a blue-ribbon committee to conduct an independent review, which ultimately exonerated the Jews and found the police negligent in the violence.
“This was the first, as far as I can tell, semi-successful attempt [by New York’s Jews] to get justice,” said Seligman. “A lot of people didn’t get seriously punished for this, but there were transfers out of the department. There were resignations in the department. They did get something for their efforts.”
The East Side Vigilance League didn’t last long (such committees “never lasted beyond the problem,” said Seligman), but it set a precedent. In 1908, after a police commissioner named Theodore Bingham used bogus statistics to claim Jews were responsible for half of the city’s crime, Reform Rabbi Judah Magnes helped establish the New York Kehillah, a federation of Jewish self-defense organizations (Bingham withdrew his statement).
The Kehillah lasted until 1922, but other national organizations, including the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, proved more durable. Jews learned the art of making their concerns known to ambitious politicians. The 1913 lynching in Georgia of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank led to the establishment of the Anti-Defamation League, still the most important of the groups helping to create a strategy for fighting antisemitism.
A century and more after the funeral riot, unity remains illusory. For decades, Israel proved a reliable cause around which to rally Jews while antisemitism receded into the background. That formula has flipped, with antisemitism once again the one communal concern on which Jews can approach something looking like consensus.
But even there, huge cracks are apparent: A year of campus activism has divided as well as united Jews, and the ADL faces competitors who think its approach to antisemitism is variously too soft on the left or too beholden to the right.
Ironically, one of the most polarizing debates in Jewish life in recent years involved the Black Lives Matter movement, which aimed to address the kind of police misconduct to which Jews were subject in the early 20th century. When one of the main BLM groups took up the Palestinian cause, it further divided Jewish groups and power brokers.
This was good until the last paragraph. BLM was a vehicle for transferring money from guilty libs to BLM leaders. Follow the money. What is it spent on? Who benefits? It's just a scam.
In this country today, if a black person gets called a rude name by a police officer, it makes headline news, and there are protest riots. Cars get burned, businesses looted.
If a police officer gets shot, his brains splattered all over the car seat, then this is kept silent. No one knows about it. Why? Because that goes against the narrative that is being pushed by the media. It is not a convenient fact. It will not help to persuade hearts and minds of the Liberal narrative. The narrative is this:
"White people are bad. They deserve punishment, financially and in other ways. Only white people are racist, there is no racism without white people. White people can only be purged of racism through intense indoctrination, beginning at the primary school level and continuing through college and beyond, because they are inherently evil. White people are "The Problem," and the best way to fix it is to get rid of white people. Every white person that is killed is a cause for celebration. Police deserve the most punishment of all. Police are terrible and always racist in every situation. If a police officer pulls over a black person, it is only because of racism, there is never another reason. The United States is the worst country in the world. It must pay reparations to all other countries. The United States invented all of the evils in the world, before the United States, people were holding hands and singing together. The best scenario would be for the United States to collapse."
There is the narrative of the liberal media, in a nutshell.
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Today, 9:59 am
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
The Lower East Side anti-Jewish riot that changed the way Jews do politics
Quote:
[...]
Ironically, one of the most polarizing debates in Jewish life in recent years involved the Black Lives Matter movement, which aimed to address the kind of police misconduct to which Jews were subject in the early 20th century. When one of the main BLM groups took up the Palestinian cause, it further divided Jewish groups and power brokers.
Ironically, one of the most polarizing debates in Jewish life in recent years involved the Black Lives Matter movement, which aimed to address the kind of police misconduct to which Jews were subject in the early 20th century. When one of the main BLM groups took up the Palestinian cause, it further divided Jewish groups and power brokers.
This was good until the last paragraph. BLM was a vehicle for transferring money from guilty libs to BLM leaders. Follow the money. What is it spent on? Who benefits? It's just a scam.
Wrong. Black Lives Matter began as a spontaneous mass movement, enabled by the advent of smart phone video cameras plus YouTube, which made it much easier than ever before for ordinary folks to document police brutality.
In any fast-growing mass movement, there are opportunists who find ways to cash in on it. But those opportunists are not the masterminds.
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
In this country today, if a black person gets called a rude name by a police officer, it makes headline news, and there are protest riots. Cars get burned, businesses looted.
No, not "every time." Only if it happens to go viral on YouTube or TikTok, or otherwise happens to get massively publicized. This is far from guaranteed to happen.
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
If a police officer gets shot, his brains splattered all over the car seat, then this is kept silent.
If the police department decides to tell local media, it will get reported there. Whether the story then gets picked up by national or international news media depends on how many other newsworthy things are happening that day.
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
No one knows about it. Why? Because that goes against the narrative that is being pushed by the media. It is not a convenient fact. It will not help to persuade hearts and minds of the Liberal narrative.
By no means do all news media subscribe to "the Liberal narrative."
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
The narrative is this:
"White people are bad. They deserve punishment, financially and in other ways. Only white people are racist, there is no racism without white people. White people can only be purged of racism through intense indoctrination, beginning at the primary school level and continuing through college and beyond, because they are inherently evil.
"White people are bad. They deserve punishment, financially and in other ways. Only white people are racist, there is no racism without white people. White people can only be purged of racism through intense indoctrination, beginning at the primary school level and continuing through college and beyond, because they are inherently evil.
What you wrote above is a greatly exaggerated caricature of the concept of white privilege and commonly proposed ways to remedy it.
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
White people are "The Problem," and the best way to fix it is to get rid of white people. Every white person that is killed is a cause for celebration.
I challenge you to find and quote any mainstream media source that says this.
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
Police deserve the most punishment of all.
Hardly anyone (other than some extremists) is saying that the police should be punished more than other people. The issue is that police are punished a whole lot less. And, up to a point at least, that's necessary. But it is commonly argued that police have too much impunity.
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
Police are terrible and always racist in every situation. If a police officer pulls over a black person, it is only because of racism, there is never another reason.
I doubt that even the most ardent "police abolitionist" would claim that there is never another reason.
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
The United States is the worst country in the world. It must pay reparations to all other countries.
Who says we "must pay reparations to all other countries"??? I challenge you to find any mainstream pundit who says this.
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
The United States invented all of the evils in the world, before the United States, people were holding hands and singing together. The best scenario would be for the United States to collapse."
There is the narrative of the liberal media, in a nutshell.
There is the narrative of the liberal media, in a nutshell.
Again I challenge you to find examples. "The best scenario would be for the United States to collapse" is an extremist view, not a mainstream liberal view.
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ASPartOfMe
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Joined: 25 Aug 2013
Age: 67
Gender: Male
Posts: 36,375
Location: Long Island, New York
Today, 11:25 am
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
The Lower East Side anti-Jewish riot that changed the way Jews do politics
Quote:
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 October 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.
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 who brought him over, and his authority was recognized only by a handful of downtown Orthodox congregations. Before suffering a stroke in 1898, he worked as a hired kosher supervisor for some wholesale butchers.
When he died in 1902 at the age of 62, a penitent Lower East Side decided to give him in death the respect that had eluded him in life. Hundreds of thousands of mourners joined his funeral procession, which wound past neighborhoods in lower Manhattan before his body was put on a ferry for burial in Brooklyn.
The trouble begins
The trouble began when the procession passed by the R. Hoe printing press factory at Grand and Sheriff Streets. Workers there hurled debris at the mourners and sprayed them with water hoses. The crowd fought back as best it could, throwing projectiles back at the factory and breaking windows.
What happened next would be a watershed in Jewish political and communal activism for a community riven by internal divisions: A day after the violence, various leaders formed the East Side Vigilance League to demand a fair investigation and punishment for the offending officers.
At the same time, Jewish lawyers rushed to the courts to defend Jews unfairly singled out in the violence. “They were uptown and downtown,” Selgiman said of the lawyers. “They were Democrat and Republican. They were Reform, and they were Orthodox.”
Over the next few months, the calls for justice would be surprisingly and unprecedentedly effective. Until then, Jews had little recourse against the largely Irish police who disdained them. But NYC Mayor Seth Low, narrowly elected on a reform platform aimed at the corrupt Democratic machine known as Tammany Hall, was sympathetic to the Jews who helped turn out the vote.
By the time police arrived, the clashes had largely ended, but, taking their cue from the factory owner and a commander who instructed police — according to a newspaper account — to “club the life out of them,” the cops began beating Jewish mourners. No Jews died in the assault, but many were arrested and hauled before the Essex Market Police court.
Low named a blue-ribbon committee to conduct an independent review, which ultimately exonerated the Jews and found the police negligent in the violence.
“This was the first, as far as I can tell, semi-successful attempt [by New York’s Jews] to get justice,” said Seligman. “A lot of people didn’t get seriously punished for this, but there were transfers out of the department. There were resignations in the department. They did get something for their efforts.”
The East Side Vigilance League didn’t last long (such committees “never lasted beyond the problem,” said Seligman), but it set a precedent. In 1908, after a police commissioner named Theodore Bingham used bogus statistics to claim Jews were responsible for half of the city’s crime, Reform Rabbi Judah Magnes helped establish the New York Kehillah, a federation of Jewish self-defense organizations (Bingham withdrew his statement).
The Kehillah lasted until 1922, but other national organizations, including the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, proved more durable. Jews learned the art of making their concerns known to ambitious politicians. The 1913 lynching in Georgia of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank led to the establishment of the Anti-Defamation League, still the most important of the groups helping to create a strategy for fighting antisemitism.
A century and more after the funeral riot, unity remains illusory. For decades, Israel proved a reliable cause around which to rally Jews while antisemitism receded into the background. That formula has flipped, with antisemitism once again the one communal concern on which Jews can approach something looking like consensus.
But even there, huge cracks are apparent: A year of campus activism has divided as well as united Jews, and the ADL faces competitors who think its approach to antisemitism is variously too soft on the left or too beholden to the right.
Ironically, one of the most polarizing debates in Jewish life in recent years involved the Black Lives Matter movement, which aimed to address the kind of police misconduct to which Jews were subject in the early 20th century. When one of the main BLM groups took up the Palestinian cause, it further divided Jewish groups and power brokers.
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.
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 who brought him over, and his authority was recognized only by a handful of downtown Orthodox congregations. Before suffering a stroke in 1898, he worked as a hired kosher supervisor for some wholesale butchers.
When he died in 1902 at the age of 62, a penitent Lower East Side decided to give him in death the respect that had eluded him in life. Hundreds of thousands of mourners joined his funeral procession, which wound past neighborhoods in lower Manhattan before his body was put on a ferry for burial in Brooklyn.
The trouble begins
The trouble began when the procession passed by the R. Hoe printing press factory at Grand and Sheriff Streets. Workers there hurled debris at the mourners and sprayed them with water hoses. The crowd fought back as best it could, throwing projectiles back at the factory and breaking windows.
What happened next would be a watershed in Jewish political and communal activism for a community riven by internal divisions: A day after the violence, various leaders formed the East Side Vigilance League to demand a fair investigation and punishment for the offending officers.
At the same time, Jewish lawyers rushed to the courts to defend Jews unfairly singled out in the violence. “They were uptown and downtown,” Selgiman said of the lawyers. “They were Democrat and Republican. They were Reform, and they were Orthodox.”
Over the next few months, the calls for justice would be surprisingly and unprecedentedly effective. Until then, Jews had little recourse against the largely Irish police who disdained them. But NYC Mayor Seth Low, narrowly elected on a reform platform aimed at the corrupt Democratic machine known as Tammany Hall, was sympathetic to the Jews who helped turn out the vote.
By the time police arrived, the clashes had largely ended, but, taking their cue from the factory owner and a commander who instructed police — according to a newspaper account — to “club the life out of them,” the cops began beating Jewish mourners. No Jews died in the assault, but many were arrested and hauled before the Essex Market Police court.
Low named a blue-ribbon committee to conduct an independent review, which ultimately exonerated the Jews and found the police negligent in the violence.
“This was the first, as far as I can tell, semi-successful attempt [by New York’s Jews] to get justice,” said Seligman. “A lot of people didn’t get seriously punished for this, but there were transfers out of the department. There were resignations in the department. They did get something for their efforts.”
The East Side Vigilance League didn’t last long (such committees “never lasted beyond the problem,” said Seligman), but it set a precedent. In 1908, after a police commissioner named Theodore Bingham used bogus statistics to claim Jews were responsible for half of the city’s crime, Reform Rabbi Judah Magnes helped establish the New York Kehillah, a federation of Jewish self-defense organizations (Bingham withdrew his statement).
The Kehillah lasted until 1922, but other national organizations, including the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, proved more durable. Jews learned the art of making their concerns known to ambitious politicians. The 1913 lynching in Georgia of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank led to the establishment of the Anti-Defamation League, still the most important of the groups helping to create a strategy for fighting antisemitism.
A century and more after the funeral riot, unity remains illusory. For decades, Israel proved a reliable cause around which to rally Jews while antisemitism receded into the background. That formula has flipped, with antisemitism once again the one communal concern on which Jews can approach something looking like consensus.
But even there, huge cracks are apparent: A year of campus activism has divided as well as united Jews, and the ADL faces competitors who think its approach to antisemitism is variously too soft on the left or too beholden to the right.
Ironically, one of the most polarizing debates in Jewish life in recent years involved the Black Lives Matter movement, which aimed to address the kind of police misconduct to which Jews were subject in the early 20th century. When one of the main BLM groups took up the Palestinian cause, it further divided Jewish groups and power brokers.
BLM was a vehicle for transferring money from guilty libs to BLM leaders. Follow the money. What is it spent on? Who benefits? It's just a scam.
In this country today, if a black person gets called a rude name by a police officer, it makes headline news, and there are protest riots. Cars get burned, businesses looted.
If a police officer gets shot, his brains splattered all over the car seat, then this is kept silent. No one knows about it. Why? Because that goes against the narrative that is being pushed by the media. It is not a convenient fact. It will not help to persuade hearts and minds of the Liberal narrative. The narrative is this:
"White people are bad. They deserve punishment, financially and in other ways. Only white people are racist, there is no racism without white people. White people can only be purged of racism through intense indoctrination, beginning at the primary school level and continuing through college and beyond, because they are inherently evil. White people are "The Problem," and the best way to fix it is to get rid of white people. Every white person that is killed is a cause for celebration. Police deserve the most punishment of all. Police are terrible and always racist in every situation. If a police officer pulls over a black person, it is only because of racism, there is never another reason. The United States is the worst country in the world. It must pay reparations to all other countries. The United States invented all of the evils in the world, before the United States, people were holding hands and singing together. The best scenario would be for the United States to collapse."
There is the narrative of the liberal media, in a nutshell.
As Mona can attest to I have been anti-BLM movement for years including in 2020 at the height of the movements popularity when she was advising me not to literally say I was “anti BLM” because saying that automatically labeled you a racist even among “non wokes”. I did not listen to her.
I do not know where you live but here in blue New York when a cop is shot or killed it is the lead story. The media narrative is what a tragedy it is, what a great person the deceased was, the poor family of the deceased.
The “BLM riots” for the most part stopped four years ago.
The narrative you described is not the liberal one it is the woke or identity left one. People who subscribe to that narrative believe that liberals are in some ways more the problem than MAGA’s.
About that last paragraph. There were too many Jews who conflated BLM with the civil rights movement they supported back in the day. While there were some of us Jews who saw the Critical Race Theory influenced ideas as an anathema to the values of the Civil Rights movement if not outright antisemitic until the blowback from the current Mideast war we were a minority among fellow Jews. Now it is the opposite.
_________________
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity
“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman
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