1902 New York riot that sparked Jewish-American activism

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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.

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.

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.

To clarify: I have my own criticisms of the BLM movement, although I would not call myself anti-BLM on the whole.

My main criticism is of the slogan "defund the police." Real police reform costs money; it should not be sold as a budget-cutting measure. One of the main reasons for abusive policing is simply that it is the cheap and easy way to do policing.

But I agree with the basic premises of the BLM movement: that Black people have all too often (more often than whites or Asians, other factors being equal) been treated as if their lives don't matter, and have been disproportionately victims of police brutality and have been generally over-policed.


It is not even the narrative of most "identity leftists." It is an exaggerated caricature of same.

For example, even the most radical "identity left" folks don't typically claim that white people are "inherently evil," but typically claim only that white people have (relative) privilege, which implies that white people tend to act as oppressors but can learn not to if we so choose.

There are some groups that do claim that white people are "inherently evil." The so-called "Nation of Islam" believes that white people (especially Jews) are literally devils. But the "Nation of Islam" is not a particularly leftist group. (See the profile of the Nation of Islam on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center.) Fortunately, as far as I can tell, the "Nation of Islam" and its beliefs do not dominate BLM.


Radical leftists, of whatever stripe, have always had issues with mainstream liberals, as voiced in the satirical song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" by Phil Ochs.

A devotee of anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan secured a senior role at Black Lives Matter Grassroots to lead "special projects" for the group as it prepares to resist President-elect Donald Trump’s second term.

Black Lives Matter Grassroots announced in a New Year's message to its supporters on Thursday that it hired Yonasda Lonewolf, a rapper and activist with close ties to Farrakhan, as a "special projects specialist" to help the group as it works to "claim victory over the white-supremacist systems designed to kill our people." Black Lives Matter Grassroots said in the message it would enter 2025 with "the revolutionary spirit of our Haitian forebears" and featured an image of Haitian revolutionaries in the early 1800s lynching French military officers.

Lonewolf doesn’t shy from her devotion to Farrakhan, who has praised Adolf Hitler as a "very great man" and casts Jews as "termites" and "enemies" who control black people. She professed her love for Farrakhan in a 2016 Facebook post and later, in a 2020 Instagram post, described the minister as "my grandfather Min. Farrakhan who also eased my spirit." In 2023, Lonewolf attended Farrakhan’s annual keynote address, where she told the ministry’s propaganda website that she felt "rejuvenated" by his message.

"We are all under attack right now, and it’s the fight against good and evil, at the end of the day," Lonewolf told the Final Call, the Nation of Islam's official publication. "The fact that we still have a great leader amongst us is a testament that he’s standing, that we need to be able to continue." Other Farrakhan devotees interviewed in that article praised the Nation of Islam leader's stand against "the Satanic Jews" and "the Jewish powers that be."

Black Lives Matter Grassroots is an offshoot of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the charity that raked in $80 million during the George Floyd riots in 2020. Black Lives Matter Grassroots broke away from the Global Network Foundation in 2022 after the latter faced intense blowback over using its windfall to purchase ritzy mansions and enrich the friends and family of its founder, Patrisse Cullors.

Black Lives Matter Grassroots now says the Global Network Foundation is run by "thieves" and that it was the rightful leader of the movement. It tried and failed to sue the Global Network Foundation for $10 million in 2022, with a California judge throwing out the lawsuit and ordering Black Lives Matter Grassroots to repay its progenitor’s legal fees of over $700,000.

The Global Network Foundation has since rebranded as an organization in an effort to put its financial misdeeds in the past, dedicating its efforts primarily to art, education, and culture with some on-the-ground organizing in the mix.

The rhetoric in Black Lives Matter Grassroots’s New Year’s message suggests it seeks to be the new standard bearer for the divisive protests that defined the movement during the first Trump administration. In addition to invoking the spirit of the Haitian revolution, which culminated in 1804 with a massacre of most of the European population in Haiti, Black Lives Matter Grassroots invoked the words of Angela Davis, a radical communist activist who was involved in a California terrorist attack in 1970 that left four people dead, including a judge. Davis owned the weapons used in the attack but was acquitted after spending a year in jail.