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<\/a><\/p>\nAn assembly at a New York City school, ca. 1910. (Bain Collection\/Library of Congress)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Herbert\u2019s father, Edward Herbert, brought the matter to Albert Lucas, a 47-year-old English-born activist who served as secretary of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.<\/p>\n
Lucas, born Abraham Abrahamson in Liverpool, was already a veteran of Jewish communal battles. He had led campaigns against Christian \u201csettlement houses\u201d that sought to convert Jewish children with free meals and holiday gifts. To him, the creeping Christianization of public schools was a subtler but equally serious threat.<\/p>\n
\u201cLucas believed the schools were the front line in preserving Jewish identity in America,\u201d Seligman said. \u201cHe saw it as his duty to protect children from being made to feel like second-class citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lucas wrote to the city\u2019s superintendent of schools, William Henry Maxwell, who had already issued a circular in 1903 reminding principals that \u201chymns containing reference to the tenets of any religious sect are out of place in unsectarian schools.\u201d But enforcement was lax, and many teachers \u2014 Jewish and Christian alike \u2014 ignored the rule.<\/p>\n
When word of Harding\u2019s assembly reached Lucas, he pounced. Within two days, a petition circulated in Brownsville accusing the principal of \u201csystematically Christianizing\u201d Jewish children. The Hebrew Standard and Jewish Comment denounced the \u201cproselytizing\u201d in public schools, while the Brooklyn Eagle, the borough\u2019s popular daily, defended the principal as merely promoting \u201cgood morals.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an unprecedented move, the Board of Education held a public hearing to weigh charges that a school principal had promoted religion. It drew a raucous crowd of 1,500.<\/p>\n
The hearing revealed sharp divisions even within the Jewish community. Some defended Harding as a well-meaning educator; others accused him of deliberately blurring the line between civic virtue and Christian faith. In the end, the board gave Harding a slap on the wrist, in what Seligman calls \u201can early Easter gift.\u201d <\/p>\n
For Lucas and the Orthodox Union, the Harding verdict only confirmed that quiet lobbying wasn\u2019t enough. They began to organize Jewish parents directly.<\/p>\n
Their campaign reflected the broader social tensions of the time. Progressive reformers such as Superintendent Maxwell believed that public schools were engines of \u201cAmericanization,\u201d meant to instill not only English and arithmetic but also civic and moral values. For many teachers, \u201cbeing a good American\u201d was synonymous with \u201cbeing a good Christian.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, America\u2019s Jews were divided along class and ethnic lines. Uptown, German-born Jews \u2014 who had arrived decades earlier \u2014 feared that the noisy protests of their Yiddish-speaking coreligionists would jeopardize their own fragile acceptance. Downtown, newer immigrants saw those elites as assimilationist and out of touch.<\/p>\n
By December 1906, with no change in policy, the Orthodox Union and the Yiddish press decided to act. Two newspapers \u2014 the Morgen Zhurnal and the Yidishes Tageblatt \u2014 called on Jewish parents to keep their children home on Dec. 24, when schools would hold Christmas exercises. <\/p>\n
By most accounts, the response was overwhelming. In the Lower East Side and Brownsville, entire classrooms emptied out. Contemporary estimates suggested that between one third and twothirds of Jewish students were absent from heavily Jewish districts \u2014 perhaps 20,000 to 25,000 children citywide.<\/p>\n
Anti-Jewish letters to the editor poured in, accusing the protesters of trying to \u201cJudaize\u201d the schools and \u201cdestroy\u201d America\u2019s Christian heritage. Protestant ministers accused Jews of ingratitude. Editorials described them as \u201clatecomers, tolerated guests in a Christian country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not all Jews supported the boycott. Abraham Stern, a German-Jewish member of the Board of Education, called the protesters \u201cagitators\u201d and said their actions lacked \u201cthe support of the more intelligent Jews of the city.\u201d<\/p>\n
Julia Richman, the city\u2019s first female district superintendent \u2014 herself a Jewish reformer \u2014 said Christmas was both \u201creligious and national\u201d and should not be barred from schools \u201cso long as it is not sectarian.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even some Reform rabbis dissented, including Judah L. Magnes of Temple Emanu-El, who favored cultural coexistence over confrontation.<\/p>\n
But among the Yiddish-speaking press, the boycott was a point of pride. \u201cNever before,\u201d wrote one editor, \u201chave Jewish workers stood up so boldly for their rights as Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lucas and the boycotters were able to point to the New York State Constitution, which explicitly prohibited the use of public funds for schools teaching \u201cthe tenets of any religious sect\u201d \u2014 a legacy of the long conflict between a Protestant establishment and Catholics.<\/p>\n
But if law was on the side of the Jews, Seligman said, \u201cthe politics was not.\u201d The Board of Education, caught between outraged Christians and emboldened Jews, eventually let the matter drop. <\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, if you\u2019re pushing for minority rights, you\u2019re not going to get a lot of help from elected officials. Your best bet is always going to be the courts,\u201d said Seligman.<\/p>\n
By 1907, with no appetite for another boycott, the Orthodox Union\u2019s activism around the issue waned. Hymns with religious themes were discouraged but not banned. Trees and wreaths returned to classrooms. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe hot potato,\u201d Seligman said, \u201cremained in the laps of the school principals.\u201d<\/p>\n
It would take until the 1960s, with the Supreme Court\u2019s Engel v. Vitale decision, for school-sponsored prayer to be declared unconstitutional. Even then, Seligman notes, \u201cChristmas programs persisted, largely unchallenged.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seligman ends his book by drawing a line from 1906 to today. America\u2019s Jewish population, he notes, is more assimilated and less religious than it was in Lucas\u2019s day. But even as the number of self-identified Christians has been shrinking, Christian nationalists are louder and more politically powerful. And the Supreme Court, increasingly sympathetic to religious expression, has eroded some of the wall between church and state that figures like Lucas fought to preserve.<\/p>\n
Jews, writes Selgiman, \u201care ostensibly in more or less the same position in which the New York Board of Education left them in 1907: forced to accept celebrations of a holiday in which they do not believe in the public schools attended by their children, paid for in part by their tax dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Seligman, the lesson of 1906 is less about Christmas than about vigilance. The false accusation of a \u201cJewish war on Christmas,\u201d he writes, \u201cis as inevitable today as it was in 1906 \u2014 if not more so.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Gussie Herbert\u2019s defiant question \u2014 \u201cWhy are you teaching the Christian religion in a public school?\u201d \u2014 still echoes, more than a century later, whenever Americans debate where faith ends and the public square begins.<\/p>\n
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