Registration now closed

Author Talk: Scott Seligman

The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906

Local author Scott Seligman will present his latest book.

Today’s battle over religious practices in American public schools has deep roots. In the nineteenth century, it was a struggle between Protestants and later-arriving Catholics. But at Christmastime in 1905, when the Presbyterian principal of a Brooklyn elementary school urged his Jewish students to be more like Jesus Christ, Jews entered the fray. Jewish activist Albert Lucas accused the public schools of illegal proselytizing and demanded limits on religious content in the schools. After the Board of Education let the principal off with a slap on the wrist in 1906 and declined to clarify the rules governing religion in schools, the New York Jewish community staged a boycott of the school Christmas pageants, leading to widespread student absences. The protest prompted policy changes, but these generated an enormous antisemitic public backlash. The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906 describes how this moment shaped the Jewish community’s long-term efforts to challenge Christian influence in public life and traces the Christmas celebration dispute to the present day.

Scott D. Seligman is a national award-winning writer of narrative non-fiction and biography with an interest in the history of hyphenated Americans. A former corporate executive who holds an undergraduate degree in American history from Princeton and a master’s degree from Harvard, he has written three books on American Jewish history, including The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902, which won gold medals in history in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and Reader Views Literary Awards and was a finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards. He lives in the Van Ness neighborhood. Visit his website at www.seligmanonline.com.

Upcoming events