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When Jews really did wage a ‘war on Christmas’
(JTA) — On a frigid winter’s day in 1906, tens of thousands of Jewish parents in New York’s Lower East Side and Brooklyn kept their children home from school.
It wasn’t a snow day, but a protest: Activists and the Yiddish press had called for a boycott of the Christmas assemblies and pageants that they knew Jewish children would be obliged to attend on the day before the holiday.
“Jews Object to Christmas in the Schools,” blared the New York Times. The Brooklyn Eagle warned that “agitators” sought to rob Christian children of their traditions. The boycott was, depending on the source, a valiant cry for religious freedom, or the first shot in the 100-year-plus “war on Christmas.”
The episode is the subject of historian Scott D. Seligman’s new book, “The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906,” which reconstructs how a seemingly local dispute in one Brooklyn school exploded into a test case for religious freedom and civic belonging.
More than a century later, Seligman suggests, the issues it raised — over religion in public schools and the boundaries of church and state — remain strikingly familiar.
“As soon as I stumbled on the story, I knew there’d be a book,” said Seligman, who grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1960s, when schoolchildren were still made to recite the Lord’s Prayer. “I was that kid in public school who always wondered why we were praying like Christians, and even why Christmas was a legal holiday.”
The book is the third installment in what’s become a trilogy about Jews engaged in mass action during the first part of the 20th century. “The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902” (2020) recalled a successful consumer uprising led by Lower East Side Jewish women fed up with the high cost of beef. In “The Chief Rabbi’s Funeral” (2024), Seligman explored how a vicious anti-Jewish riot on the Lower East Side led the city’s fractious Jewish community to organize as never before.
In practical terms, the Christmas boycott accomplished little, and even led to an antisemitic backlash. But it set a precedent for Jewish civic activism — and for a broader national debate about religion in public education that would stretch into the 21st century.
The spark came a year earlier, in December 1905, at Public School 174 in Brownsville. The Brooklyn neighborhood was a dense warren of immigrant Jews, many newly arrived from Eastern Europe, who eagerly sent their children to the public schools that were being filled nearly as fast as they could be built or renovated.
“The Catholics gave up on the public schools as irredeemably Protestant. The Jews loved public schools — they were a ticket to acculturation and advancement in a way they’d never had in the old country,” said Seligman. “All they wanted was to get the religious influence out.”
In a school assembly the day before Christmas, F. F. Harding, the school’s Presbyterian principal, read aloud from a text called “Gems of Wisdom from Bible Literature and Proverbs” and then addressed his 500 pupils, nearly all Jews.
“Now, boys and girls,” he said, “at this time of year I want you all to have the feeling of Christ in you. … Be like Christ.”
That message did not sit well with Augusta (“Gussie”) Herbert, a 14-year-old seventh grader. The daughter of a Jewish lawyer, Herbert stood up in front of the assembled students and asked why the Christian religion was being taught in a public school.
Her boldness shocked classmates and administrators alike. But she wasn’t alone. Dozens of Jewish children went home and told their parents that Christmas hymns and Bible readings had been part of their school day. Within days, Brownsville’s Jewish community was in an uproar.
Herbert’s 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.
Lucas, born Abraham Abrahamson in Liverpool, was already a veteran of Jewish communal battles. He had led campaigns against Christian “settlement houses” 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.
“Lucas believed the schools were the front line in preserving Jewish identity in America,” Seligman said. “He saw it as his duty to protect children from being made to feel like second-class citizens.”
Lucas wrote to the city’s superintendent of schools, William Henry Maxwell, who had already issued a circular in 1903 reminding principals that “hymns containing reference to the tenets of any religious sect are out of place in unsectarian schools.” But enforcement was lax, and many teachers — Jewish and Christian alike — ignored the rule.
When word of Harding’s assembly reached Lucas, he pounced. Within two days, a petition circulated in Brownsville accusing the principal of “systematically Christianizing” Jewish children. The Hebrew Standard and Jewish Comment denounced the “proselytizing” in public schools, while the Brooklyn Eagle, the borough’s popular daily, defended the principal as merely promoting “good morals.”
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.
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 “an early Easter gift.”
For Lucas and the Orthodox Union, the Harding verdict only confirmed that quiet lobbying wasn’t enough. They began to organize Jewish parents directly.
Their campaign reflected the broader social tensions of the time. Progressive reformers such as Superintendent Maxwell believed that public schools were engines of “Americanization,” meant to instill not only English and arithmetic but also civic and moral values. For many teachers, “being a good American” was synonymous with “being a good Christian.”
At the same time, America’s Jews were divided along class and ethnic lines. Uptown, German-born Jews — who had arrived decades earlier — 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.
By December 1906, with no change in policy, the Orthodox Union and the Yiddish press decided to act. Two newspapers — the Morgen Zhurnal and the Yidishes Tageblatt — called on Jewish parents to keep their children home on Dec. 24, when schools would hold Christmas exercises.
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 — perhaps 20,000 to 25,000 children citywide.
Anti-Jewish letters to the editor poured in, accusing the protesters of trying to “Judaize” the schools and “destroy” America’s Christian heritage. Protestant ministers accused Jews of ingratitude. Editorials described them as “latecomers, tolerated guests in a Christian country.”
Not all Jews supported the boycott. Abraham Stern, a German-Jewish member of the Board of Education, called the protesters “agitators” and said their actions lacked “the support of the more intelligent Jews of the city.”
Julia Richman, the city’s first female district superintendent — herself a Jewish reformer — said Christmas was both “religious and national” and should not be barred from schools “so long as it is not sectarian.”
Even some Reform rabbis dissented, including Judah L. Magnes of Temple Emanu-El, who favored cultural coexistence over confrontation.
But among the Yiddish-speaking press, the boycott was a point of pride. “Never before,” wrote one editor, “have Jewish workers stood up so boldly for their rights as Americans.”
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 “the tenets of any religious sect” — a legacy of the long conflict between a Protestant establishment and Catholics.
But if law was on the side of the Jews, Seligman said, “the politics was not.” The Board of Education, caught between outraged Christians and emboldened Jews, eventually let the matter drop.
“At the end of the day, if you’re pushing for minority rights, you’re not going to get a lot of help from elected officials. Your best bet is always going to be the courts,” said Seligman.
By 1907, with no appetite for another boycott, the Orthodox Union’s activism around the issue waned. Hymns with religious themes were discouraged but not banned. Trees and wreaths returned to classrooms.
“The hot potato,” Seligman said, “remained in the laps of the school principals.”
It would take until the 1960s, with the Supreme Court’s Engel v. Vitale decision, for school-sponsored prayer to be declared unconstitutional. Even then, Seligman notes, “Christmas programs persisted, largely unchallenged.”
Seligman ends his book by drawing a line from 1906 to today. America’s Jewish population, he notes, is more assimilated and less religious than it was in Lucas’s 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.
Jews, writes Selgiman, “are 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.”
For Seligman, the lesson of 1906 is less about Christmas than about vigilance. The false accusation of a “Jewish war on Christmas,” he writes, “is as inevitable today as it was in 1906 — if not more so.”
And Gussie Herbert’s defiant question — “Why are you teaching the Christian religion in a public school?” — still echoes, more than a century later, whenever Americans debate where faith ends and the public square begins.
The post When Jews really did wage a ‘war on Christmas’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Courage to Name Evil
Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the UN Security Council. Photo: Wiki Commons
On Nov. 10, 1975 — almost 50 years ago to the day — Daniel Patrick Moynihan did something that few diplomats or public figures would dare attempt today: he told the truth in public, when the world preferred a lie.
As the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Moynihan rose before the General Assembly to condemn Resolution 3379 — the infamous measure that declared Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination.”
Moynihan saw, with prophetic clarity, that this was no ordinary resolution. It was a calculated attempt to turn antisemitism into international law and an effort to delegitimize the Jewish people’s right to self-determination under the guise of anti-racism.
Moynihan warned plainly, “The United Nations is about to make antisemitism international law.”
And then, in words that still thunder half a century later, he declared: “[The United States] does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act … A great evil has been loosed upon the world.”
I frequently open lectures with that story. I tell my students and audiences that if they remember nothing else from my remarks, they should remember this: courage begins with naming things truthfully. It’s why Moynihan remains one of my heroes. At a time when global institutions and elite opinion had succumbed to moral cowardice, he reminded the world — and America — that truth is not negotiable.
The Corruption of Language
Moynihan once wrote, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
That line, often repeated but rarely understood, expressed his deepest conviction: that words must map to reality, not be twisted to serve ideology. When the United Nations turned Zionism — a movement of liberation — into a synonym for racism, it wasn’t merely lying about Israel. It was corrupting the moral language on which civilization depends.
That corruption of language is what Moynihan fought so fiercely against. His 1975 speech was not only about defending Israel; it was about defending truth. He understood that words matter; that they are the means by which we give order to the world around us, and that once institutions redefine words to suit politics, they lose moral legitimacy.
In Jewish terms, what Moynihan did that day was Kiddush Hashem, sanctifying the divine name by standing for truth before the nations. He refused to let a lie pass unchallenged, even when doing so made him unpopular among diplomats and intellectuals. For him, the duty to speak truth outweighed the instinct to please.
Echoes in Our Time
Half a century later, his words feel hauntingly relevant. The same moral inversion that he condemned at the UN now reappears across Western institutions.
On elite campuses, students chant that “Zionists don’t belong.” Faculty resolutions describe the murder of civilians as “resistance.” Jewish students are told that their identity is oppression and their longing for homeland a form of violence. The language of “decolonization” has become the new euphemism through which antisemitism cloaks itself in moral respectability.
Moynihan foresaw this. He understood that the battle for truth is never merely political; it is cultural and linguistic. His stand in 1975 was not only a defense of Israel but of liberal civilization itself.
As he argued, culture, not politics, determines the success of a society — yet politics can change a culture and save it from itself. At the UN, he embodied both truths and proved that culture and politics alike can be redeemed when courage and clarity converge.
Many in the diplomatic corps thought him reckless; others accused him of inflaming tensions. But Moynihan knew that civility without conviction is just another form of surrender.
In refusing to “tone down” his words, he restored to American diplomacy something that had been fading for years: moral seriousness.
On Dec. 16, 1991 — 16 years after his speech and in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse — the United Nations repealed that infamous resolution. The reversal did not erase the damage, but it vindicated his courage and exposed the Soviet motives he had identified all along.
Geopolitical Tensions Today
Today, Moynihan’s moral framework faces new tests as the Abraham Accords expand into uncharted territory. As debates swirl over bringing Kazakhstan into the Abraham Accords, commentators like Amit Segal argue the move has little to do with Israel and everything to do with containing Iran and Russia.
Kazakhstan, a Muslim-majority state and the world’s largest uranium producer, accounting for about 40% of global supply, sits in a crucial corridor between Moscow’s weakening sphere and Tehran’s growing ambitions. For Washington, its inclusion symbolizes an attempt to expand the US-Israel-Arab alliance into Eurasia — a rebuke to authoritarian revisionism.
But others, like Shay Gal, warn that such moves may blur the moral map Moynihan fought to preserve. By tethering Israel’s normalization efforts to a bloc still tied to Moscow and influenced by Ankara — a government that has positioned itself as Hamas’ diplomatic advocate — the United States risks trading moral clarity for geopolitical convenience.
Moynihan would have understood this tension. He knew that alliances built without a moral spine eventually fracture under pressure. As historian Gil Troy recently wrote, Moynihan “backed Israel for reasons that had almost nothing to do with it.” He was defending the West’s moral vocabulary from Soviet distortion — the same “totalitarian mind” that “reeked of the totalitarian state.”
That distortion is visible today when democracies hesitate to call terrorism by its name or confuse appeasement with diplomacy. Whether in the UN, universities, or Washington’s corridors of power, the temptation to “tone down” the truth — to be “polite” in the face of lies — remains.
Moynihan mocked that instinct in 1975: “What is this word ‘toning down’; when you are faced with an out-right lie about the United States and we go in and say this is not true. Now, how do you tone that down? Do you say it is only half untrue?” he asked. “What kind of people are we? What kind of people do they think we are?”
He asked that question then. We should ask it again now.
The Lesson for Us
In my lectures, I tell students and audiences that moral courage isn’t about volume or virality. It’s about standing for something when every incentive points the other way. Moynihan didn’t posture. He told the truth in an unfriendly room — and did it with moral gravity. His example reminds us that education and citizenship alike begin with facts, not feelings, and that democracy cannot endure if we lose the courage to call things by their right names.
When Moynihan declared that “a great evil has been loosed upon the world,” he wasn’t speaking only of 1975. He was naming a permanent temptation: to believe that truth is negotiable, to mistake moral complexity for moral cowardice.
Moynihan’s life proves that civic courage and Jewish moral witness are inseparable. The fight against the world’s oldest hatred is not only Israel’s fight — it is the test of whether the West still believes in truth itself.
When the powerful grow timid and relativism reigns, we must remember Moynihan’s example: a man who refused to be silent while the world applauded a lie.
Because when a great evil is loosed upon the world, truth must be spoken aloud. Daniel Patrick Moynihan did just that. And that is why, half a century later, I begin my classes with his words and count him among my heroes.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Iran Built Nuclear Weapons Instead of Desalinization Plants — Now There Is a Water Shortage
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks in a televised message, after the ceasefire between Iran and Israel, in Tehran, Iran, June 26, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
“Water water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink” — from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner — is a suitable motto for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
With the Persian Gulf in the southwest, the Sea of Oman in the south, and the Caspian Sea (an inland brackish water lake) in the north, Iran is surrounded by water — yet there is very little to drink. Iran’s experts, of course, blame Israel and the US for manipulating the weather and causing a drought so severe that the Islamic Republic’s president says he may “have to evacuate Tehran.”
If only Iran’s Mullahs had spent their money on desalination plants instead of nuclear facilities, the people of Iran would not be facing death from dehydration.
According to a new report by the Middle East Forum, Iran is at the precipice of “water bankruptcy” stemming from “the regime’s profound failure to adapt in a region where other arid states have successfully implemented sustainable water management strategies.” Whereas its neighbors have long planned for the absence of rainy days, investing in the infrastructure to provide water for its subjects, the Islamic Republic has wasted all its resources foolishly pursuing nuclear weapons.
Kuwait built eight desalination plants that provide 93% of the necessary drinking water to its 5 million people. Qatar built 109 desalination plants that provide 48% of the drinking water to its 3 million people, and the UAE built 70 plants that provide 42% of its drinking water for 11 million people. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest producer of desalinated water, built 30 “super plants” that provide more than half of drinking water to its 34 million subjects.
Iran’s desalination plants, however, provide a mere 3% of the potable water for its 92 million thirsty people. It was one of the last nations in the Middle East to begin installing desalination plants, and they are small and inefficient, mostly relying on old technology and antiquated methods. In spite of Iran’s efforts to ramp up its desalination capabilities, the situation is dire.
Blinded by its nuclear ambition and hatred of Israel and the US, Iran has unwisely spent its money on expensive nuclear reactors and even more expensive nuclear bombmaking.
In the US, where environmental and regulatory fees inflate the prices, a nuclear reactor costs billions of dollars. The newest one in the US is the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, which has cost approximately $30 billion. In Iran, we can assume that the total price tag is lower, but the added expenses of burying facilities deep underground probably make the total roughly the same.
On top of the money Iran has spent on nuclear reactors, it has also spent untold billions on enrichment facilities, many of them also subterranean. It has spent liberally on research and development into trigger systems and the ballistic missiles to deliver bombs.
By contrast, a desalination plant costs in the millions of dollars. In 2010, Texas put the price tag at $658 million for a 100 MGD desalination plant. Today, a desalination plant might run $1 billion. That means that for every $20 billion-dollar nuclear site it built, Iran might have built 20 state-of-the-art desalination plants.
Without a steady supply of desalinated sea water, Iran has resorted to unsound policies to provide potable water, causing great harm to the land. These policies have led to drastic groundwater depletion, according to the Middle East Forum report, causing Iran’s cities to literally sink into the ground due to “aquifer compaction,” putting the nation well along the path to “aquifer death.”
Of course, the Islamic Republic will never acknowledge the folly of its ways. Instead, it will continue to blame the US and Israel, where five major desalination plants provide 80% of the nation’s drinking water.
The irony of Iran’s situation is that the entire world would step up to help the people of Iran avoid impending disaster were their nation not run by a bellicose government motivated by hatred. And Israel — the object of that hatred — would be among the nations most willing to help.
Chief Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. A version of this article was originally published by IPT.
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Jews Across the World Are Repeating the Mistakes of the 1930s
A shop damaged in Magdeburg, Germany, during Kristallnacht. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In August 1933, only months after Hitler rose to power, a chilling article appeared in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Dr. Max Naumann, a proud German patriot and the founder of the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden — the Association of National German Jews — declared his unwavering loyalty to the Nazi government. Even as Jewish livelihoods were being dismantled and the beginnings of the Holocaust were in place, this group of proper, fancy German Jews insisted that Jews had nothing to fear if they behaved correctly, shed their national identity, rejected Zionism, and embedded themselves wholly within German society.
But history was about to deliver its verdict.
This is the story of a worldview that has reappeared across Jewish history again and again: the belief that if Jews abandon their nationalism, and appease their oppressors, they will be spared. They condemned the very concept of Jewish self-defense.
The existence in Germany of Betar, a Zionist movement founded in 1923, presented an ideological threat to this worldview.
Betar youths sang Hebrew songs, carried themselves with discipline, and insisted the Jewish people were a nation with a destiny. In the eyes of people like Naumann, Betar represented a dangerous idea: that Jews could survive only by standing as a proud, independent people — not by pleading for acceptance. History proved Betar right.
At first glance, one could treat Naumann as a figure locked in the past, but his story remains painfully relevant today. Across the Diaspora, Jewish communities are living through a renewed wave of open antisemitism not seen in generations. And how does a certain segment of world Jewry respond?
With fear. With appeasement. With approximately 33 percent of New York City’s Jews voting for Zohran Mamdani. They repeat the same delusions Naumann preached: that appeasement will earn respect, that silence will earn safety, that bowing one’s head will spare us.
We know where that path leads.
One of the most important lessons of the Holocaust — and indeed of all Jewish history — is that Jews need to fight back. This truth remains unchanged today. And just like in 1933, the Jews most desperate to blend in, the ones who insist “We’re not like those other Jews,” will end up being persecuted and targeted by those they try to appease.
This is the moment when we must remember the Zionist leader who founded Betar, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky believed that every Jewish person must stand tall, walk with pride, and never bow their head. Jabotinsky taught that Jewish dignity must never be surrendered, and that Jewish self-defense and a Jewish state is the only real guarantee of Jewish safety.
In the 1930s, Jabotinsky warned that Europe was becoming unsafe for Jews. Most of world Jewry dismissed his most dire warnings of death as hysteria.
Today, not a single one of the mainstream Jewish leaders of the Diaspora is talking about aliyah, the process of Jews immigrating to Israel.
Across the Diaspora, Jewish communities cling to institutions that no longer protect them, governments that no longer defend them, and illusions that no longer serve them. They dedicate themselves to endless dialogues with activists who openly seek their destruction. They send letters, petitions, pleas, and polite condemnations, all while their enemies march in the streets and terrorize their children on campus.
This is a Naumann mindset reborn. And just like in 1933, it is a deadly delusion.
World Jewry has failed to learn the most basic lessons of Jewish history. The lesson that no society, not even the most enlightened, guarantees Jewish safety. The lesson that Jewish security cannot depend on the goodwill of others.
And the only difference between then and now is the Jewish State.
At a time when New York, London, Toronto, Paris, Melbourne, and Johannesburg are becoming unsafe for Jews, Israel is thriving. Our cities — Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Raanana, Herzliya, Haifa — are full of innovation, culture, Jewish life, and Jewish safety. Hebrew is spoken without fear. Soldiers protect us. Our national institutions — flawed as they may be — defend us. The Diaspora is in deep trouble, in part because many Jewish leaders abroad, like Naumann in his time, are enemies of the Jewish people.
Ronn Torossian is an Israeli-American Jewish communal leader and entrepreneur who lives in Israel.