Uncategorized
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.
Uncategorized
The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’
Think of the British painter David Hockney, who died Thursday at 88, and you think of color. 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” almost certainly his most famous work, is a study in blue so profound that it’s nearly synesthetic: The pool is such a saturated cool that you can feel the water lap your feet, and the sky so rich with California sunlight that your shoulders burn. When Hockney turned more toward landscapes in later years, trees came in every color of the rainbow — here a pink trunk, there a purple — and roads were streaked salmon and teal.
Which makes it stranger that one of the works of his that I find most evocative has no color at all. It’s a 1975 pen and ink drawing of the American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj, one of Hockney’s dearest friends, sitting on a bench outside an art school in Vienna.
Kitaj, head propped in his hand, looks out toward the left side of the page. His face is the lone area of detail in a scene thrown together with brisk, expressive lines. There is a sense of place around him, but that place is in the act of disappearing. As the scene spreads to the right and lower edges of the page — the areas that would fall outside Kitaj’s line of sight — it ceases to exist. Kitaj’s bench is slatted, rounded and real, but the bench abutting it is depicted in a few brief strokes. The buildings and street are sketched with light attention within what seems to be Kitaj’s periphery line, and are nonexistent beyond it.
The picture is a study of a man in deep focus. Hockney draws Kitaj’s head — and by inference, everything within it — as real and lifelike. But beyond the scope of Kitaj’s vision — the material the world presents him, possibly to be made into art — Hockney shows his surroundings as being valuable only as perspective lines, helping to situate the subject in space.
To be caught thinking is a vulnerable experience. To have someone restore your sense of your own physical self is a shock. By sketching Kitaj in his moment of remove, Hockney gave a renowned and somewhat glamorous friendship a sense of life. And he gave a sense of life, too, to the thing that made his own art so attractive: the impression of a rare and gorgeous intensity of vision, one that could draw a viewer’s attention so completely that it seemed what was on the canvas was the only real thing on earth.
In his drawing of Kitaj, the line is blurred between his subject’s concentration and his own. Is it really that Kitaj is so immersed in the act of seeing — or that Hockney is, his gaze so rapt upon his friend as to make him able to capture, briefly, what it was like to see through Kitaj’s eyes?
From the first days of their friendship at the Royal College of Art, Hockney and Kitaj existed on two planes for one another: human and artistic. As each worked to find the right way to reflect their own humanity in their art, their concepts of both themselves and their work influenced one another. “I was painting about my Jews and my books and Hockney was just coming out of the closet, so I said paint that,” Kitaj once said. And another time: “He switched to his gay culture as I began on my Jewish culture in its first forms.”
When Kitaj married the painter Sandra Fisher in 1983 — after Hockney introduced them in the 1970s — Hockney was his best man. “Those orthodox Rabbis had never seen such a gang under the chuppa,” Hockney told 032c magazine in 2025. At that moment, he said, “life for me had reached a dangerous perfection.”
A “dangerous perfection.” What did that mean? I see a glimpse of the answer in Hockney’s drawing of Kitaj — a sense of connection so complete as to threaten the boundaries of selfhood. At Kitaj’s wedding, Hockney experienced that threat as a kind of transcendence: Look, how wonderful being alive among other people can be. The experience captured in his drawing of Kitaj is different, but related. It’s that of a kind of looking, and seeing, that briefly gives total knowledge.
That kind of completeness is one of the aims of friendship, and also of art. There will be much to miss about Hockney, an artist who was easy to love. But the rare experience of absolute immersion that his best work gave its viewers may have made, out of all he accomplished, the biggest splash.
The post The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’ appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner
In last Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Maine, nearly three quarters of voters decided that Graham Platner — Iraq War veteran, oysterman, Reddit misogynist and SS tattoo bearer — was their best hope to defeat the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, come November. While the result was wildly cheered by his supporters, other Democrats and independents were left deeply uneasy.
There are good reasons, philosophical no less than political, for this disquiet. For some Democrats, the winning approach to the election is not necessarily one that leads to victory, but instead one that leads from virtue.
Much attention has been given to the political issues raised by Platner’s candidacy. His embrace of economic populism and excoriation of our country’s oligarchy, his denunciation of forever wars and defense of the common man were and remain compelling stances. That Platner speaks his own mind, and does so simply but rarely simplistically, rather than from a script bolted together by handlers, is clearly a plus as well.
But the matter of his character also raises a serious ethical issue not just for Platner, but also for those who voted for him this spring and plan to do so again this fall. It is less a matter of achieving a good result, than of affirming the good itself.
Moral philosophy comes in three flavors: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. For reasons of space, let’s focus on the first and last. As the name suggests, consequentialism focuses not on the means but instead on the ends. But this does not mean, as some think, that any end can justify any means. Instead, philosophical consequentialists argue that acts must be judged by a simple measure: seeking the greatest good at the least moral cost.
For a hypothetical example, say I have a student who is floundering in one of my classes. They are doing their best, but for various reasons their best will probably not help them avoid a failing grade. Afraid to disappoint or depress the student, I allow them to continue in the class. Consequently, the student sinks rather than swims by semester’s end. Or, instead, I can sit down with the student earlier in the semester and suggest that they withdraw today and try again a later day when they are better prepared. The result is the least cruel and most good: some suffering in the short term rather than greater suffering in the long run.
Yet, consequentialism can be complicated. Consider the election of John Fetterman to the Senate in 2022. Faced by the prospect of voting for the Republican candidate, Democrats and independents gave Fetterman the winning margin despite a stroke he suffered during the campaign, one that raised serious questions about his capacity to hold the office. For reasons that are hard to parse, Fetterman has since broken with his fellow Democrats on several vital issues.
Rather than realizing the greater good, some Pennsylvania voters may now realize their reasoning was misplaced.
This brings us to virtue ethics, which is now enjoying a second wind among moral philosophers. Inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, virtue ethicists are less concerned with actions than they are with character. As the philosopher Todd May writes in his book The Decent Life, the key question for consequentialists (and deontologists) is “How should I act?” But for those who promote virtue ethics, the question is “How should I live?”
By this, they mean what Aristotle seems to have meant: how can we live a happy or flourishing life? The answer is by living that life in accord with virtue.
Simply put, virtues are those traits of character — think bravery and constancy, sagacity and generosity—crucial to human flourishing. And to flourish as humans requires a deep disposition to see and feel, choose and respond to the world and others in ways that align with those virtues. In the words of the late Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher who reintroduced virtue ethics to modern readers, “The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man.”
Inevitably, just as with the other ethical theories, there are problems with virtue ethics. But there are also advantages, principally that it seeks to build character rather than build a calculus of the highest good. This brings us back to Graham Platner. What is at issue with his campaign is not just the character of the candidate, but the character of the nation we wish to realize. The unavoidable question is not whether the ends justifies the means, but whether the means justifies the end—in this case, a nation dedicated not to winning a Senate majority, but to one dedicated to reversing the waning of virtue. Even if this means giving Susan Collins 6 more years.
Modern Jewish thinkers find ties between pagan and Jewish ethics. Yonatan Brafman, who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary, points to fascinating parallels between the writings of Aristotle and the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides. The latter, Brafman suggests, sought various ways to encourage the practice of generosity. “Fulfilling the commandment of matanot le-’evyonim (gifts to the poor) and even prioritizing it over other commandments both expresses and fosters the virtue of generosity,” Brafman writes. “Moreover, in Maimonides’ view, this virtue is central to human flourishing. Generosity enables an individual to achieve divine joy.”
Of course, the exercise of generosity should apply to Platner, a man who insists that he has changed. Come November, we will learn whether this is true for our nation. As for Platner, who insists he has changed, it may take much longer for all of us to know.
The post Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate?
What does Gwyneth Paltrow have to do with a new luxury apartment building in Tel Aviv suburb Herzliya?
Not much, it seems, judging from a new ad that dropped this week. It features Paltrow going on a morning jog in the city — New York City, that is. She wakes up, voices some pat complaints about why “mornings have to be so early” and how her “coffee needs a coffee,” before she heads to Central Park. She comes home, showers, then asks her driver to take her to 51 Park.
Her driver asks if she means New York. “Herzliya, Israel,” she clarifies, smiling into the camera, as though the black SUV can drive across the ocean.
The ad makes so little sense that my first instinct was to think that it must be some sort of AI rendition of Paltrow. But a LinkedIn post about the project, from Gabi Attal, the CEO of the ad agency Why Worry, which made it, says that they did indeed shoot the ad in real life, in New York City, and that Paltrow is the face of the ad campaign behind a luxury apartment building called 51Park in Herzliya.
51Park is the name — though seemingly not the address — of an enormous new apartment complex that does not appear to exist yet; the website for the building is written in future tense. In renderings, two 51-story glossy towers, with — depending on which part of the website you read — either 636 or 733 apartments total, shine over a park. The neighborhood, it promises, is about to become the beating heart of Herzliya, bounded by highways, the light rail and Herzliya Park.
Paltrow, who is Jewish, has hawked a lot of weird products in her time — vagina-scented candles, anyone? And in some ways, the luxury building makes sense as a product for the actress, who has often flaunted her wealthy lifestyle. But everything else about the 51Park campaign places it back into Paltrow’s stranger offerings.
First off, of course, is the simple setting of the ad, which is nowhere near the apartment building Paltrow is lending her face to.
“To bring this architectural masterpiece to the Israeli audience, we needed a figure who effortlessly embodies international elegance, a premium lifestyle and uncompromising quality,” Attal wrote in the LinkedIn post about the ad.
No one behind the ad responded to my questions about how Paltrow was selected except the director’s agent, Tal Nathan, who said that he couldn’t comment beyond saying the actress “looks absolutely fantastic.” Still, Paltrow certainly embodies a certain kind of “premium lifestyle” — her lifestyle brand, Goop (tagline: “beauty as wellness”), sells such wealth signifiers as a $425 black tank top and a $55 “sex oil,” and also partners with other luxury brands to market expensive jewelry, clothing, and wellness accessories via Paltrow’s own website as “Gwyneth’s picks.” (These include a $225 “eyelift bioremodeling peptide matrix” and a cream for “mindfulness and intuition.”)
The actress has made her name, at least since her Oscar win in 1999, by defining an ideal of minimalist, luxurious perfection — one with little care for qualities like accessibility, approachability or reality. (She had to pay a fine after Goop sold bespoke jade eggs promising questionable health benefits for one’s “yoni.”) In fact, part of her allure is her lack of those values. Her aesthetic seeks to soar above plebian concerns like pragmatism or cost. Who cares if that $491 pewter cocktail strainer requires regular polishing to maintain its silver sheen? It’s covetable. Similarly, who cares where your luxury building is, the 51Park ad seems to say; the important part is the luxury.
Still, it seems odd to market the building to Israelis via an ad filmed in New York City, in English. Sure, New York might signify wealth and luxury in the international market. But the ad doesn’t highlight the amenities 51Park actually offers, such as proximity to Herzliya Park; it shows Paltrow in a luxury apartment in New York with convenient access to a different, and more famous, park: Central Park.
Instead, it feels as though the ad is directed at Americans, selling the idea that New York City and Herzliya are the same. That’s patently absurd though — even if we were to equate Tel Aviv and NYC, which are really not very similar outside of being their respective countries’ most cosmopolitan cities, Herzliya is neither; it’s a separate, much smaller city. Which means Herzliya is, at best, Hoboken. Perhaps that’s why Paltrow didn’t even bother flying to Israel to film the ad.
Marketing an Israeli home to Americans, however, is a controversial proposition. Over the past couple of years, Israeli companies selling homes and land to Jewish Americans, often at fairs held in synagogues, have been a target for protests. Sure, Herzliya is not in the West Bank. But for an actor to wade into obvious controversy like this, especially when she has a new major project coming up — starring as Belle Burden in an adaptation of the heiress’ best-selling memoir Strangers — is a confusing choice.
The ad was reposted by viral celebrity gossip account PopBase, leading to thousands of retweets and comments accusing her of supporting, as many commenters put it, “gwynocide.” Others said it was tone deaf to market luxury apartment buildings only a few hundred miles from razed apartments in Gaza, and compared her to the Nazi wife who enjoys her garden outside Auschwitz in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
Yet, in the ad, Paltrow seems blissfully unaware of all that, or at least doesn’t betray the slightest political statement. It’s not the first time Paltrow has been impressively out of step with public opinion — for example, saying that being a mother while working on movie sets is harder than being a “regular” working mother who is not extremely wealthy and famous, or that she would rather die than let her child eat a “Cup-a-Soup” and would rather do crack than eat cheese out of a tin.
Paltrow’s serene smile in the ad implies she can just float above the political realities tied to Israel without touching them. The idea that one can move to Israel and live a life indistinguishable from the one you once had on Park Ave in NYC, is fundamentally a political statement, of course; not everyone has that freedom of movement, whether due to financial or political realities. But Paltrow has not responded to criticism online or to journalists reaching out to ask what she meant to say with the ad. Though she voiced support for the hostages after Oct. 7, she hasn’t implied that her ad for 51Park is any kind of statement. In fact, she’s carefully avoided making one.
Instead, Paltrow — as is so often the case with the actress famed for her snobbery — has demonstrated that she is not as interested in Israel, Gaza, the war, or Judaism as she is in the disembodied ideal of luxury. As she once said, she “can’t possibly pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” The rest isn’t important; she can ignore it.
The post What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate? appeared first on The Forward.
