“The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906” by Scott D. Seligman

The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906

Scott D. Seligman
Potomac Books (2025)
ISBN: 978-1640126541
Reviewed by Joan Kirschner for Reader Views (12/2025)

The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle Over Christianity in the Public Schools, by Scott D. Seligman,relates how nearly one hundred twenty years ago, a controversy erupted over the celebration of Christmas in New York City Public Schools.

On Christmas Eve, just before the children were dismissed for the holiday break, pageants including performances of Christmas carols and hymns, readings from religious texts, and the display of Christmas trees regularly took place in schools across the city’s five boroughs.

Seligman describes how one of these celebrations took place in December 1905, at an elementary school, Public School (P.S.) 144, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, an expanding community that was then overwhelmingly, almost entirely, Jewish. For context, around the turn of the twentieth century, he relates, the total Jewish population of New York City numbered close to one million, or approximately twenty percent of those calling the city home.

The school enrolled both boys and girls up through the eighth grade. Its principal was Frank Harding, an experienced and well-educated administrator who was also a deeply religious Presbyterian.

Harding’s pre-Christmas assembly included readings from a book that included numerous quotations from the New Testament as presented in the King James Bible. While this was obviously offensive to Jews, it was also repudiated by Catholics, who used a different set of texts. After the readings, Harding remarked, “Christ blesses all but the hypocrites, and the hypocrites are the people who do not believe in him. He forgives all but those, so, boys and girls, be like Christ”.

He was challenged by a Jewish eighth-grader, Augusta Herbert, who asked him, “Mr. Harding, don’t you think that preaching about Christ belongs to the Sunday school or church and not to a public school?”

This exchange would ultimately lead to legal action and hearings in the courts that the author discusses in depth. It prompted the involvement of a large contingent of prominent clergy and other figures in the Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic communities. The issue was widely covered in the press, which in those pre-radio/pre-TV days, included many daily newspapers in English and Yiddish, with substantial circulations and readerships.

Throughout the book, Seligman skillfully weaves in the specifics and evolution of this incident, and how it led to Jewish parents boycotting 1906 Christmas pageants in the schools by keeping their children home on the scheduled day. He also addresses the larger issues of antisemitism and its manifestations, citing various examples, and the parental fear of the proselytizing of their children. He addresses the ongoing conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, and looming overall, the subject of prayer and religious expression in schools funded by taxpayer dollars in New York City and other cities and states, in 1906 and onward.

Seligman takes readers through developments in this issue in subsequent decades, including an unsuccessful measure taken in some locations to compose and implement a compromise school prayer that would satisfy Protestant and Catholic Christians and Jews. He explains how this proposed solution failed to address other minorities, including atheists and agnostics, and members of other religious creeds.

This highly controversial topic continues to simmer today, as Seligman reminds us. It boils over regularly in the courts country-wide, up to and including cases brought before the Supreme Court, and with extensive coverage in the media. At a time of heavily reported incidents of increasing antisemitism, and deep schisms in our political landscape that concern the religious practice of many groups, Seligman’s well-documented book is highly pertinent.

The book is well-organized with a list of the illustrations, and a guide to the key figures (Dramatis personae) provided. The author’s Preface explains his background on the topic and his intent. The writing is scholarly, but clear and compelling. It is strongly supported by research, which is documented in the notes at the end of the book. The chronology of the events and the list of publications for further reading will also be helpful to those who want to learn more.

I personally found this book relevant: I recall reciting the Lord’s Prayer in my public-school classroom in the early 1960s, until Supreme Court decisions changed what was permissible, and it was replaced with “a moment of silence” following the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle Over Christianity in the Public Schools, by Scott D. Seligman, will find its audience among those who are interested in history, particularly in topics of importance to the Jewish community, and the specific period and events in New York City that Seligman covers here. It will also be relevant to those with an interest in current affairs, and the politics around religious practice in public schools, and readers who are concerned with the historic principle of the separation between church and state and how it was and is applied.