In 1902, the funeral of Chief Rabbi Jacob Joseph in New York’s Lower East Side turned violent when antisemitic factory workers and police attacked mourners, sparking outrage and reform across the city.

SYNOPSIS

The Chief Rabbi's Funeral: The Untold Story of America's Largest Antisemitic Riot by Scott D. Seligman

On July 30, 1902, tens of thousands of mourners lined the streets of New York’s Lower East Side to bid farewell to the city’s chief rabbi, the eminent Talmudist Jacob Joseph. All went well until the procession crossed Sheriff Street, where the six-story R. Hoe and Company printing press factory towered over the intersection. Without warning, scraps of steel, iron bolts, and scalding water rained down and injured hundreds of mourners, courtesy of antisemitic factory workers. The police compounded the attack when they arrived on the scene; under orders from the inspector in charge, who made no effort to distinguish aggressors from victims, officers began beating up Jews, injuring dozens.

To the Yiddish-language daily Forverts (Forward), the bloody attack on Jews was not unlike those that many Russian Jews remembered bitterly from the old country. But this was America, not Russia, and the Jewish community wasn’t going to stand for such treatment. Fed up with being persecuted, New York’s Jews, whose numbers and political influence had been growing, set a pattern for the future by deftly pursuing justice for the victims. They forced trials and disciplinary hearings, accelerated retirements and transfers within the corrupt police department, and engineered the resignation of the police commissioner. Scott D. Seligman’s The Chief Rabbi’s Funeral is the first book-length account of this event and its aftermath.

Gold Medal for the 2024 Reader Views Literary Awards in History
Winner of the 2024 Reader Views Literary Awards in Regional: North-East
Silver Medal for the 2025 IPPY Award
Finalist for the 2024 Best Book Award from American Book Fest 
Honorable Mention for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book Awards

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott D. Seligman is a national award-winning historian and biographer with a special interest in the history of hyphenated Americans. He holds an undergraduate degree in American history from Princeton University and a master's degree from Harvard University.

Fluent in Mandarin, he lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China for eight years and reads and writes Chinese. He has worked as a legislative assistant to a member of the U.S. Congress, lobbied the Chinese government on behalf of American business, managed a multinational public relations agency in China, served as communications director of a Fortune 50 company and taught English and Chinese. 

He is the author of twelve books, including The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots that Shook New York City, which won gold medals in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards and the 2020-21 Reader Views Literary Awards; A Second Reckoning, which won a gold medal in the 2021 Foreword Indies Book of the Year awards; The Third Degree: The Triple Murder that Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice, which won a gold medal in the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards and The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo. He is also co-author of the best-selling Cultural Revolution Cookbook and Now You're Talking Mandarin Chinese.

He has published articles in Smithsonian Magazine, The Atlantic, the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, The Hill, the China Business Review, Tablet Magazine, New York Jewish Week, The Forward, New York Jewish Week, China Heritage Quarterly, Bucknell Magazine, Howard Magazine, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center blog, the New York Almanack blog, the Granite Studio blog and Traces, the Journal of the Indiana Historical Society. He lives in Washington, DC.