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 says, 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” 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,” 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........

© The Times of Israel