When Jews really did wage a ‘war on Christmas’

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 ,”