A valuable history of violent assault finds newfound relevance.
Revisiting the largest violent antisemitic incident in U.S. history.
Known as “Jacob the Sharp” for his wisdom, Jacob Joseph of Lithuania came to America in 1888 to serve as chief rabbi of New York City. He died in 1902, and his funeral cortege on July 30 of that year drew tens of thousands of mourners to the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, home to many Jewish immigrants. As Seligman writes in his revealing history, when the procession passed the R. Hoe & Co. printing press factory, workers on the floors above pelted the mourners with “iron nuts and bolts, flat irons, screws, tools, bricks,” and more. Worse, arriving police officers “drew their billy clubs and started beating up Jews.” Hundreds suffered injuries. The resulting outrage compelled New York’s Jewish community to demand five investigations into police conduct, including the first citizens’ committee in the nation to investigate an ethnic riot. Seligman shows how popular revulsion to the horrific antisemitic violence unified New York City’s fractious Jewish community, the Russian and largely Orthodox newcomers downtown with the German and largely Reform Jews uptown. The author’s account portrays a Jewish community learning how and when to deploy its newfound political clout. He writes that the Anti-Defamation League reported that “2023 marked the high-water mark for antisemitic assaults, harassment, and vandalism” in the U.S.—there were 161 violent assaults in 2023. “Had the ADL been around and been counting, however, they would have exceeded that number on just one day in 1902.” Seligman’s retelling of this largely forgotten incident of anti-Jewish violence could hardly be more timely. In 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray found that antisemitism fueled 63% of religious hate crimes in the U.S., though Jews make up only 2.4% of the population. The horrific 1902 riot does not seem so far in the past.
A valuable history of violent assault finds newfound relevance.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781640126183
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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