Focused on the events of July 30, 1902 in New York City, Scott Seligman's latest book, The Chief Rabbi's Funeral: The Untold Story of America's Largest Antisemitic Riot picks up only a few months after the events of his 2020 book, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City.

This narrative history looks at the career of Jacob Joseph, the first and only chief rabbi of New York City, from his arrival in 1888 to his death and the communities posthumous embrace of him. As part of his widely attended funerary ceremony, his casket was taken around New York City to several different places of worship. As the procession made its way through the city, it passed the R. Hose & Co. printing press factory, where workers above pelted the mourners with trash, tools, metal bits used for the presses and fired hoses of scalding water. When the police arrived, having only been at the front and back of the procession, instead of seeking to resolve the situation, they instead quickly drew their clubs and cleared the street.

The outrage fueled an investigation into police conduct and shows the growing power of Jews as their own voting block and economic power. The antisemitism wasn't new, but now Jews had enough power to do something about it, leading to changes in the running of the police.

In both the introduction and conclusion, Seligman links this historic event to the present US where cases of harassment and antisemitic assaults have reached a record high.

While the majority of the book is informative and traces the event from the unification and arrival of Rabbi Joseph through the litigation and justice of the riot, for me the introduction relied far too much on the effort of creating a hook, it depicts people going through their normal days with the foreshadowed little did they know...

Recommended reading for US Historians, readers or researchers of minorities in America or antisemitism.