But even in free America there were those who took offense at the very existence of the Jewish East Side, a place they believed to be darkly menacing. According to the New York Times, “This neighborhood . . . is the eyesore of New York and perhaps the filthiest place on the western continent.  It is impossible for a Christian to live there because he will be driven out, either by blows, or by dirt and stench.  Cleanliness is an unknown quantity to these people.  They cannot be lifted to a higher plane because they do not want to be.”

There was worse to come.  In 1908, Theodore Bingham, the police commissioner of New York City, wrote an article entitled, “Foreign Criminals in New York.”  He claimed that half the criminals in the city were Jews, “burglars, firebugs, pickpockets and highway robbers.”

In response to this outburst, mass meetings of protest flared up in the Lower East Side halls.  The Yiddish press exploded; every Jewish organization denounced Bingham as an anti-Semite.  Leaders of the long-established Jewish community — such as Louis Marshall, the great constitutional lawyer and Jacob Schiff, the financier — protested more sedately, and within weeks Bingham apologized, “frankly and without reservation.”

Joan Dash, We Shall Not Be Moved: The Women’s Factory Strike of 1909 (New York: Scholastic, Inc., 1996).