Featherweight Joe Bernstein (November 7, 1877 – 1931) was one of the first great boxers to emerge from New York's Lower East Side.

On July 27, 1896, he met Dolly Lyons, a well known Jewish Bantamweight and Featherweight in an eight-round draw at the Palm Athletic Club in New York.

Two months later, Yanger beat Attell on April 24, 1902, in a very rough nineteenth-round TKO in St Louis but was never given the title, though the bout was advertised as a Featherweight championship by some sources.

Bernstein was unable to continue fighting at the Eureka Athletic Club in Baltimore in the seventh round, and therefore lost the match by technical knockout.

The Butte intermountain noted the fight was before a sizable crowd of 3000, and that "there is little doubt that Bernstein would have been able to stay the limit but for the fact that in the seventh round he sustained a broken bone in his left hand."

Washington D.C.'s Evening Star noted that Bernstein failed to throw Walter Lovelace for a fifty dollar purse at the Empire Theatre on November 6, 1902.

Partly as a tribute to Bernstein, novelist Peter Levine wrote that Eastern European Jewish immigrants who flooded into America during this period, "came out to cheer on their landsmen...and enjoy a sense of independence and freedom in a...male world that combined fierce ethnic loyalties in praise of athletes that personified both ethnic pride and...the importance of individual effort, hard work, discipline, and competition as the keys to succeeding as Americans.