Food riots have occurred throughout history when supply has been short or prices too high, most commonly in developing countries. Often they are caused when a staple like bread, rice, or meat is suddenly out of reach; at other times anger stems from poor economic conditions overall, when everything is suddenly too expensive or bellies are not full. At such times, consumers don’t consider the costs of inputs or the logistics of getting their food to market. They care only about whether it is for sale at an affordable price.
But the Lower East Side of Manhattan was not starving in 1902 when thousands of Jewish women took to the streets in a quest for affordable kosher meat, nor was America a poor country. Although many immigrant Jews lived hand-to-mouth existences, their boycott was never really about hunger. Nonkosher meat was always available and more affordable. But to families that felt duty bound by history, culture, and religion to honor the commandments in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus and the rulings in the Talmud that specified in exacting detail which foods were permitted and how and by whom they had to be slaughtered and processed, it was simply not an option.
This book tells the inspiring story of immigrant Jewish women in early twentieth-century New York who, certain of the righteousness of their cause, discovered their collective power and found their political voice. It is an early case study in consumer activism, all the more impressive because it involved mostly uneducated women, some barely conversant in English, with few resources at their disposal. That they managed to organize themselves overnight to challenge powerful, vested corporate interests in their new homeland is remarkable.
For most, it was their first foray into the political and economic arena, and they were treading new ground. Though they could look to the nascent labor movement for inspiration, community organizing was a broader and more complex task than unionizing, requiring educating vast numbers of their compatriots about supply and demand economics and persuading them of the value of short-term sacrifice. And despite the attendant violence, in the main they approached the task in a disciplined and strategic manner, never losing sight of their goal.
Whatever relevant experience these women might have brought with them when they crossed the Atlantic, resistance in America called for breaking out of traditional roles and employing unfamiliar tactics. And it was an America that was itself in the throes of rapid social change.
Here you will also find the very much related story of the Beef Trust, a cartel of greedy, Chicago-based packers colluding to corner the national market for meat. Behind closed doors, they cooperated to depress the prices they paid for cattle, pressure the railroads for kickbacks in shipping fees, manipulate the nation’s supply of beef and other commodities, and, ultimately, gouge consumers.
At precisely the same time as the Lower East Side boycott, President Theodore Roosevelt set out to expose and break up their syndicate. His administration’s prosecution of the beef barons provided the backdrop against which New York’s Jews struggled to achieve their goal of affordable kosher meat.
Although the true villains in the drama were mostly gentile businessmen located hundreds of miles away, the local scene pitted Jew against Jew: housewives against butchers, butchers against wholesalers, the secular against the Orthodox, Eastern Europeans against Germans, honest rabbis against corrupt ones. It also exacerbated other frictions, such as those between the Jewish community and the police.
The women’s need to build a coalition to help carry their water dictated reaching out to congregations, unions, mutual aid societies, philanthropic and political groups, all of which were male-dominated, and eventually—and probably inevitably—men assumed some control over leadership of the effort. But it was, at its outset at least, conceived, organized, and executed entirely by female homemakers.
Issues of authenticity and quality of the meat supply were also front and center during the boycott, and herein you will meet Jacob Joseph, brought to America at great expense and with great fanfare as the chief rabbi of New York. Charged with bringing order to a chaotic and corrupt system of kosher slaughter, he was ultimately no match for the forces marshaled against him.
But most importantly, you’ll meet several extraordinary women who, facing a common, existential threat, rose to the occasion and pulled off an impressive feat of grassroots organization. Their pioneering efforts inspired later generations of activists who, in their own times, would heed the call to fight back when rents rose too high, staple foods became out of reach, women sought voting rights, or employers underpaid or mistreated workers.
This book nearly didn’t get written. Not because I wasn’t strongly drawn to the subject. Immigrant Jewish women not unlike my own female forebears, their backs to the wall, waging a battle for their way of life in an era in which it wasn’t thought proper for women to demonstrate in the streets certainly seemed like a topic that merited further exploration. An excellent, seminal article written about their struggle in 1980 by the late Dr. Paula E. Hyman, a professor of Jewish history at Yale, had intrigued me. Later writers had also taken note of their strike, but no one since Professor Hyman had dug more deeply into it than she had.
I realized that, if told in depth, the story of the strike needed to address a number of questions, not all of which had been within the scope of Hyman’s groundbreaking research. Why did the price of meat rise so suddenly and substantially? Who was behind it? Why were Orthodox Jews affected more than others? What went into getting kosher meat to the tables of the immigrants on Manhattan’s East Side, and how is it that the women came to blame fellow Jews for the price rise? Why did they point fingers at their own retail butchers, and not the slaughterhouses, packers, or cattlemen?
I also resolved to dig into some issues Dr. Hyman did address. How did these women, unsophisticated and foreign, decide on a boycott as the means to solve their problem? Who were they, and what influenced them? Where did they get the organizational skills to execute such a massive undertaking with so little preparation and so few resources? And finally, why is their story important? Were their efforts merely a flash in the pan, or did they yield lasting effects?
It seemed that the story would best be told from these women’s point of view and in the context of what was going on in their lives, but I was foiled by the fact that a century had passed and materials about them as individuals were scarce. Nor did any of them leave memoirs or go on to greater achievements. On the contrary; to a woman they sank right back into the obscurity from whence they had come when it was all over.
In the face of these obstacles to creating accurate, three-dimensional portraits of the women and their inner lives, others might have turned to fictionalization. But because I’m a historian and not a novelist, the idea of fabricating anything about them was anathema to me. I enjoy creating narrative nonfiction, but I’ve always been averse to inventing dialogue that was never spoken or projecting thoughts or feelings onto people who may never have thought or felt them. I don’t judge other writers who choose this route; it’s just not for me.
So reluctantly, I let them go and moved on to another project.
Two years later, unable to put them entirely out of mind, I decided to revisit the topic. This time, I turned to the tools of genealogical research. I consulted city directories, ship passenger manifests, and court and census records in addition to books and newspaper reports. I also traced and contacted descendants of several of the movement’s leaders.
With help, I obtained access to a rich vein of sources that had previously eluded me. The contemporary Yiddish press provided more detail and nuance than the English-language papers, and many insights into how the Jewish community itself viewed the events. Papers representing both socialist and Orthodox Jewish points of view survive for that period, and their coverage offered up much compelling material. The Yiddish newspapers provided another window into the personalities of the women who led the boycott, and helped depict the novelty, creativity, and power of their common efforts.
My American-born maternal grandmother, Celia Sternrich Abrams, only ten years old at the time of the strike, was living with her family on Orchard Street. I’d like to think that her mother, Austrian-born Mollie Zimmerman Sternrich, joined the boycott and stopped buying kosher meat, as most Jewish women of the neighborhood did. My paternal grandmother, Belarus-born Gussie Rudbart Seligman, would not arrive in America until 1907, but she was in nearby Newark in time for some of the later, copycat strikes.
I would like to dedicate this book to my female immigrant ancestors and, more broadly, to the immigrant Jewish women who, when it looked as if they could not feed their families and remain true to their religious beliefs, took matters into their own hands in 1902, brazenly forcing their way into the public sphere and launching a brave and successful effort to shape their own future in their new homeland.