presents a new book by Scott D. Seligman
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Home Author News and Events Reviews Other Works Purchase Contact |
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The
Great Kosher Meat War
of 1902 |
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IMMIGRANT HOUSEWIVES AND THE RIOTS THAT SHOOK NEW YORK CITY |
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 IN
THE WEE HOURS of May 15, 1902, some 3,000 immigrant Jewish women
quietly took up positions on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower
East Side. They had assembled in the pitch black in squads of
five, determined to shut down every kosher butcher shop in New
York’s heavily Jewish quarter.For years the women had patronized these butchers, who, like them, were observant Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe who had recently arrived in America. But the latest jump in the price of kosher meat had made it unaffordable, and their religious beliefs allowed them no other variety. Convinced that their butchers were gouging them, they saw no choice but to take to the streets.  Customers who crossed their picket lines were heckled and
assaulted, their parcels of meat hurled into the gutter.
Butchers who refused to close were attacked, their windows
smashed, stocks ruined, fixtures destroyed. Brutal blows from
police nightsticks sent many women to local hospitals and others
to court. But the strikers persevered, and soon Jewish
housewives in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem, Newark and even
Boston joined them in solidarity, and all the kosher butchers in
the metropolitan area either shut their doors or had them shut
for them.Contemporary newspapers described it as a modern Jewish Boston Tea Party.  The true villains in
the drama, however, were not the local butchers, but rather a
cabal of Chicago-based meat packers who had formed a “Beef
Trust” and were colluding to corner the national market for
meat. Behind the scenes, they cooperated to manipulate the
supply of beef sent to the cities and gouge consumers. Just as
the upstart women were laying waste to New York's Lower East
Side, “trust-buster” President Theodore Roosevelt launched an
effort to break up the meat cartel that would take its members
it all the way to the Supreme Court. The
book also tells the story of Jacob Joseph, the first and only
Chief Rabbi of New York, a Talmudic scholar brought to America
at great expense to oversee the sanctity of the kosher meat
supply in the city, among other tasks. The long knives were out
for him, however, and the changes he instituted met with fierce
resistance among corrupt players in the meat industry and Jewish
consumers. This first
book-length account of the protest tells the inspiring story of
immigrant women who, certain of the righteousness of their
cause, discover their collective power as consumers and find
their political voice. With few resources and little experience,
but steely determination and a clear understanding of the threat
their families faced, these mostly uneducated wives and mothers,
some barely conversant in English, organized themselves
overnight into a potent fighting force, challenged powerful,
vested corporate interests and emerged victorious.Their first foray into the political and economic arena marked the dawn of Jewish female political activism in America, and it would set a pattern future generations would employ to address injustice whenever and wherever they experienced it.     |
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| © Copyright 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 by Scott D. Seligman. All Rights Reserved. | |
