The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City by Scott D. Seligman

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City by Scott D. Seligman Melissa R. Klapper (bio) The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City By Scott D. Seligman. Lincoln, NB: Potomac Books, 2020. xxxiii + 276 pp. Reviewing The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 in the summer of 2021, it is impossible not to think about the historical parallels between the "riots" of more than a century ago and the marches following the murder of George Floyd during the summer of 2020. Obviously the direct circumstances and the scale are not at all the same, but the spread of the protests beyond the initial location; the connections between local and national conditions; the conflation of protests and riots; the dismissal of instigating figures as naïfs in over their heads; the wildly varying media coverage; the pronouncements of government officials at the local, state, and national levels; and quite possibly the long-lasting impact of participation are, at the least, reminiscent of one another. Equally central to any review of Scott D. Seligman's book is the bright light still cast by Paula E. Hyman's pathbreaking article "Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902," published in American Jewish History in 1980. This was an early example of American Jewish women's history and has arguably remained one of the most influential scholarly articles in the field. While Seligman certainly fleshes out the story of the 1902 protests in much more detail than was possible in an article, it is unfortunate that he did not learn more from Hyman's work than the basic narrative. Even in 1980, without the benefit of the decades of corroborating research to come, Hyman understood that the women she was writing about were savvy political actors who strategically deployed gender within economic and religious constraints to achieve their goals. When they worked with [End Page 287] male allies, as they did during the kosher meat boycott and within the labor movement more generally, they were making a calculated choice rather than bowing to the seemingly inevitable dominance of men. As Hyman would argue in later work, immigrant Jewish women's activism stemmed not only from their immediate circumstances, but also their long experiences as public actors in eastern Europe, where the gender norms were quite different than in their new homeland. Seligman spins a good yarn, but The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 is fundamentally flawed by its consistent dismissal of the Jewish women on the Lower East Side and in other thickly populated Jewish enclaves as ignorant, uneducated housewives who could not possibly have brought preexisting political acumen to their actions. His thin knowledge of modern Jewish women's history—and American Jewish history more generally—limits the scholarly impact of the book. Still, there are pleasures and contributions to be found in The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902. Seligman provides both a helpful list of the major cast of characters, many of whom will be unknown to most readers, and a detailed timeline of the boycotts, which lasted for several weeks and spread to places other than the Lower East Side. The book is smoothly written and adopts a sort of mini-cliffhanger style so that readers will want to proceed immediately from one chapter to the next. To his credit, Seligman integrates Yiddish periodical coverage of the boycott as well as intensive research into the mainstream press, and he frequently points out the different approaches his various sources took to the events as they unfolded. He also, importantly, highlights the experiences of the Jewish retail butchers who were caught between the demands of consumers and the pressures exerted by the wholesale kosher meat slaughterers, who themselves were at the mercy of the national Beef Trust, which was being investigated under antitrust laws at the very moment of the boycott. The chapters on the history of beef supply chains and the special circumstances of bringing kosher beef to market tell a fascinating tale. Seligman's contribution on this front is significant, as he...