Reviewed by: The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City by Scott D. Seligman Caroline Luce (bio) Scott D. Seligman, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City. Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books, 2020. 276 pp. Against the backdrop of a devastating pandemic—the effects of which have been disproportionately borne by women, especially women of color, and which has inspired an explosion of rent strikes, mutual-aid efforts, mass protests, and civil disobedience—I was happy to hear of a new book exploring one of the most famous uprisings in American Jewish history: the kosher meat boycotts of 1902. Forty years have passed since Paula Hyman published her seminal essay about the episode, during which time scholars have introduced a range of new frameworks for examining women's political participation, and the time seems ripe for reconsideration. Central to Hyman's essay were questions of consciousness: were the women boycotters, most of them poor immigrant housewives without formal education, self-conscious political actors motivated by the radical politics and class-based solidarity of their contemporaries who worked outside the home? Or were these spontaneous "riots" fueled by indignation and outrage? Hyman found evidence of political sophistication among the boycotters and argued that by centering their fight for affordable food, historians could recover their contributions to contemporaneous political and labor movements. Five years later in another important essay, Dana Frank echoed Hyman's findings, showing that in their cost-of-living protests during World War I, working-class housewives advanced their own mode of politics based on analyses of power and the potential of their gendered activism to affect the economic system in which they were enmeshed. Countering the popular consensus among leading (male) historians at the time, both Hyman and Frank located intention and organization in events viewed as impulsive "riots" and, in turn, asserted the full humanity of the boycotters. Just because they were poor immigrant women who worked in the home did not mean the protestors were without convictions, savvy, and political consciousness. In that assertion, Hyman and Frank joined other 1980s feminist and postcolonial scholars who advanced new ways of recognizing the agency and resistance of subaltern populations. Seligman frames his book as an effort to supplement Hyman's research and address unanswered questions. His account certainly adds a significant number of new details based on a meticulous survey of both the Yiddish and English-language press. He illuminates the web of interests involved in producing and distributing kosher meat, connecting the professionalization of kashrut observance, technological advancements [End Page 450] in agriculture and transportation, and corporate consolidation of both slaughterhouses in the region and the national meat trust to explain the sudden and significant rise in the price of kosher meat. He writes with particular sympathy for the plight of mom-and-pop retail kosher butchers who, long before they were subject to boycotts, had been abused by greedy landlords and "market forces" that favored bigger chain stores (225). By doing so, he reveals both the boycotters and the shopkeepers they protested as victims of Gilded Age market concentration. But when it comes to the immigrant housewives, Seligman's reexamination is less productive. Offering very few new biographical details, he devotes all of five pages to the question of "what knowledge" the women might have "possessed," recalling boycotts, strikes, and labor organizing among Jews in both Europe and the United States as ambient influences without acknowledging the participation of mothers, wives, and daughters in those efforts (105, 110). He references arguments made in the Yiddish press—condemning, in particular, socialist writers like Abraham Cahan for using the women's boycott to "indict the entire capitalist system" (102, 119)—but does not consider that housewives might have read and agreed with those arguments or been socialists themselves. Dismissing such political-economic interpretations as "conspiracy theory," he denies the women boycotters any motivations beyond their maternal concerns, insisting "all they knew, and all they cared about, was that their families required kosher meat and that such meat had become unaffordable" (149, 105). Although Seligman claims to agree with Hyman's...