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Signposts: Reflections on Articles from the Journal's Archive: How a Kosher Meat Boycott
brought Jewish Women's History into the Mainstream: A Historical Appreciation1
Author(s): DEBORAH DASH MOORE
Source: American Jewish History, Vol. 99, No. 1 (January 2015), pp. 79-91
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 Signposts: Reflections on Articles from
the Journal's Archive

How a Kosher Meat Boycott brought Jewish Women's

History into the Mainstream: A Historical Appreciation1
DEBORAH DASH MOORE

~Historiography
In 1980 Paula Hyman published an article in
History on an obscure three-week boycott of kos
New York City that would subsequently revolutio
women's history, bringing it into the mainstream
history.1 "Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest
Kosher Meat Boycott of 190z" was not the first
Jewish women reflecting the impact of the feminis
several influential articles, one by Alice Kessler-H
women labor organizers in the garment industry an
Schwartz Seller on the education of immigrant
States, considered significant activities of Ameri
/ migrants.3 However, Hyman's was the first to co
Jewish women's activism within the context of Jew
Historiography history. By devoting attention to married Jewish w

Historical -
also deliberately engaged emerging paradigms th
Jewish women in the paid labor force as significant

contine
-

migrant politics and culture. As she introduced mar

-
activism into American history, she challenged th
emer women to labor history where their strikes and
-

mob
-

Historic
I
serious scholarship.4 In the process she broadened
contextuals -

historical

with larger 1. This article, drawn from the inaugural lecture of Paula E.
at Yale endowed by her husband, Stanley Rosenbaum, was o
relegation
avericer 14, 2013. I decided to take the liberty of focusing specificall

history
ship and using some of my own personal knowledge based on
2. Paula E. Hyman, "Immigrant Women and Consumer Pro
f Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902," American Jewish History 70:

immigrant All future references to this article will be page numbers in th

3. Alice Kessler-Harris, "Organizing the 'Unorganizable': T
politics - Their Union," Labor History (Winter 1976): 5-23. Maxine Schw
of the Immigrant Woman, 1900-1935," Journal of Urban H
cute 4. See, in addition to Kessler-Harris, "Organizing the 'Uno
scholarship by Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land

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 ~Historioseory
80 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

history in the United States and drew attention to

as sites of political activism. Finally, with this arti
whole new field of historical scholarship on Amer
Her article on the kosher meat boycott of 1902 s
case study to illuminate gender dynamics and econ
the immigrant world of New York City that reverber
confines of its place and era. It pointed toward fre
>
Jewish modernization both in Europe and the Unit
-

would subsequently articulate in her influential vo

Assimilation in Modern Jewish History.5 Most im
-
these Lower East Side housewives she brought Jewish
-

historical
- consciousness. In addition, the article con -

activism
-
with her historical professionalism, chart
scholars
- would
- subsequently follow.6
As a feminist, Paula Hyman knew that women h
tory but in the 1970s they were mostly invisible. Sch
(Worse, many Jewish historians denigrated both w
study them.) Politically engaged feminists like Hy
-

activism had precedent, but without historical sch

-

critical knowledge. Hyman employed a number of

-- - H
American Jews to the historical importance of women
& essays on Jewish women published in
importance
of
Jew historical
general
vative Judaism (1972)7 and Congress Monthly (19
jews
audience of affiliated American Jews. These serve
Jewish Woman in America (1976), a jointly autho
-

on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Re

Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Tu
York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), Susan Glenn
Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell
Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and
the United States, 1900-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North
5. Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jew
and Representation of Women (Seattle: University of Washing
6. For an analysis of her scholarship on French Jews, see Richa
An Emancipating Experience: The Jews of France in Paula Hy
and Jewish History, ed. Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Das
Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 367-82.
7. Paula Hyman, "The Other Half: Women in the Jewish T
Judaism (Summer 1972): 14-21. Reprinted in The Jewish Wom
(New York: Schocken, 1976): 105-113.
8. Paula Hyman, "Looking for a Usable Past," Congress M
10-15. Reprinted in On Being a Jewish Feminist, ed. Susan
Schocken, 1983): 19-26.

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 D. D. Moore: Signposts 81

wrote as a graduate student together with Charlotte Baum and Sonya

Michel.9 This explicitly feminist history, published by a trade press,
reached an even broader audience than her essays.
In The Jewish Woman in America Hyman had written sections that

.
narrated a transnational history of Jewish women, looking at German
F -

Jewish
- immigrants and their gender roles in Europe and the United States
volcesras and comparing them to Eastern European immigrants. Researching Jewish
gender
-

18 women in the United States, she produced innovative scholarship that

settines internation broadened the scope of modern Jewish history. She also demonstrated
graspof Jewish as a modern European Jewish historian that American Jewish history
lay within her purview. Indeed, Elyman considered American Jewish
history
water history as part of modern Jewish history. Writing her chapters for the
book, she introduced topics rarely broached by historians at that time.
For example, in the chapter on labor, "Weaving the Fabric of Union
ism: Jewish Women Move the Movement," she devoted several pages
not only to gender bias and discrimination against women in the gar
ment industry but also to sexual abuse. (132-36, 144-48) Despite this
accomplishment, Elyman was aware of academic bias C against writing
C
popular, not to mention feminist history. So she kept the book off of
-

her curriculum vita for over a decade.

This reluctance to allow The Jewish Woman in America to stake an
-

academic claim for a feminist and gendered interpretation of American

Jewish history
- influenced her decision to research and write the kosher
meat boycott article. This essay examines her path leading from the
-

O book, a product of Hyman's feminism and the place where she did her

/.
first work in American Jewish history, to her article. A brief analysis of
the article will show how it addressed multiple audiences, including im
attrgument
migrant historians and those European historians interested in women's adressed

[ many ardines
-

political activism (especially their roles in food riots), in addition to her

primary audience of Jewish historians.
The article began as a paper read at the Berkshire Conference on the
History of Women. The Conference itself started in 1973 as Women's
History was emerging as a field, although there had been a regular gath
ering dating back to the 1930s of women historians who did research
in various areas. The Conference's initial 1973 meeting attracted three
hundred participants, far more than anticipated. The 1974 conference
organization at Radcliffe College drew a thousand, an enormous number for those
years.10 Recognizing the growing importance of the Berks, as the Con
men

9- Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America
(New York: Dial Press, 1976). Future references will be page numbers in text.
10. http://berksconference.org/history/; accessed June 14, 2014.

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 82 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

ference came to be called, for women's history, Hy

history to be part of this intellectual exchange. She n

women
-
as actors in history to be left out of the em
on women. When the call for papers for the 1978
-

Holyoke came out, Paula was visiting me with her

College, where I was teaching Jewish history in the Re
On that 1977 summer visit we talked about the im
historians appearing on the program at the Berks -

Paula might propose as a topic. The labor historian

I
-

S had recently published a provocative op-ed in the

In the piece, titled "As for the '02 Kosher-Food Ri
-
Hisario -

* grphy
called attention to rabid language used against Jewi
-

to condemn and contextualize similar terms employ

who participated in looting that occurred during t -

--
blackout in New York City.11
Gutman had previously mentioned the kosher
major article, "Work, Culture and Society in Indus
1815-1919," published in the American Historical R ~

There he had argued for the importance of culture -

class social history and used the boycott to illustrate a

of a broad desire on the part of workers to seek a
S
The editors of America's Working Women: A Docu
-
Hisovirgraphy
1600 to the Present (1976) picked up on Gutman's
York Times 1902 editorial condemning the immigr
-
and published newspaper articles on the "food riots
But in this particularly hot summer when the Ne
fearfully followed the serial murders of "Son of S
seeking to give a history lesson that might ->
make New Significan
their revulsion toward the mostly African America
He condemned unpardonable language that describ
"the
-> night of the animals," characterizing
-

-
looters

G
jackal pack." Such language had historical preceden
-

/
*A
Ii. Herbert G. Gutman, "As for the '02. Kosher-Food Rioter
zi July 1977, p. 2.3.
iz. Herbert G. Gutman, "Work, Culture and Society in Ind
1815-1919," American Historical Review 78:3 (June 1973), pp
13. "Brooklyn Mob Loots Butcher Shop," and "Butchers Ap
tection," in Rosalyn Baxandall, Lynn Gordon and Susan Rever
Women: A Documentary History 1600 to the Present (New Yor
PP- 432_37

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 - significe (NVT)
D. D. Moore: Signposts 83
elhod-sources
had been used against immigrant Jewish women. Gutman quoted not
only from the New York Times of 190z but also from Irving Howe's
bestselling, World of Our Fathers, that had appeared the previous year,
the same year as The Jewish Woman in America. Gutman hammered
Method
home his point: "The animal metaphor always serves a base function," -

he wrote. "It separates the behavior of the discontented poor I(striking,

rioting, looting, boycotting) from the conditions that shape their dis
analyze
content. Animal behavior, it is wrongly believed, is 'natural' and 'law
lenguase
it
less'—therefore inexplicable. The best that can be done is to
how restrain
delegitimizes
it." By reminding readers to think of the world of "our mothers and
Rehetorical / people
grandmothers" and to recognize how wrongly they were tarred as "a -

pack of wolves," Gutman hoped to inspire empathy and understanding

-

Metlerd Argument(we should have

for contemporary poor and foreign New Yorkers.14
~

Gutman's op-ed unleashed a flood of letters, very few of which seemed

to have been inspired to extend sympathy to the current looters. Instead,
empethy)
they rallied to support the kosher meat rioters even as the letter writers
(most of whom appeared to be Jewish) distinguished between rioting
about food prices as opposed to looting such commodities as cameras
and televisions. (In fact, Gutman made a similar point about riots ver
sus looting in his scholarly article.15) Many extolled their hardworking
forbears who put themselves on the line to better society rather than
just seeking "selfish gain."16 Only a handful acknowledged the power of
animal language to separate the poor from those who are comfortable.
The labor historian Joshua Freeman, in his 2000 history of the work
ing class in New York City, observed that a subsequent Times editorial
-
Historiogra
"left unaddressed the utter lack of empathy among the letter method
writers for
&
New York's poor," not to mention "the meanness and self-satisfaction
NYTerchive
that pervaded their outrage at Gutman's linkage of their ancestors with
contemporary rioters . . . ."I7 ~esponses
These recent political uses of the kosher meat boycott attracted
Hyman's attention as a politically involved city resident. But she was
interested in more than comparisons with contemporary rioters. Her
politics extended specifically into the realm of feminism as well as the
academy. The kosher meat boycott itself intrigued her and, equally
important, she wanted to examine it as part of Jewish history. Gutman

14- Gutman, "As for the '02 Kosher-Food Rioters ... p. 23. Emphasis in the original.
15. Gutman, "Work, Culture and Society," p. 576.
16. "Disorders of '02 and '77: Readers Replies," New York Times, 3 August 1977, p. ?
17. Freeman also discusses a vitriolic attack by Midge Decter in Commentary on
Gutman's "truly disgraceful" article. Joshua Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and
Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 281-82.

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 looks
author so

84 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY e archies

Subrece
~A inter
-da
had not looked at the Yiddish press in his scholarly
that reduced what could be said about the boycott
potentially offered an alternative understanding. At
dish journalists articulated
on
-
-
viewpoints that expres
women boycotters. More importantly, consideri Argurat
English sources was critical to presenting the koshe

~ engraspects
part of both American and Jewish history as well
The result—a brilliant article that achieved her aaim
European and American historians' analyses of stree
ots, women's roles as activists, and the gendered cha
Jewish community. Now it is time to consider the a
achieved her goals.
The opening sentence articulates Hyman's brea
"Women have always participated in politics." (91)
women's political activism has regularly been overlo
tal fact of that participation cannot be denied. With
Hyman situated her own profound political commit
She goes on to offer examples drawn from Europe
England and France, thus setting her subject—a kos -
Reasons
within a grand tradition of women's revolutionary
-

Hyman then turns to her specific topic of immigrant

quotes one of those juicy New York Times attacks
Gutman also cited. But she specifically mentions "
going about" the city "with petroleum destroying g
set fire to the shops of those against whom they ar
quickly reveals what the women were trying to do
of fundamental questions:
-
what impelled women to
Spontaneous
-
rage? Women's inclination to riot? Is t
a pre-industrial sensibility as Gutman had argued?
to each of these three hypotheses. Instead she propo
exposes much about immigrant Jewish women's self-pe

/
consciousness and sense of community.
She writes her thesis with vigor and clarity and it
paragraph in full:

Arquit Despite their superficiality to earlier food riots, the k

-
1902 give evidence of a modern and sophisticated polit
ing in a rapidly changing community. With this issue
food, immigrant housewives found a vehicle for politic-

O-
articulated a rudimentary grasp of their power as cons
-managers. And, combining both traditional and moder
porarily turned their status as housewives to good adv
-

neighborhood
- network to stage a successful three-week

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 D. D. Moore: Signposts 85

meat shops throughout the Lower East Side, parts of upper Manhattan and
-
the Bronx, and Brooklyn. The dynamics of the kosher meat boycott suggest
that by focusing almost
- exclusively upon organized political activity in the
labor movement and socialist parties, historians have overlooked the role of

- women. Although for a great part of their- life absent from the wage-earning
market, immigrant Jewish women were not apolitical. They simply expressed

*
-

their political concerns in a different, less historically accessible arena—the

neighborhood—where they pioneered in local community organizing. (92.-3)

Hyman then footnotes a Hampshire College undergraduate student

paper written by Daphne Kis as another example to support her argu
~Histoiugrony
ment.18 Her decision to recognize and credit young scholars making
-
early forays into Jewish women's history reflected Hyman's feminist
- politics and intellectual generosity just as her conclusion that married
immigrant women had pioneered in local community organizing drew
upon her own experiences in anti-war activism. Handing out leaflets in
Brooklyn together with Marion Kaplan expanded Paula's consciousness
of the processes of female community activism. This paragraph and the
article would similarly combine Hyman's continuing political and per
sonal commitments with her exceptional historical acumen.
*
-
Hyman then launches into a narrative of the origins of the May 14th
strike, drawing upon the Yiddish Daily Forverts for a colorful account

drTriasumen
of women's self-perceptions. Women knew how to make a strike, averred
-

hantre
Mrs. Levy, unlike the retail kosher butchers, who had half-heartedly
opposed the rise in meat prices. Hyman also notes the role of restaurant
owner Sarah Edelson, as well as the specific streets (Monroe and Pike)
where the women started to gather support. Additional juicy quotes

&C come from the Forverts, including the admonition from a sheitel-wearing
striker to a woman buying meat for her sick husband that "a sick man
can eat tref meat." With this quote, Hyman reminds her reader that this
event belonged in Jewish as well as American history. The two Yiddish
-

/ -
terms—sheitel and tref—signified internal Jewish arguments among the
women as well as their gendered commitments to a religious culture that

met extended far beyond the Lower East Side. Hyman would use the Yid
dish press to argue cogently for the religious knowledge, commitment,
-
and competence of these immigrant housewives, especially when they
subsequently entered synagogues to disrupt the reading of the Torah

broader greded commitment

t
reliziors
*
18. Daphne Kis did not become an historian but went on to earn an MBA at di
NYU In
and
then served as owner, CEO and president of EDventure Holdings. She remained a feminist
activist committed to women and entrepreneurship, is a leader in the technology revolution,
married and raised two daughters, http://www.daphnekis.com/; accessed June 14, 2014.

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86 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

because a matter of justice was at stake. In short,

how to build an effective movement of consumer
appearance as mere housewives. entiment
By Sunday, May 18th, a mere four days after it star
spread beyond the Lower East Side to Harlem, Broo
and the women were ready to organize beyond mas
of women participated in meetings; dozens volunteere
Their presence on the streets in front of kosher butc
aggressiveness in preventing other women from en
purchasing meat led to scuffles with the police and ar
Hyman assiduously identifies the women by name, ide
first names but occasionally only with their husba
Yiddish press, the Orthodox Yiddishes Tageblatt as
Forverts,- she succeeded in uncovering conflict and
the women. Male communal leaders took advantage
-

power between Sarah Edelson, one of the initiators

Caroline Schaatzburg, President of the Ladies Ant
tion later formed to coordinate the boycott. Not to
set up an alternative group. Several days later the
male Retail Butchers affiliated with the boycott
butchers' Beef Trust. With the lines clearly drawn, in
boycotters, and with wide swaths of neighborhood
engaged in the boycott, the wholesale butchers ca
5th, the strike ended. A few of the cooperative bu
been established during the boycott continued to o
price of meat plummeted down to 9 cents wholes
it slowly rose again. Hyman judged the three-week
-
"a qualified success."
- (96)
The story of the boycott's brief history gleaned thro
Hyman as a starting point for further discussion.
-
of social history, she sought to identify these Jew

Jawa
It was not enough that she had named them and an
She wanted to bring them back into history as mu
manuscript census records and city directories she
activists and then generalized from what she found
recent immigrants nor young (mean age of 39); they w
with children, and their husbands worked in typic
tions. Furthermore, their children over age sixteen
Hyman to conclude that they were "not an elite in the
-

a true grass roots leadership." (97)

-
At this point Hyman introduced her forceful ar
the women's politics: they understood supply and
-

*
histum
Succ

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 mad D. D. Moore: Signposts 87

ere
self understandi

/
pain
ist society, they had distinct economic objectives to lower the cost of
meat, and they possessed a clear political strategy. Calling themselves
-

"strikers," the women utilized radical rhetoric reflecting their political

self-understanding and claimed for themselves vaunted American ide
als of freedom of speech. "Thus Lower East Side women were familiar
/ with the political rhetoric of their day, with the workings of the market
economy, and with the potential of consumers to affect the market," she
concludes. (98) One needed to distinguish between impulses that started
Americ
-

the boycott and the actual boycott. And, one had to pay attention to
ideals the neighborhood nexus that sustained the boycott over several weeks
incorpreted and allowed women to recruit each other. Hyman notes the quasi-public
character of neighborhood life that
- encouraged women to exert moral
C
and physical pressure on each other. She calls the immigrant neighbor
itrument
hood "a form of female network," and a "locus of community." (99)
- R e a s o n
As she writes, the women "assumed the existence of collective goals
-

and the right to demand shared sacrifices." (98) Individual preferences

---
- -

had to be subordinated to a collective that was local but also Jewish

and transnational.
-
-
Hyman argued that in general the women secured the support of the
Jewish community. "The climate of the immigrant Jewish community
facilitated the resolute behavior of the women," she contends. (100)
Here one sees her own politics- reappearing in her largely positive as
sessment of most local rabbis. In fact, she cites an appeal by the women
-
for communal ostracism of one rabbi, Dr. Adolph Radin of the People's
Synagogue, who objected to the boycott -
and treated the women rudely
in
-
his synagogue when they interrupted the Torah reading to secure the
men's
-
support. (Radin eventually apologized.) She also notes that the
Forverts condemned collusion between Rabbi Jacob Joseph's son and
the German Jewish beef trust. Although she does not elaborate on this
ethnic competition between German wholesalers (the beef trust) and the
largely eastern European retail butchers, the boycott did expose some

E
of the other fissures among New York Jews. And she detailed efforts by
men to wrest leadership of the boycott from women, often in the guise
of assistance. There were limits on Jewish communal support.
In contrast to the Yiddish press as well as most rabbis and Jewish
Reusen communal leaders, English language Socialist papers criticized the women
Muscationaland their consumer boycott as ineffective politics. Hyman characterized
this stance as more ideologically pure. She also suggested that despite
resien tendencies -by Jewish and labor historians to portray Jewish Socialists

-
as "assimilationist," they
- remained closer to the values of their Jewish

!
community than other American radicals.

figument : &
relivered
pervis zultre
to Jewish
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 88 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

Her conclusions pointed to directions that would

by other historians. First, she noted how highly po
migrants were. Then she observed that the pencha
categorize Jewish immigrants according to ideologi
to the mutability of either immigrant identities or
lines were fluid," she writes, "and socialist rhetoric
the tongues of women who still cared about koshe
Biblical passages in Hebrew, and felt at ease in the
Finally, she looked for precedents in Europe that m
-
impact and cites Hasidic rebbes' calls for passive resista

/
on kosher meat through a boycott. As the scholarsh
- -

Daniel Soyer, Annie Polland and Glenn Dynner w

reveal, future scholars would amplify these conclus

↑ Yet in the end, Hyman did not ignore the rapidi

activists seem to have disappeared from the scene o

Method there would be other forms of neighborhood activism

connectio
as well as another meat boycott in 1917, different
these protests. She closes on note of realism. "Becau

Europe into obscurity with the conclusion of the boycott,

nature of a short-lived grass roots movement, it is -

the impact of
-
the movement upon its participants. How
"it is likely that the political awareness expressed by
not an isolated phenomenon but was communicated eff
and informally, to their younger sisters and daught
kosher meat boycott of r902 served as a prelude to f
also held out the promise of the transmission of po
from one generation of Jewish
-
significance
women to another.
While it is impossible to determine whether the boyc
rect descendants of political activists, their history, to
compellingly by Paula Hyman, has reached thousand
in American universities since 1980. Historians regularl
It appears on many different course syllabi. Ameri
anthropologist, and women's studies scholar, Riv-E
that often her students claim that its introduction

19. See Tony Michels, A Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialist in

MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Daniel Soyer, Jewish Imm
American Identity in New York, 1SS0-1939 (Cambridge, MA: H
1997); Annie Polland, "May a Free Thinker Help a Pious Man? T
'Religious' and the 'Secular' among Eastern European Jewish Im
American Jewish History 93:4 (December 2007): 375-407; Glen
The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford

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 D. D. Moore: Signposts 89

class women's activism is one of the things they most valued about her
course." The boycotters continue to awaken political consciousness and
the possibilities of initiating change on the part of ordinary women, a
message Hyman would have appreciated.
Others have also revisited this article recently as part of an assess
ment of the impact of Paula Hyman's scholarship. Rebecca Kobrin, who
studied with Hyman as an undergraduate at Yale and then returned as
a post-doctoral fellow and colleague, turned to the article in remarks
-

prepared for a panel at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusa

Historique
-
lem in 2013. The article, Kobrin wrote, "revolutionized the way Jewish
female activism was theorized, conceptualized and narrated not only by
Jewish historians, who rarely looked at women or considered them a
subject worthy of research, but also by the growing ranks of scholars in
women's history - who rarely dealt with issues of religion or questions of
lifecycle." In fact, Kobrin contends, it "arguably made a deeper impact
-

on the field of American history and in particular American women's

-

history," than Hyman's later important book, Gender and Assimilation

-

in Modern Jewish History.21

Kobrin observed that the "kosher meat boycott article bridged another
important divide, between labor and consumer history . . . Because
-
of her location as a scholar of European history, Hyman paid attention
to women's activism in consumer protests, a subject that had not yet
- -

been
- treated by American historians in 1980 when her article appeared.
Kobrin pointed to Nancy Hewitt, a historian of United States women's
history, who wrote in a 1985 review of women's history scholarship that
Hyman's article came out at a time when "the notion of a single women's
community rooted in common oppression" was seen as "denying the
-

social and material realities of caste and class in America." Increasingly,

L "the concept of community" which had been the bedrock of American

women's history in the 1970s, had "become problematic for women's

↑
historians."13 But as Kobrin contended, Hyman demonstrated "how
-
'community' was still a valid analytical concept for those interested in
understanding
- how gender operated and shaped the past."14

L Kobrin found inspiration in the article's insistence on an "approach

to analyzing the past on its own terms." Both in her teaching and her

20. Conversation with Riv-Ellen Prell, July 2013.

21. Rebecca Kobrin, "Jewish History Since Gender: A Panel in Memory of Paula Hy
man," paper delivered at the World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem (July 30, 2013).
22. Ibid.
23. Nancy A. Hewitt, "Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women's History
in the 1980s," Social History, 10: 3, North American Issue (October 2985): 300-301.
24. Kobrin, "Jewish History Since Gender."

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 histry of
history
90 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

scholarship, Hyman taught "the critical importance

torical sources for the voices of those who have bee
Kobrin writes, "the- women she found on the front
Daily Forward because they were upset about the p
far from unknown or silent in their day, . . . ."2S T
ences were central to Jewish immigrant history and to
of American Jews.

I
Six years after it appeared, American Jewish historia
reprinted the article in his anthology on The American
(1986) and five years later immigrant historian Geor
it in an anthology on Ethnicity and Gender: The I
(1991 ).26 Seven years after that American Jewish histor
reissued it in his multivolume collection of articles fro
History. Then Jewish women's historian Pamela Na
into her landmark collection of articles on America
History that appeared in 2003. This collection marke
of American Jewish women's history, a burgeoning fie
century. Reflecting recent trends, the volume inclu
written prior to 1990. Hyman's article was one of them
book grew out of Nadell's frustration at the absenc
Jewish women from anthologies of American wom
Hyman's motivations in the 1970s, namely, to have sch
women participate in women's history. The large v
teaching edited by Ellen DuBois and Lynn Dumenil p

-
Nadell.28 However, there is no question that Hyma
over
- into both American and Jewish history in ad
women's history as she had hoped.
References to the article span an even wider rang
ing. A few examples reveal the diversity of its rea -Alyument
in Consumer Boycott: Effecting Change through t
+
the Media as well as in Food, Drink and Identity: C
impact
Drinking in Europe since the Middle AgesSpread
(in this

25- Ibid.
26. Jonathan D. Sarna, ed., The American Jewish Experience (New York: Holmes
&C Meier, 1986); George E. Pozzetta, ed. Ethnicity and Gender: The Immigrant Woman
(New York: Garland, 1991).
27. Pamela S. Nadeil, ed. American Jewish Women's History: A Reader (New York:
New York University Press, 2003). The other pre-1990 article was by Alice Kessler-Harris,
"'Organizing the Unorganizable:' Three Jewish Women and Their Union."
28. Ellen Carol DuBois and Lynn Dumenil, Through Women's Eyes: an American
History with Documents, 2 vol (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2005).

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 y D. D. Moore: Signposts 91

ing discussion of European practices is mentioned). It appears in The

Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to
the Present as well as in Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and
-

Working Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965.

-

With the kosher meat boycott, Paula Hyman found just the women
-
to enter and disrupt Jewish historical consciousness. Ordinary, working
class, married, middle-aged (many of them older than she was when she
wrote the article), these Jewish immigrant mothers possessed simulta
neous commitments - to maintaining Judaism, expressed through their
-

observance
- of kashrut,-and pursuing justice and a fair price on meat,
evidenced
- through their willingness to strike. Their blend of modern
political organizing with a traditional sense of Jewish collective respon
-
sibility illuminated Jewish history's gendered character. Their radicalism
upset the status quo, provoked outrage on the part of "respectable" New
Yorkers that registered in the English language press (not to mention the
fury of judges who chastised the women arrested for protesting), and
revealed possibilities of female activism.1' Through her research Hyman
uncovered a Jewish past that spoke effectively to diverse scholarly and

Tmin
popular audiences. The kosher meat boycott article opened new ways
of conceptualizing and theorizing history. It brought back to life the
voices of those silenced and provided an incisive example of the fusion
of feminism and history.
"Women have always participated in politics," she wrote. Indeed
they have. Hyman's kosher meat boycotters continue to inspire new
generations.

in
D

19- Hyman quotes from the Forward a dialogue of a judge questioning women ar
rested for disorderly conduct. "What do you know of a trust? It's no business of yours,"
a judge condescendingly inquired. Rose Peskin replied, "Whose business is it, then, that
our pockets are empty?" (91)

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