Topica: The Johns Hopkins University Press American Jewish History
Topica: The Johns Hopkins University Press American Jewish History
Topica: The Johns Hopkins University Press American Jewish History
Topica
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
~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
-
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:
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~Historioseory
80 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY
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
-
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D. D. Moore: Signposts 81
.
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
-
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
-
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
women
-
as actors in history to be left out of the em
on women. When the call for papers for the 1978
-
I
-
* grphy
called attention to rabid language used against Jewi
-
--
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 ~
-
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," -
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
~ 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
-
/
consciousness and sense of community.
She writes her thesis with vigor and clarity and it
paragraph in full:
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
*
-
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
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86 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY
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
-
-
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
-
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
-
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
/
on kosher meat through a boycott. As the scholarsh
- -
connectio
as well as another meat boycott in 1917, different
these protests. She closes on note of realism. "Becau
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
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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
-
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
-
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
-
↑
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
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histry of
history
90 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY
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
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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