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The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902

Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City

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Pub Date Dec 01 2020 | Archive Date Dec 31 2020


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Description

2020–21 Reader Views Literary Award, Gold Medal Winner
2021 Independent Publisher Book Award, Gold Medal Winner
2020 National Jewish Book Award, Finalist
2020 American Book Fest Best Book Awards Finalist in the U.S. History category
2020 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Finalist 

In the wee hours of May 15, 1902, three thousand Jewish women quietly took up positions on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Convinced by the latest jump in the price of kosher meat that they were being gouged, they assembled in squads of five, intent on shutting down every kosher butcher shop in New York’s Jewish quarter.

What was conceived as a nonviolent effort did not remain so for long. Customers who crossed the picket lines were heckled and assaulted and their parcels of meat hurled into the gutters. Butchers who remained open were attacked, their windows smashed, stock ruined, equipment destroyed. Brutal blows from police nightsticks sent women to local hospitals and to court. But soon Jewish housewives throughout the area took to the streets in solidarity, while the butchers either shut their doors or had their doors shut for them. The newspapers called it a modern Jewish Boston Tea Party.

The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 tells the twin stories of mostly uneducated women immigrants who discovered their collective consumer power and of the Beef Trust, the midwestern cartel that conspired to keep meat prices high despite efforts by the U.S. government to curtail its nefarious practices. With few resources and little experience but steely determination, this group of women organized themselves into a potent fighting force and, in their first foray into the political arena in their adopted country, successfully challenged powerful, vested corporate interests and set a pattern for future generations to follow.


 

2020–21 Reader Views Literary Award, Gold Medal Winner
2021 Independent Publisher Book Award, Gold Medal Winner
2020 National Jewish Book Award, Finalist
2020 American Book Fest Best Book Awards...


Advance Praise

“Master storyteller Scott D. Seligman weaves together the disparate narratives of New York’s 1902 kosher meat boycott, America’s first and only chief rabbi, and the notorious Meat Trust. Deeply researched and engagingly written, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 takes its delighted readers back in time to the teeming streets of the Lower East Side and the rough-and-tumble world of its immigrant Jews.”—Pamela S. Nadell, author of America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today

 

“The first blow-by-blow account of the kosher meat boycott of 1902 and the Jewish immigrant women who devised and promoted it. Anticipating both the consumer movement and contemporary Jewish women’s activism, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 shows how commerce, labor, food, and gender explosively combined at a tempestuous moment in the history of New York City.”—Jonathan D. Sarna, University Professor and Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, and author of American Judaism: A History

“Master storyteller Scott D. Seligman weaves together the disparate narratives of New York’s 1902 kosher meat boycott, America’s first and only chief rabbi, and the notorious Meat Trust. Deeply...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781640123588
PRICE $32.95 (USD)
PAGES 320

Average rating from 24 members


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