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

Abstract

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