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 intended to shut down every kosher butcher shop in New York’s Jewish quarter. Customers who crossed picket lines were heckled and assaulted, their parcels of meat hurled into the gutter. Butchers who remained open were attacked, their windows smashed, stocks ruined, equipment destroyed. Soon Jewish housewives throughout the area took to the streets in solidarity in a protest the newspapers called a modern Jewish Boston Tea Party. With few resources and little experience but a great deal of steely determination, these women organized themselves into a potent fighting force and, in a milestone in the history of Jewish-American women, successfully challenged powerful vested corporate interests and set a pattern for future generations to follow.

Scott D. Seligman is a writer and historian. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning The Third Degree: The Triple Murder That Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice (Potomac Books, 2018) and The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post and the Seattle Times, among other publications.

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