Jewish Women on Strike
The Forward
1902
The entire city is talking about the tumult, the uproar in the Jewish Quarter that began after the price of meat started to rise.
The prices for meat not only went up in the Jewish Quarter. The Trusts are also ripping off the small butchers among the gentiles and the masses at large. Not long ago, the gentiles also came to know how sweet it is to…
Creator Bio
The Forward
The Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) is an American Yiddish periodical that was launched on April 22, 1897, in New York City by the socialist activists Abraham (Abe) Cahan and Louis Miller. Initially, the Forverts was a Yiddish socialist daily newspaper that emerged as a successor to the socialist newspaper Di arbeter tsaytung. It promoted socialist ideas and trade unionism among Yiddish-reading Jewish immigrants. In 1903, Cahan became the sole editor in chief and remained in this position until 1951. With a circulation of 120,000 copies in 1912 and more than 275,000 by the early 1930s, the Forverts was for decades the most widely read and influential Yiddish newspaper in the world. In addition to socialist and progressive editorials on political and social matters, it offered advice columns aiming to ease immigrant adaptation with practical insights, English lessons, a rich selection of Yiddish literary writing: stories, essays, and serialized novels, and news coverage of American and world affairs of interest to Jewish readers. Over time, its political line shifted from revolutionary socialist to support for Roosevelt’s Democratic Party and New Deal and concerns for the situation and fate of the Jewish people came to loom larger in its coverage. Now known as the Forward, the periodical continues to be published online in English and Yiddish.
This article, published on May 16, 1902, describes Jewish women who had launched a consumer “strike” against local kosher butchers in response to what many saw as price gouging. Thousands of women in New York City’s Lower East Side participated in picket lines; this boycott spread to Jewish communities throughout the city and across the country.