From December 26, 1907, to January 9, 1908, ten thousand tenants, predominantly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe living in New York City’s Lower East Side, took part in a historic rent strike. During an economic depression causing mass unemployment and grinding poverty, landlords tried to hike rents by 33 percent. With their cry to “fight the landlord as they had the Czar,” the tenants won a partial victory, with rents significantly reduced for two thousand households.

The movement established a tradition of militant working-class housing campaigns that eventually contributed to winning vital rent controls that still protect millions of the city’s tenants today. As the COVID crisis continues, New York City renters are again organizing against rapacious landlordism.

The 1907–8 rent strike was led by a remarkable woman, Pauline Newman, who had arrived in the United States from Lithuania in 1901, aged about nine (her birth certificate was lost along the way). She was one of 2 million Jews who arrived in the country between 1881 and 1924, escaping antisemitic pogroms. Still a child, she started work, first making hairbrushes and then in the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.