The Radical History of New York City's Jewish Women
Over a century ago, Jewish immigrant women arrived in New York’s Lower East Side from the Russian Empire with nothing. Within a generation, they had pulled off some of the most combative and highly organized labor actions in American history.
Jewish immigrant women faced a stark reality in New York: “It’s the same fight everywhere. In Russia it is the Czar. In America it is the boss and the boss’s money.” Rather than submit to the new tyranny, they organized mass labor action. (Fotosearch via Getty Images)
In the early twentieth century, Jewish immigrant women on New York’s Lower East Side were at the forefront of some of the most militant labor actions in American history. Most had fled poverty and persecution in the Russian Empire, arriving in a country that offered them grueling work in sweatshops and tenements — and little else. What they built in response, through boycotts, rent strikes, and mass walkouts, was a tradition of working-class feminism that has been largely written out of the standard accounts of both the labor movement and American Jewish life.
The following is an excerpt from the book The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters and Firebrands by Donny Gluckstein and Janey Malka Stone (Verso Books, 2026).
“Bravo, Bravo, Bravo, Jewish Women!”
After the turn of the century, the locus of action moved into the community. Home and workplace were, in any case, very intertwined; outwork and sweatshops, peddlers and street shop fronts, seasonal work and a strong sense of community show how important it is to see the Jewish labor movement in New York primarily in terms of the class as a whole, not according to employment status.
Sorry, but this article is available to active subscribers only. Please log in or become a subscriber.