This is the first of a three part series. Click here to learn how to win her new book There Shall Be No Needy.

I was recently invited to participate in a panel discussion (along with Nigel Savage of Hazon and Nell Geiser of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice) following the June 10 performance of Give Us Bread, a new play about the 1917 New York food riots, which were largely led by Jewish immigrant women.

Wartime food prices had reached levels that few families could afford, and thousands of women throughout New York took to the streets in protest. These women knocked over and set fire to pushcarts, while the police struggled to gain control of the crowd. The New York Times reported that, during a community meeting, “a woman appeared in the meeting room, followed by five little children, and forced her way to the speakers’ platform. She cried out that her husband earned but $8 a week as a tailor’s helper and that she was unable to buy enough food for her babies.” (“Pushcarts Burned in Riots over Food,” Feb. 20, 1917)

This incident represents only one instance of Jewish women’s consumer activism in the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1902 and 1935, Jewish women participated in boycotts of kosher butchers, rent strikes, and protests against overpriced food.

Through these protests, these women—who had little positional power in society—used the power that they did have to force changes in the economic structure of their society. As Rebecca Ablovits, a participant in a 1902 boycott of kosher meat, said to the judge trying to force women off the streets, “We women see how skinny our children are, and how our husbands no longer have the strength to work, because others want to get rich from their toil. If all women followed us, they would not be able to drain the money we have earned with our blood in exchange for nothing but bones.” (qtd. In Nancy L. Green, Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora, Berkeley: University of California, 1998, p. 123)

Today, as the economic crisis has contributed to rising food costs, we have seen food riots in some parts of the world. But even more strikingly, Americans and others have increasingly come to realize the extent to which our economic system makes it difficult for ordinary people to scrape by. In the 1990s, the wage gap in the United States grew to levels not seen since the 1920s—when so many Jewish women and others took to the streets to protest inequality. Today, workers earning a minimum wage cannot afford basic necessities, and even those technically living above the poverty line struggle to make ends meet. In 2008, U.S. Conference of Mayors reported that, in twenty-five cities surveyed, 40% of those applying for emergency food assistance were employed.

If any good comes out of this economic crisis, it will be a collective re-imagination of what the United States economy might look like in the future. In this re-imagination, I hope that ordinary men and women, regardless of positional power or wealth, will contribute to creating a society in which even a tailor’s assistant can afford to feed, house, and otherwise care for his or her family.

Click here to purchase tickets for Give Us Bread. The June 10 performance will be followed by a special panel discussion on Judaism and social justice, featuring Nigel Savage (Hazon), Rabbi Jill Jacobs (Jewish Funds for Justice) and Nell Geiser (Jews for Racial and Economic Justice).
Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the Rabbi-in-Residence of Jewish Funds for Justice and the author of There Shall be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law and Tradition (Jewish Lights 2009)