Tradesmen or Religious Functionaries? Laboring Shehitah in Early Twentieth Century Chicago

• In Event: Jews, Labor, and the Politics of Work

Abstract

This paper will examine the history of the Chicago shohetim and their efforts to unionize between the 1910s and 1920s. It will highlight the role of the shohetim in Chicago's increasingly secularized kosher food trades, as well as the struggle over who would regulate this industry. The paper will also examine the struggles of the shohetim with the city's rabbinical bodies over working conditions and with secular Jewish labor activists over religious observance, and highlight their short-lived alliance with the predominantly non-Jewish Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butchery Workers Union. This paper will build on recent scholarship on the history of kashrut in America as well as labor issues within a variety of Jewish religious occupations, in a variety of settings. As the study of North American Jewish labor history has in recent years moved beyond its traditional focus on New York City, Chicago's Jewish labor history has become recognized as a focus of comparative study, given the Chicago Jewish community's distinct status as a major American Jewish community that was at a significant geographical remove from New York during the peak period of Eastern European Jewish migration to the United States. This remove would have shaping effects on Chicago's Jewish labor movement that included closer interactions with the city's non-Jewish labor movements and working class. While this greater degree of interaction would begin with the clothing workers, it would eventually spread to the kosher food trades, and have profound effects on Chicago's shohetim. In addition, during the period this paper covers, the effort of the shohetim to organize would be shaped by the secularization of the kosher meat industry, the locally focused economy that encouraged the development of what has been termed “metropolitan unionism,” and the large-scale meatpacking industry for which Chicago became both famous and infamous. These combined circumstances would continuously challenge the shohetim to negotiate their dual identities as skilled tradesmen and religious functionaries, as they simultaneously sought to negotiate better working conditions.

author

• Susan Roth Breitzer, National Coalition of Independent Scholars