9 ms·

When Jewish wives beefed with butchers and changed the world

79 points by samclemens 6y ago

shmerl 6y ago
For higher resolution photos: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ggbain/item/2014681484/resource/ https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ggbain/item/20146814... https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.04610/ https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.04610/ https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ggbain/item/2004679521/resource/ https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ggbain/item/20046795...
ablekh 6y ago
Pretty fascinating story. There is so much that I don't know, including history. Learning something new every day ...
teleforce 6y ago
Fun fact, Muslim can eat kosher meats but generally Jews cannot eat halal meats. The main reason is that they are both descendent of Abrahamic based religion that always slaughter their herd animals to eat by the name of one God. Muhammad is a descendent of Ismail while Moses is the descendent of Isaac, both are siblings from the same father Abraham but different mother. Even the original languages for their holy scriptures namely Arabic and Hebrew are very similar by being rooted from the same original Semitic based language.
- tsjq 6y ago
  Is that due to different ways the animals are killed ?
  - rajangdavis 6y ago
    I think the difference is based on who gives the blessing over the meat.
    - names_are_hard 6y ago
      I can't speak for halal, but kosher is not about blessings. In the case of meat, there are a myriad of rules that regulate the production, starting from animal selection (only a kosher species, and then only an animal that meets certain health criteria - a cow with a punctured lung may not be eaten), then the slaughter technique and procedure, then the removal of specific parts of the animal that may not be eaten, salting to remove the blood, and ultimately preparation (no mixing with dairy, etc).
      - tsjq 6y ago
        Curious. Are there scientific basis behind these specifications?(perhaps valid in those historical times?)
        names_are_hard 6y ago
        I have no idea, while I'm no expert in religion I'm positively ignorant about science. But I'll answer anyway. 1) There are a few precepts in the bible that are very much aligned with modern understanding of medicine, such as the law that forbids leaving human feces around (soldiers are to carry a spade among their tools, and to leave camp to defecate and then bury their feces). There are many rules that are aligned with ancient superstitions that may have been thought to be about health (think purity laws) and others that prescribe behaviors that can cause illness (incest). That said, the bible generally does not give safety or health as a reason for a prohibition. Rules are listed with no reason at all, or with an explanation of "purity" or "God will turn His back on you if you leave disgusting things like feces around, and then you'll lose the war". So if indeed these rules were created for health and safety, it's unclear to me if the authors knew that that was the reason or if they were just cargo-culting and guessing. 2) To contemporary devotees of Judaism, pretty much everything I wrote in the previous paragraph is blasphemous. Some would take a harder line than others, but among people who keep the rules strictly (ie not those who kinda-sorta keep the "spirit" of the rules), the attitude is that these things are not up for renegotiation based on new science because _they are not based on science at all_. The reason they do these things is that the literature tells them to, which essentially means that God says so. Why did God say so? For any number of reasons, but probably not because of health or safety. Regardless, getting into God's mind is an interesting academic exercise, and one that occupies a place in "softer" rabbinic literature, but not particularly relevant for the "hard" technical literature that is busy with understanding the rules. tl;dr: there may be something to that, but many religious people would be offended by the idea that these laws are mere health recommendations. Note: I wrote this off-the-cuff, if you're interested in sources leave a comment and I'll dig some up.
  - djur 6y ago
    Muslim and Jewish dietary law are both interpreted in various ways by various authorities (and, of course, adherents follow those laws to various degrees of strictness). So any blanket statement on the subject is going to be incomplete. Under the strictest rules for each, halal meats cannot be kosher and vice versa, because the slaughter must be carried out by a member of the religion. The physical requirements for the initial slaughter are essentially identical. But it's not uncommon for Muslims to view kosher meat as acceptable, at least as an alternative (and there's scriptural basis for this). The reverse really isn't possible because there are more restrictions on how kosher meat is handled after slaughter , most notably the removal of certain fatty tissues, nerves, and veins. More info on that here: http://www.kashrut.com/articles/nikkur/ http://www.kashrut.com/articles/nikkur/
- names_are_hard 6y ago
  Your second paragraph begins with "The main reason is that" by what follows is not really a reason, though it's an interesting tidbit. When kosher and/or halal adherents accept the others' standards, it's because they believe it is at least a strict as their own. Kind of like how a vegetarian will eat food labeled as vegan. But like another commenter pointed out, interpretations of these rules vary widely among practitioners so making blanket statements about who might eat what is difficult.
  - teleforce 6y ago
    Please note that I'm not a scholar of Islamic or Jewish study and don't take my comments seriously. OK I will re-phrase that to "one of the main reasons" since for the meat to be considered halal it needs to fulfill two main requirements. Firstly it must be slaughtered by the name of one God and secondly it must be slaughtered with proper procedures. For most religions, the practices are always come down to spiritual and physical aspects, and as you probably can deduce that the first one is the spiritual aspect of it. Having said that, Quran refer to the Jews and Christians as "People of the Book"[1], and that's the main reason some of their rulings are acceptable in Islam. Another fun fact is that "Moses" is mentioned by name more than any other prophet names including "Muhammad" inside the Quran [2][3], and there is also one Chapter "Mary" referring to the Jesus' mother. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_the_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_the_Book [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_in_Islam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_in_Islam [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophets_and_messengers_in_Islam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophets_and_messengers_in_Isl...
js2 6y ago
Fascinating. I can’t say for sure one of my great-grandmothers participated in this, but I can’t rule it out. I had two great-grandmothers living in the lower east side then. Ethel arrived in 1892 with her family from Pinsk, Belarus and would have been 17. Her mom Annie would have been 36. It could have also been my great-grandmother Rachel who’d arrived in 1897 with her family from Romania. She would’ve been too young in 1902 (13), but her mother Esther would’ve been old enough. Thanks for sharing this!
gfxgirl 6y ago
Super interesting but so conflicted. > Those who insisted on entering the shops were heckled and, on their departure, assaulted. Their parcels of meat were confiscated, hurled into the gutters and sometimes doused with kerosene. Butchers were goaded into closing, and those who refused were attacked. Their inventory was destroyed and in many cases their windows and fixtures were smashed. It's not really a boycott if it's by force It's also not clear if they really had an real impact given > The Justice Department of “trust-buster” President Theodore Roosevelt had taken note, and on May 10, the very day the kosher butchers had first shut down, took the packers to court to force them to cease their illegal practices. In other words the government had independently started suing before the influence of this group. Still super interesting.
ElevenTimesTen 6y ago
Rabbis conspire with slaughterhouses to raise prices to increase profits. Jewish women downstream of the price-hikes kick off an uprising that sounds chaotic and at times brutal. And we are supposed to regard this as a heartwarming story of Jewish-American patriotism? That's a generous interpretation, to put it mildly. It rather plays into some unfortunate stereotypes, and a pro-Jewish author might be advised to keep such history private.
- ohazi 6y ago
  The slaughterhouse bosses, not the rabbis, were the ones who raised prices to increase profits after agreeing with other slaughterhouses to divide the territory and fix prices. The rabbis were brought in to negotiate with the slaughterhouse bosses. They were not conspiring with them.
- dullcrisp 6y ago
  Are we all choosing where we stand on the Jewish question then?
rootsudo 6y ago
"Their parcels of meat were confiscated, hurled into the gutters and sometimes doused with kerosene. Butchers were goaded into closing, and those who refused were attacked. Their inventory was destroyed and in many cases their windows and fixtures were smashed. " So it's okay if they do it, but not okay when it's done upon them? -- I don't get the point of the article, they want a product includes more labor, more time and more duty to a select, niche, market - "Of course, not only kosher meat was affected. Prices rose for everyone. But the Jews were the first to feel the heat because kosher meat was more expensive. Prices had to reflect not only the wages of slaughterers and religious supervisors, but also the cost of transporting live cattle to New York. Because kosher meat had to be salted and soaked in the home within 72 hours of slaughter, it could not, like the non-kosher variety, be killed in Chicago and shipped more cheaply as a carcass." -- "As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it at the time, the women “seem to have imbibed a fundamental principle of Americanism as quickly as any earlier [immigrants] did. They decided that they were unjustly taxed, or charged, which amounts to the same thing for the person who pays, and they went out to find a means to remedy the injustice." I disagree, it's more labour intensive, it's not unjust. Consumers demanded meat a certain way, and then refused to pay more for the product as it was more labor intensive, more transportation intensive, and have specific rituals associated with it. Very disgusting piece of history imo and only further trains social behavior of being angry and making sure no one else has if it you can't. Normal meat was affordable, they decided they wanted to force business to reduce prices of kosher meat which is more labor and transport intensive. That's not okay.
- MaysonL 6y ago
  Bull. The price rise was due to price fixing by a cartel, which was shown in the article.
- dullcrisp 6y ago
  > So it's okay if they do it, but not okay when it's done upon them? What?
- function_seven 6y ago
  Go re-read the article. The anger wasn't that kosher meat was more expensive than non-kosher. Rather it was that the price was hiked 50% in a short time. As a result of collusion among meat packers. As far as their tactics are concerned, article deals with that as well. Sympathetic reports still regarded their actions as "censurable", even if their motives were worthy.
melvinram 6y ago
Why is this on "Hacker News"?
- ROARosen 6y ago
  Did you read the Hacker News welcome page? https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html >> Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads. A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting. What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, perhaps it could be. <<
  - andi999 6y ago
    Wait... there is a welcome page??? How does one find it, if one doesnt know it? Anyway:thanks.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - shock 6y ago
    > Did you read the Hacker News welcome page? From the guidelines: > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
jungletime 6y ago
Kosher slaughter is extra cruel/inhumane. The animal is not stunned during slaughter, while its neck is cut and it is bled out. No good reason what so ever for this practice to be allowed to continue in 2020, other than outdated religious dogma. [Edit] Since I'm already getting downvoted for this comment. Go look up some videos if you don't believe.
- tasogare 6y ago
  Sad you are being downvoted for saying a truism, since if it were a Christian dogma the same people would upvote you instead. I’ll add that nowadays the problem of kosher and hallal meat price is "solved" this way: most animals are killed using one of those rites, and the meat surplus is sold as non-kosher and non-hallal to unsuspecting users. This is something some people advocate to change (speaking of France here) since hallal meat is funding mosquees and other for the safety/animal wellbeing point of view, but entrenched religious lobbying made it fail so far.
- krzyk 6y ago
  And I was very surprised that in my country (non-Islamic, non-Jewish) most of the meat produced is using kosher/halal way because we export most of it. It is quite sad, because I don't think making animals suffer is a good way to go :(
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    The main reason is it's cheaper to kill animals this way. Capitalism has no soul.
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      It's not cheaper. Stunning is cheaper, and can be pretty much completely automated.
  - xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
    I am guessing here, but in South America? Temple Grandin wrote a wonderful (and terrifying) essay about the Kosher/Halal industry and it was pretty eye-opening.
bsaul 6y ago
"Although many of the women had been in the United States for only a short time and could not manage much English, they had already grasped the power of that most American form of expression: protest" i'm sorry, what ?? Does the writer truely believe people in eastern europe at the turn of the 20th century didn't know how to protest ?? Has he ever heard of anarchism and communism ?
xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
I posted this elsewhere but for the uninformed, I found Temple Grandin's article on Kosher/Halal slaughtering really eye-opening. https://www.grandin.com/ritual/kosher.meat.uruguay.html https://www.grandin.com/ritual/kosher.meat.uruguay.html
CyberRabbi 6y ago
Love to learn about our history. Glad to see this is welcomed on hacker news. We need more activism like this for our rights.
Udik 6y ago
The title and conclusions of the article are entirely unsubstantiated: "The spirit and grassroots tactics of the Great Kosher Meat Strike of 1902 would be applied successfully in the early decades of the century in rent strikes, community protests, labor actions, and suffrage demonstrations. " In fact, as the Wikipedia 'boycott' entry shows, while boycotts have been used since ancient times (notably, the American boycott of English goods at the time of the American revolution) the term "Boycott" was born in Ireland in the 1880s and quickly spread around the world; there is no indication in the article itself that this particular instance was either the first or remarkable or that it left any lasting legacy.
known 6y ago
Earth is ~4,000,000,000 years old; Humans are ~200,000 years old; Religions are ~2000 years old; And Earth is Flat as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_writings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_writings "Religion was born when the first con-man met the first fool" --Oscar Wilde (b. 1854)
- baloney1 6y ago
  That's Mark Twain, you idiot! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2taZ8-0EI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2taZ8-0EI

79 points by samclemens 6y ago

For higher resolution photos: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ggbain/item/2014681484/resource/ https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ggbain/item/20146814... https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.04610/ https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.04610/ https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ggbain/item/2004679521/resource/ https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ggbain/item/20046795...

ablekh 6y ago

Pretty fascinating story. There is so much that I don't know, including history. Learning something new every day ...

teleforce 6y ago

Fun fact, Muslim can eat kosher meats but generally Jews cannot eat halal meats. The main reason is that they are both descendent of Abrahamic based religion that always slaughter their herd animals to eat by the name of one God. Muhammad is a descendent of Ismail while Moses is the descendent of Isaac, both are siblings from the same father Abraham but different mother. Even the original languages for their holy scriptures namely Arabic and Hebrew are very similar by being rooted from the same original Semitic based language.

tsjq 6y ago
Is that due to different ways the animals are killed ?
- rajangdavis 6y ago
  I think the difference is based on who gives the blessing over the meat.
  - names_are_hard 6y ago
    I can't speak for halal, but kosher is not about blessings. In the case of meat, there are a myriad of rules that regulate the production, starting from animal selection (only a kosher species, and then only an animal that meets certain health criteria - a cow with a punctured lung may not be eaten), then the slaughter technique and procedure, then the removal of specific parts of the animal that may not be eaten, salting to remove the blood, and ultimately preparation (no mixing with dairy, etc).
    - tsjq 6y ago
      Curious. Are there scientific basis behind these specifications?(perhaps valid in those historical times?)
      - names_are_hard 6y ago
        I have no idea, while I'm no expert in religion I'm positively ignorant about science. But I'll answer anyway. 1) There are a few precepts in the bible that are very much aligned with modern understanding of medicine, such as the law that forbids leaving human feces around (soldiers are to carry a spade among their tools, and to leave camp to defecate and then bury their feces). There are many rules that are aligned with ancient superstitions that may have been thought to be about health (think purity laws) and others that prescribe behaviors that can cause illness (incest). That said, the bible generally does not give safety or health as a reason for a prohibition. Rules are listed with no reason at all, or with an explanation of "purity" or "God will turn His back on you if you leave disgusting things like feces around, and then you'll lose the war". So if indeed these rules were created for health and safety, it's unclear to me if the authors knew that that was the reason or if they were just cargo-culting and guessing. 2) To contemporary devotees of Judaism, pretty much everything I wrote in the previous paragraph is blasphemous. Some would take a harder line than others, but among people who keep the rules strictly (ie not those who kinda-sorta keep the "spirit" of the rules), the attitude is that these things are not up for renegotiation based on new science because _they are not based on science at all_. The reason they do these things is that the literature tells them to, which essentially means that God says so. Why did God say so? For any number of reasons, but probably not because of health or safety. Regardless, getting into God's mind is an interesting academic exercise, and one that occupies a place in "softer" rabbinic literature, but not particularly relevant for the "hard" technical literature that is busy with understanding the rules. tl;dr: there may be something to that, but many religious people would be offended by the idea that these laws are mere health recommendations. Note: I wrote this off-the-cuff, if you're interested in sources leave a comment and I'll dig some up.
- djur 6y ago
  Muslim and Jewish dietary law are both interpreted in various ways by various authorities (and, of course, adherents follow those laws to various degrees of strictness). So any blanket statement on the subject is going to be incomplete. Under the strictest rules for each, halal meats cannot be kosher and vice versa, because the slaughter must be carried out by a member of the religion. The physical requirements for the initial slaughter are essentially identical. But it's not uncommon for Muslims to view kosher meat as acceptable, at least as an alternative (and there's scriptural basis for this). The reverse really isn't possible because there are more restrictions on how kosher meat is handled after slaughter , most notably the removal of certain fatty tissues, nerves, and veins. More info on that here: http://www.kashrut.com/articles/nikkur/ http://www.kashrut.com/articles/nikkur/
names_are_hard 6y ago
Your second paragraph begins with "The main reason is that" by what follows is not really a reason, though it's an interesting tidbit. When kosher and/or halal adherents accept the others' standards, it's because they believe it is at least a strict as their own. Kind of like how a vegetarian will eat food labeled as vegan. But like another commenter pointed out, interpretations of these rules vary widely among practitioners so making blanket statements about who might eat what is difficult.
- teleforce 6y ago
  Please note that I'm not a scholar of Islamic or Jewish study and don't take my comments seriously. OK I will re-phrase that to "one of the main reasons" since for the meat to be considered halal it needs to fulfill two main requirements. Firstly it must be slaughtered by the name of one God and secondly it must be slaughtered with proper procedures. For most religions, the practices are always come down to spiritual and physical aspects, and as you probably can deduce that the first one is the spiritual aspect of it. Having said that, Quran refer to the Jews and Christians as "People of the Book"[1], and that's the main reason some of their rulings are acceptable in Islam. Another fun fact is that "Moses" is mentioned by name more than any other prophet names including "Muhammad" inside the Quran [2][3], and there is also one Chapter "Mary" referring to the Jesus' mother. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_the_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_the_Book [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_in_Islam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_in_Islam [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophets_and_messengers_in_Islam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophets_and_messengers_in_Isl...

js2 6y ago

Fascinating. I can’t say for sure one of my great-grandmothers participated in this, but I can’t rule it out. I had two great-grandmothers living in the lower east side then. Ethel arrived in 1892 with her family from Pinsk, Belarus and would have been 17. Her mom Annie would have been 36. It could have also been my great-grandmother Rachel who’d arrived in 1897 with her family from Romania. She would’ve been too young in 1902 (13), but her mother Esther would’ve been old enough. Thanks for sharing this!

gfxgirl 6y ago

Super interesting but so conflicted. > Those who insisted on entering the shops were heckled and, on their departure, assaulted. Their parcels of meat were confiscated, hurled into the gutters and sometimes doused with kerosene. Butchers were goaded into closing, and those who refused were attacked. Their inventory was destroyed and in many cases their windows and fixtures were smashed. It's not really a boycott if it's by force It's also not clear if they really had an real impact given > The Justice Department of “trust-buster” President Theodore Roosevelt had taken note, and on May 10, the very day the kosher butchers had first shut down, took the packers to court to force them to cease their illegal practices. In other words the government had independently started suing before the influence of this group. Still super interesting.

ElevenTimesTen 6y ago

Rabbis conspire with slaughterhouses to raise prices to increase profits. Jewish women downstream of the price-hikes kick off an uprising that sounds chaotic and at times brutal. And we are supposed to regard this as a heartwarming story of Jewish-American patriotism? That's a generous interpretation, to put it mildly. It rather plays into some unfortunate stereotypes, and a pro-Jewish author might be advised to keep such history private.

ohazi 6y ago
The slaughterhouse bosses, not the rabbis, were the ones who raised prices to increase profits after agreeing with other slaughterhouses to divide the territory and fix prices. The rabbis were brought in to negotiate with the slaughterhouse bosses. They were not conspiring with them.
dullcrisp 6y ago
Are we all choosing where we stand on the Jewish question then?

rootsudo 6y ago

"Their parcels of meat were confiscated, hurled into the gutters and sometimes doused with kerosene. Butchers were goaded into closing, and those who refused were attacked. Their inventory was destroyed and in many cases their windows and fixtures were smashed. " So it's okay if they do it, but not okay when it's done upon them? -- I don't get the point of the article, they want a product includes more labor, more time and more duty to a select, niche, market - "Of course, not only kosher meat was affected. Prices rose for everyone. But the Jews were the first to feel the heat because kosher meat was more expensive. Prices had to reflect not only the wages of slaughterers and religious supervisors, but also the cost of transporting live cattle to New York. Because kosher meat had to be salted and soaked in the home within 72 hours of slaughter, it could not, like the non-kosher variety, be killed in Chicago and shipped more cheaply as a carcass." -- "As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it at the time, the women “seem to have imbibed a fundamental principle of Americanism as quickly as any earlier [immigrants] did. They decided that they were unjustly taxed, or charged, which amounts to the same thing for the person who pays, and they went out to find a means to remedy the injustice." I disagree, it's more labour intensive, it's not unjust. Consumers demanded meat a certain way, and then refused to pay more for the product as it was more labor intensive, more transportation intensive, and have specific rituals associated with it. Very disgusting piece of history imo and only further trains social behavior of being angry and making sure no one else has if it you can't. Normal meat was affordable, they decided they wanted to force business to reduce prices of kosher meat which is more labor and transport intensive. That's not okay.

MaysonL 6y ago
Bull. The price rise was due to price fixing by a cartel, which was shown in the article.
dullcrisp 6y ago
> So it's okay if they do it, but not okay when it's done upon them? What?
function_seven 6y ago
Go re-read the article. The anger wasn't that kosher meat was more expensive than non-kosher. Rather it was that the price was hiked 50% in a short time. As a result of collusion among meat packers. As far as their tactics are concerned, article deals with that as well. Sympathetic reports still regarded their actions as "censurable", even if their motives were worthy.

melvinram 6y ago

Why is this on "Hacker News"?

ROARosen 6y ago
Did you read the Hacker News welcome page? https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html >> Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads. A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting. What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, perhaps it could be. <<
- andi999 6y ago
  Wait... there is a welcome page??? How does one find it, if one doesnt know it? Anyway:thanks.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- shock 6y ago
  > Did you read the Hacker News welcome page? From the guidelines: > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

jungletime 6y ago

Kosher slaughter is extra cruel/inhumane. The animal is not stunned during slaughter, while its neck is cut and it is bled out. No good reason what so ever for this practice to be allowed to continue in 2020, other than outdated religious dogma. [Edit] Since I'm already getting downvoted for this comment. Go look up some videos if you don't believe.

tasogare 6y ago
Sad you are being downvoted for saying a truism, since if it were a Christian dogma the same people would upvote you instead. I’ll add that nowadays the problem of kosher and hallal meat price is "solved" this way: most animals are killed using one of those rites, and the meat surplus is sold as non-kosher and non-hallal to unsuspecting users. This is something some people advocate to change (speaking of France here) since hallal meat is funding mosquees and other for the safety/animal wellbeing point of view, but entrenched religious lobbying made it fail so far.
krzyk 6y ago
And I was very surprised that in my country (non-Islamic, non-Jewish) most of the meat produced is using kosher/halal way because we export most of it. It is quite sad, because I don't think making animals suffer is a good way to go :(
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  The main reason is it's cheaper to kill animals this way. Capitalism has no soul.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    It's not cheaper. Stunning is cheaper, and can be pretty much completely automated.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  I am guessing here, but in South America? Temple Grandin wrote a wonderful (and terrifying) essay about the Kosher/Halal industry and it was pretty eye-opening.

bsaul 6y ago

"Although many of the women had been in the United States for only a short time and could not manage much English, they had already grasped the power of that most American form of expression: protest" i'm sorry, what ?? Does the writer truely believe people in eastern europe at the turn of the 20th century didn't know how to protest ?? Has he ever heard of anarchism and communism ?

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago

I posted this elsewhere but for the uninformed, I found Temple Grandin's article on Kosher/Halal slaughtering really eye-opening. https://www.grandin.com/ritual/kosher.meat.uruguay.html https://www.grandin.com/ritual/kosher.meat.uruguay.html

CyberRabbi 6y ago

Love to learn about our history. Glad to see this is welcomed on hacker news. We need more activism like this for our rights.

Udik 6y ago

The title and conclusions of the article are entirely unsubstantiated: "The spirit and grassroots tactics of the Great Kosher Meat Strike of 1902 would be applied successfully in the early decades of the century in rent strikes, community protests, labor actions, and suffrage demonstrations. " In fact, as the Wikipedia 'boycott' entry shows, while boycotts have been used since ancient times (notably, the American boycott of English goods at the time of the American revolution) the term "Boycott" was born in Ireland in the 1880s and quickly spread around the world; there is no indication in the article itself that this particular instance was either the first or remarkable or that it left any lasting legacy.

known 6y ago

Earth is ~4,000,000,000 years old; Humans are ~200,000 years old; Religions are ~2000 years old; And Earth is Flat as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_writings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_writings "Religion was born when the first con-man met the first fool" --Oscar Wilde (b. 1854)

baloney1 6y ago
That's Mark Twain, you idiot! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2taZ8-0EI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2taZ8-0EI