Papers presented by Roger Horowitz since 2019
2025 Atlanta, Georgia
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Roger Horowitz, Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, Hagley Museum and Library
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"Jewish Cuisine and Poultry Markets: From Eastern Europe to America, 1880-1935"
Roger Horowitz, Hagley Library and Museum & University of Delaware
Abstract:
As millions of Jews moved from Eastern Europe to American cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they brought along a prodigious culinary preference for poultry. Folklore and fiction document the patterns of Jewish demand for chicken, goose, and duck that became embedded in social relations in the Pale of Settlement, including the market relations ships between Christian peasants Jewish towns. As immigrant Jews settled in America’s cities, they retained their desire for poultry, in so doing transforming this somnambulant business in their new country. Between 1890 and 1960, millions of live chickens flowed from all over the American countryside to cities where shochets could slaughter them in accordance with Jewish ritual requirements. With their practices traceable through market research and cookbooks, as well as embedded in market prices, Jewish preferences became reflected in certain kinds of preparations and particular times of the year. Their culinary choices offered a challenge and opportunity to rural producers, as they sought to compete for the Jewish markets. Poultry trade organizations and U.S. Department of Agriculture sought to impart this knowledge to rural producers through government publications and industry trade journals, including education of preferable breeds to offer Jewish consumers. These success in turn impacted Jewish consumption practices as certain kinds of poultry became more prevalent in the markets, and as other consumer products such as Crisco could assume the place of traditional ingredients. The paper relies on market research studies, cookbooks, price and distribution data, and fiction for its sources. It is part of a larger book project on the kosher poultry trade, 1890-1960.
Keywords:
2022 Mexico City
"The Mob and the (Trade)mark: Schocktim, Gangsters, and Rule-Making in the Kosher Poultry Trade, 1890-1945"
Roger Horowitz, Hagley Library and University of Delaware
Abstract:
This paper comes out of research for a book project that explores the connections between religion, consumer demand, and industrial structure through a close study of the kosher poultry industry in America between 1890 and 1960. Jewish demand for kosher poultry generated a large national market for the shipping of millions of live chickens to east coast centers where they could be killed by schocktim – kosher slaughters -- for Jewish consumers. At its height in the interwar period, roughly 200 million chickens annually made the trip from midwestern and southern farms to New York and other cities with large Jewish populations. This paper looks at one particularly acute issue – the tight connection between the urban trade in kosher poultry and illicit practices by the firms involved, extending to outright criminal activity by gangsters. I draw on three principal areas of scholarship to explore this curious phenomenon: on branding (Andrea Lluch, Theresa Lopes, Paul Duguid, and Alessandro Stanziani); business rule-making in fragmented industries (Ellis Hawley, Gerry Berk, and Laura Phillips Sawyer); and union corruption (Steve Fraser, Andrew Wender Cohen. Drawing on these literatures, the paper will argue that the corruption in the highly fragmented live poultry business was a recourse by stakeholders to facilitate rule-making in the absence of any legal channel to do so – and these rules included enforcement of kosher standards. A critical group of agents in this process were the schocktim who accepted an alliance with criminal elements to reinforce their ability to ensure that poultry “branded” as kosher truly met kosher requirements. Their acceptance of illicit practices reflected a practical awareness of the weakness of state power and the absence of other legal avenues to prevent dilution – counterfeiting, to adopt a term from the brand literature – of their unprotected kosher brand.