"Oriental Jewesses" on Strike: Labor Organizing in New York’s Garment Industry among Jewish Women from the Ottoman Empire

This paper highlights the previously unrecognized involvement of young Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jewish women from the Ottoman Empire in New York City’s garment industry and the associated labor movement during the early twentieth century. Coming from Muslim societies, speaking a language similar to Spanish, and embracing their status as Jews, Ottoman Jewish woman posed a quandary to immigration officials, labor organizers, social workers, journalists, and even Teddy Roosevelt, none of whom could readily determine how to classify these “peculiar” newcomers in terms of race and nationality, let alone address their demands for improved working conditions in New York’s kimono, bathrobe, skirt, and dress factories from the 1910s-1930s. The same problem of illegibility has plagued the historiography as this group, representing a workforce of several thousand, has alluded the attention of scholars, although a few oblique references identify them as “Spanish” or lump them together with Puerto Rican laborers. Drawing on a range of primary sources in Ladino, English, Yiddish, Greek, Turkish, and Spanish—including newspaper reports, private papers, institutional records, union archives, memoirs, oral histories, and even presidential correspondence—this paper recuperates the dynamics and impediments impacting Ottoman Jewish women in the garment industry; their approach to labor organizing with other groups including Yiddish-speaking Jews, Syrians, and Puerto Ricans; and their eventual impact on the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and on broader transformations in labor practices in New York City.