Before it housed NYU students with smoothies and laptops during the workday, the Asch Building on Washington Place was known as the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. Two years before the fire that scorched Triangle Shirtwaist’s name into history, the women toiling away inside–mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants–had already decided they were fed up with poverty wages, dangerous working conditions, and sexual harassment.Meeting in the Cooper Union’s Great Hall in November of 1909–the same room in which Mayor Bloomberg delivered the class of 2013’s commencement speech last week–garment workers voted to strike, and over the next several days, 20,000 people walked off the job at Shirtwaist and other major manufacturers.Now, local iPhone and iPad users can travel back in time to the golden age of Jewish labor organizing through a game called “Jewish Time Jump: New York.”

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