by Ted Merwin
The choreographer Jerome Robbins, whose father owned a kosher delicatessen on the same block as their apartment on East Ninety-Seventh Street, had no interest in going into the family business. As his biographer, Greg Lawrence, put it, “by the time Jerome was born, the inherited dream of success had magnified beyond anything that his lower middle-class father might have imagined.” Along with so many fellow Jews, he “would embrace the idea of putting as much social distance as possible between himself and his origins.”12
Susan Thaler, whose father owned Schlachter’s Kosher Delicatessen on 176th Street and Walton Avenue in the Bronx, was mortified by her father’s line of work. “Why couldn’t he take weekends off instead of a school day so we could do things together like a family?” she asked plaintively in an essay in the New York Times. “Why couldn’t he learn to speak English without an accent? Why couldn’t he sell the store and get a real job in an office where he could wear a suit and tie and carry a briefcase? Why couldn’t he be witty and tall and dapper like Mr. Anderson on ‘Father Knows Best’?” Only later in life, when she had a child of her own, did she belatedly conclude that her father was “blessed” rather than cursed by his humble occupation.13
Other daughters of deli owners bedecked themselves in expensive clothes and jewelry in an attempt to conceal their humble origins, of which they had a lifelong sense of shame. As the humorist Harry Gersh conceded, they were simply absorbing the sensibility of their time; it was demeaning to admit that your father worked behind the counter of a store. “A delicatessen store man is different from a candy store man or a merchant, but not much,” Gersh pointed out. “A little of the spice of the pastrami, a little of the fat he didn’t trim off the corned beef enters his soul.”14 Deli owners were stereotyped as low class; on the jacket of Jackie Mason’s 1962 debut album, I’m the Greatest Comedian in the World, Only Nobody Knows it Yet!, the comedian’s heavy Yiddish accent is described as “midway between that of a Bronx taxi driver and a Lower East Side delicatessen proprietor.”15
The Supermarket Delicatessen Counter
With the rise of atomic power and the coming of other scientific breakthroughs during the postwar era, frozen food was widely viewed as more modern and exciting than fresh food. Technology seemed to promise a future in which every food was appetizing, nutritious, and safe to eat. According to the historian Rachel Bowlby, every product was seen to be merely “awaiting its ideal package, to beautify it and to guarantee its cleanliness.”16 Many Jews “enjoyed kosher frankfurters, bagels, or a good piece of herring,” the historian Alan Kraut notes, “but they preferred their consumables spotless and packaged for easy storage.”17 Using technology such as vacuum-packing and freeze-drying—originally developed in order to send food to the troops overseas—frozen food was placed in a waterproof plastic or foil pouch, known as a “hotback,” that could be dropped in boiling water to reheat. “With our quarter-pound hotbacks of corned beef or pastrami that go into boiling water, you can have a hot pastrami on rye in a remote areas of Kansas,” Jack Chase, a sales manager for Hebrew National, boasted to the New York Times.18 When the sales staff of Zion Kosher went to call on supermarkets, they were armed with a laminated green card that showed photographs of their packaged products—everything from kosher frankfurters to liverwurst, kishka (stuffed derma), salami, and bologna.19
Ironically, these modern technologies were modern analogues of the smoking, salting, drying, and spicing that ancient peoples had used to preserve meat, fish, vegetables, and other foods.20 By freezing pastrami (which is already twice preserved, given that it is made from brisket that is cured and then smoked), Hebrew National was preserving it yet again, but for modern mass consumption. By 1947, the company was selling cans of stuffed cabbage, meatballs in gravy, spaghetti sauce and meatballs, rice with braised beef, corned beef hash, and potato pancakes. These products, all of which cost less than a dollar a pound, could be found at more than three hundred stores in the New York area.21
The packaging of Jewish food was, however, nothing new. Since the turn of the twentieth century, matzoh, gefilte fish, and other staples of Jewish holiday fare had been available in boxes, jars, and other containers. As the historian Jenna Weissman Joselit has found, Yiddish newspapers had advertised such products as Uneeda Biscuits, Quaker Oats, and Proctor and Gamble’s cooking fat Crisco (the availability of which, its makers proclaimed, represented the culmination of four thousand years of Jews waiting for a non-meat-based cooking fat that could be used for the frying of dairy products). In the 1920s, Joselit notes, “white bread, mayonnaise, and satiny-smooth Spry gradually assumed pride of place within the kosher kitchen, transforming it from an island of culinary superstition to a common meeting ground for tuna fish sandwiches and oatmeal cookies.”22 National consumer products were marketed to a Jewish population that prided itself, as the historian Andrew Heinze has found, on its ability to consume the same products as other Americans.23 The problem for delicatessens was that supermarkets sold many of the same items that they carried. By 1957, 83 percent of supermarkets sold cooked meats and potato salad, 67 percent sold coleslaw, and 61 percent sold baked beans. And almost two-thirds of these supermarkets prepared these items in the store itself rather than depending on any outside vendors.24
Sales card with images of packaged Zion Kosher Delicatessen products (Collection of Ted Merwin)
As a result, from 1929 to 1954, the number of delicatessens (of all types, not just Jewish ones) dropped nationwide by more than a quarter from around 11,000 to only 8,000. By contrast, the number of supermarkets, or “combination markets,” rose sharply from 115,000 to 188,000. By 1960, supermarkets sold 70 percent of the nation’s groceries.25 Waldbaum’s, founded by the Polish Jewish immigrant Ira Waldbaum, catered to a customer base of middle-class Jews. The business journalist Leonard Lewis compared Waldbaum to Moses; Waldbaum led Jews on their exodus from Brooklyn to the Long Island suburbs. By doing so, Lewis noted, Waldbaum’s became the “unofficial supplier to the children of this new promised land.”26
The historian Mark Zanger has noted that ethnic foods tend to become “softer and whiter” in the process of assimilating to mainstream American foodways.27 The flabby, bland, light-colored cold cuts sold in supermarket packages bore little resemblance to the chewy, spicy, dark-red slices of meat found in a traditional deli. While the average per capita consumption of meat in New York was more than three pounds a week in the 1950s, the trend was away from the type of meat traditionally served in a deli. According to Jerry Freirich, the owner of a kosher-meat-processing company, New Yorkers had become partial to lean meat that was not too spicy or salty, as compared to the South, where, he said, fattier, spicier, and saltier meats were still preferred.28
As the historian Marilyn Halter has noted, it was initially assumed by marketers that ethnic shoppers “would seek out local immigrant businesses involved in small-scale food production and retailing rather than consuming the products of corporate giants.”29 But for the most part, Americans of all stripes, including relatively new immigrants, eagerly embraced “ethnic” products sold by large food corporations. This made it difficult for mom-and-pop delis to compete. Sam Novick, a longtime salesman for a number of kosher meat companies, including Public National Kosher, City Kosher (founded by his father), and Hebrew National, put it bluntly: “The supermarket was part and parcel of the ruination of the neighborhood deli.”30
On the other hand, some supermarkets saw delis as a threat and sought to block them from renting space in a shopping center in which the supermarket was an anchor tenant. This attitude reflected long-standing tensions between small retail stores and supermarkets; the attorney Manny Halper recalled that as a child in the Bronx, he once heard his rabbi give a sermon exhorting housewives not to buy meat from the supermarkets but to patronize their local butchers instead. Halper started writing leases in New York in 1960, enabling retail stores, including scores of Jewish delis, to move from city streets to suburban shopping centers. But he insist
ed that he never prepared a lease for a supermarket on Long Island without including a clause permitting a Jewish deli in the same shopping center. “The deli never posed any kind of threat,” he said, “particularly a kosher deli, which sold different kinds of merchandise than the supermarket did.”31
Whether the precipitous decline in Jewish deli owners’ business could be attributed to the rise of the supermarket or not, it caused rage among them. In New York, their antagonism toward supermarkets allegedly grew so intense that they committed antitrust violations. If a kosher meat company agreed not to sell to local supermarkets such as Dilbert’s, Kubrick’s, Royal Farms, and Dan’s Supreme, then the Jewish delis in that neighborhood would purportedly band together and buy all their meat exclusively from that company. Companies that sought to sell to the supermarkets anyway, the government claimed, were threatened with violence. Fred Molod, a deli owner’s son who had become a lawyer for the Brooklyn branch of the Delicatessen Dealer’s Association, defended the delis. Molod brought a large map of Brooklyn into the courtroom, pushing colored pins into the map to mark the locations of the delis. He then put the deli owners on the stand to testify that there had been no unlawful cooperation. The government backed down from most of its allegations.
Here She Is . . . Miss Hebrew National Salami
With the decline of the deli and the mainstreaming of Jews into society, the kosher meat companies also realized that they needed a new marketing strategy. By such publicity stunts as sending salami-scented ads through the mails and anointing a “Miss Hebrew National Salami” and a “Miss Hebrew National Frankfurter” (the latter on the occasion of the company’s billionth hot dog sold), Hebrew National used sexual associations and offbeat humor to market its products beyond the Jewish community.
Sex in American advertising was, of course, nothing new; the historian Tom Reichert has found that it dates back to the 1850s, when drawings of nudes were first used to sell tobacco.32 But, with the advent of Playboy in 1953 and the many men’s magazines that followed in its wake, sexual images became more prominent and accepted in American culture. Sausages, because of their phallic shape, especially lent themselves to titillating advertising. While Jeanne Williams, a.k.a. “Miss Hebrew National Frankfurter of 1952,” simply cradled a long hot dog above her ample cleavage and was surrounded by pendulous hot dogs in the background, Zion’s “Queen of National Hot Dog Week of 1955,” Geene Courtney, wore frankfurters, sausages, and kielbasa as a crown on her head, as a belt around her waist, as a scarf-like chain thrown over her left shoulder, and as bracelets around her wrists, as if in some kind of sexual bondage.33 (As the activist Carol Adams has argued, meat has long been—and continues to be—advertised in our culture in ways that degrade women and that mirror pornography. According to Adams, “viewing other beings as consumable is a central aspect of our culture.”34)
Nevertheless, Hebrew National, in an ironic counterpoint to playing up the sexual undertones of its products, also emphasized the associations with purity, healthfulness, and cleanliness that many Americans associated with the word kosher. The company used the Good Housekeeping seal in its print advertising, along with a picture of a ribbon showing that the company had been commended by the consumer service bureau of Parents magazine. One ad campaign on New York City subways depicted a young boy balancing a Hebrew National salami on his head; the ad copy claimed that the food could be part of a healthy diet.35
Painted highway billboards, many located on commuter routes throughout the metropolitan area, focused on the company’s new use of a distinctive blue-and-yellow string to connect its sausages and frankfurters to one another. Ads on subways and buses, in addition to in delicatessens and supermarkets themselves, hawked the kosher meats. Newspaper ads ran not just in New York but in cities such as Providence, Pittsburgh, Hartford, Cleveland, and Washington, DC.
The company also sponsored 80 percent of the radio and television coverage of the 1953 and 1954 elections on the major radio networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and WOR; it used the slogan “Make Election Night Party Night” to encourage listeners to organize gatherings and serve the company’s products. By promoting an association between Jewish food and voting, the company allied itself with ideals of patriotism and democracy. This fit with prevailing ideas about the role of consumption as a mark of good citizenship. According to the historian Lizabeth Cohen, “the new postwar era of mass consumption deemed that the good purchaser devoted to ‘more, newer, better’ was the good citizen,” that one “simultaneously fulfilled personal desire and civic obligation by consuming.”36
Hebrew National also produced as part of its marketing strategy a plethora of advertising items that reflected the ongoing acculturation process of the second and third generations of American Jews. These ranged from books of score sheets for gin rummy and canasta (popular card games that Jews played both at home and when they vacationed in the Catskills and in Miami Beach) to little, white, plastic trash bags with its logo and the slogan “Bag it and help keep our highways clean.” These give-aways implicitly recognized that Jews wanted to maintain their connection to their heritage and participate in the life of society on an equal basis with other Americans.37
Hebrew National was also a major sponsor of the many popular radio and late-night television programs on CBS hosted by Arthur Godfrey. Both Godfrey and the comic Steve Allen gave out free Hebrew National salamis to their studio audiences; free provisions were also distributed at telethons, benefit performances at Madison Square Garden, and other large-scale charity events. Meanwhile, parents were targeted through a campaign in which consumers were asked to send in examples of situations that their children tended to avoid (such as the dentist’s office, barber shop, music lessons, or bathtub) but for which a Hebrew National hot dog might serve as an effective bribe.38
In a radio spot on the most popular Jewish station in New York, WEVD (named for Eugene V. Debs, the socialist leader), a jaunty jingle by the Pincus Sisters announced that “for that old fashioned flavor that all the folks favor, try Hebrew National meats.” Customers who sought authentic Jewish food for their parties, late-night dinners, and other social occasions were urged to “be rational” and “serve meats made by Hebrew National.”39 One advertising campaign solicited sandwich “recipes” from Jewish New Yorkers who were then featured in its advertising along with their creations. Another campaign focused on the supposed favorite sandwiches of celebrities such as the actress Molly Picon and the comedian Morey Amsterdam. Not to be outdone, Zion Kosher sponsored a “name that cantor” contest on radio station WEVD; identifying a cantor from his singing alone would win prizes in delicatessen products.
The clever mass marketing of Jewish foods also embraced the rye bread used to make delicatessen sandwiches. Henry S. Levy & Sons was a kosher bakery on Thames Street in Brooklyn that had long supplied kosher delicatessens; in an ad in the early 1930s in the Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine, it trumpeted its fifty years in the business contributing to “firm, even, tender sandwiches that look better and taste better” and advertised twenty-four-hour deliveries to all parts of the city.40 But by the 1960s, with sales falling precipitously, the company experimented with packaged rye, pumpernickel, and raisin breads in an effort to broaden its customer base, especially among non-Jews—a strategy that apparently alienated many of the bakery’s Orthodox customers. Howard Zieff at the Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising firm developed a series of ads featuring non-Jewish models, including an American Indian chief, an altar boy, a Japanese man, and an African American boy, eating deli sandwiches on rye with the tag line, written by Judy Protas, “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye.”41 The African American activist Malcolm X liked the one with the African American boy so much that he had his own picture taken standing next to it.
Ordinary New Yorkers with their sandwich creations depicted in a 1950s Hebrew National promotional booklet (Collection of Ted Merwin)
As Zieff later wrote, “We wanted normal-looking people
, not blond, perfectly proportioned models. I saw the [American] Indian on the street; he was an engineer for the New York Central. The Chinese guy worked in a restaurant near my Midtown Manhattan office. And the kid we found in Harlem. They all had great faces, interesting faces, expressive faces.” What he sought, he said, were “faces that gathered you up.”42 In the same way, Jewish food was starting to “gather up” a non-Jewish clientele, thus expanding the popularity of Jewish culture in America in ways that would only accelerate in the coming decades.
Levy’s Rye Bread subway advertisement from the 1960s with American Indian eating a delicatessen sandwich (Courtesy of Bimbo Bakeries)
Jews Redefining Themselves as a Religious Group
From the 1956 release of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments to the rise of evangelical preachers such as Billy Graham, religion was resurgent in many Americans’ lives during the postwar era. The economic prosperity that fueled the rise of the suburbs, the growing focus on family life in the generation of the baby boomers, and the ascendancy of a militant anticommunism—all of these seemed to require legitimation in religious terms. At the same time, fear about the instability of life in an age of hydrogen bombs also led many Americans, including Jews, to seek comfort from religion. Best-selling books by religious leaders from Rabbi Joshua Liebman (Peace of Mind) to Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking) capitalized on the need for reassurance that many Americans felt. Liebman’s book in particular, according to the historian Jonathan Sarna, “heralded Judaism’s emergence as an intellectual, cultural, and theological force within postwar American society.”43 But as Judaism took on a kind of high-mindedness and serious of purpose, Jews began to define themselves less as an ethnic group and more as a religious one, as a “faith” that was the equal of Protestantism and Catholicism.