Pastrami on Rye
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By changing “Moon River” (from the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s) to “Chopped Liver,” “With a Little Bit of Luck” (from the Broadway musical My Fair Lady) to “With a Little Bit of Lox,” and “Water Boy” (a southern African American song) to “Seltzer Boy,” Sherman exploited not just the humorous associations of delicatessen foods but the sense that Jews were transforming American culture in their own image. According to Sherman’s biographer, Mark Cohen, while Sherman’s delicatessen-themed musical The Golden Touch never made it to Broadway, its “suspicion of success, encouragement to remain true to oneself, and proud assurance that chopped liver and other homely hallmarks of Jewish life were worth keeping . . . remained the themes of Sherman’s life.”100
While the author Ken Kalfus has suggested that Sherman made Jewish humor “mainstream,” he also notes that Sherman emphasized Jewish particularity. In Kalfus’s words, it “expressed Jews’ apartness from American culture, at a time when the culture itself was about to go counter.” Kalfus writes perceptively about the emphasis placed at the time on the “lovability of the loser,” cataloguing such bumblers and bunglers—both real and fictional—as the 1962 Mets (40 wins, 120 losses), Alfred E. Neuman, Charlie Brown, and Jerry Lewis.101 In any event, Sherman turned Jewish food into comic gold in a way that transcended its Yiddish origins and made it accessible and humorous to both Jewish and non-Jewish Americans. As the critic Gerald Nachman has pointed out, Sherman “resisted being branded a ‘Jewish’ performer, as his repertoire played to everyone. . . . His lyrics spread a generous helping of chopped liver over a slice of American cheese. The playful lyrics were a kick, but they also made fun of Jewish (and, by extension, all) middle-class American life in the early 1960s.”102
Love, Sex with the Shiksa, and the Jewish Delicatessen
Another “danger,” that of intermarriage with non-Jews, loomed ominously over the delicatessen. Eating nonkosher delicatessen food had long symbolized having the “forbidden pleasure” of sexual relations with non-Jewish partners. In the 1940s, the novelist Isaac Rosenfeld had famously observed the riveted passersby who watched beef fry (a kosher imitation of bacon) falling off the slicing machine of a window of a Lower East Side delicatessen. Rosenfeld wrote that a crowd, “several rows deep,” constantly gathered to watch this spectacle—“oblivious of the burden of parcels, of errands and of business; no comments are made, they stand in silence, not to interfere with another’s contemplation, as they follow the course of the slices, from the blade to the box.”103
Rosenfeld viewed the trance that the people fell into not in religious terms but in sexual ones; he suggested that the beef fry is an “optical pun” on the concept of treyf and that Jews unconsciously associated eating treyf with sex with non-Jews—unlawful carnal knowledge, indeed! Rosenfeld insisted that anti-Semitism sprang from a misconception among non-Jews that Jews were “lecherous” and enjoyed “greater freedom from restraint.” As Eve Jochnowitz interprets him, Rosenfeld “traces all of sexual pathology to the laws of kashrut,” suggesting that “all anti-Semitism is rooted in gentile myths, all provoked by Jewish food, about Jewish superior sexuality.”104
By the late 1980s, the Jewish-Christian intermarriage rate had skyrocketed from almost nothing at the beginning of the century to about 50 percent, as Jews increasingly sought non-Jewish partners and non-Jews felt more comfortable marrying Jews.105 The trope of the Jewish man and the shiksa (a derogatory Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman) had become especially familiar in popular culture, especially in the films of Woody Allen. Jewish delis often served as backdrops for relations between Jewish men and their non-Jewish girlfriends, as in Annie Hall, when the main character, Alvy Singer, takes his tall, midwestern girlfriend to the Carnegie Deli as a prelude to their having sex for the first time; she mistakenly orders a pastrami sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise (echoing a scene in the Broadway musical Skyscraper in which Julie Harris commits a similar faux pas in the Gaiety Delicatessen),106 and he grimaces, as if remembering Milton Berle’s classic joke that “every time someone goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread with mayo, somewhere a Jew dies.”
Food and sex are frequently linked in Allen’s films; as Allen’s character in Love and Death quips when his lover invites him to her bedroom, “I’ll bring the sauce.” Or as Allen noted in a parodic New Yorker essay, on food in the world of philosophy, “As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness; many sandwiches were forced to stay closed and only opened after the Reformation.” (Indeed, the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza “dined sparingly because he believed that God existed in everything and it’s intimidating to wolf down a knish if you think you’re ladling mustard onto the First Cause of All Things.”)107
But why has Alvy taken Annie to a deli in the first place, if not to shore up his own vulnerable ego? The delicatessen is the one place that is comfortable and familiar for the demasculinized Jewish man and where he can thus feel superior to her and her anti-Semitic family. His refraining from coaching her on what to order, and his thus allowing her to make a fool of herself in front of him, elevates him in his own eyes. It allows him to make love to her from a position of strength rather than of weakness and inferiority.108 The historian Henry Bial views this scene from the dual perspectives of the Jews and non-Jews in the film audience, noting that the non-Jews “learn what it means to act Jewish as the film progresses. . . . Alvy’s rolling eyes and horrified expression are an in-joke to some of his viewers and a ‘teachable moment’ to the rest.”109
This dynamic is neatly reversed in the Katz’s Deli scene in Rob Reiner’s 1989 film When Harry Met Sally—a takeoff of the Woody Allen genre and of Annie Hall in particular—in which the non-Jewish woman, Sally, played by Meg Ryan, shows the egotistical Jewish man, Harry, played by Billy Crystal, that he is less masculine than he thinks he is because he cannot tell whether she is having an orgasm (and, in a sense, that she doesn’t need him at all in order to have it). While the fake orgasm is not related specifically to the food that she is eating (she is eating a turkey sandwich, from which she carefully removes one slice of meat after another before consuming it), it is uniquely appropriate in the deli context—one has the sense that the humor would evaporate if it were shot in a Chinese restaurant with tinkling music in the background. The scene makes hay from the associations that Jewish food has with sex, with vulgarity, with unbridled bodily urges, with the lack of civility and restraint.
After all, the deli—with its casual vibe, lack of tablecloths, and raucous atmosphere—was a place where Jews had celebrated freedom from table manners, from the need to speak softly, and from the oppressive kinds of control over their own physical bodies that they needed to assert in the wider society in order to prevent being viewed as vulgar, uncivilized, and uncouth.110 In the context of the Lower East Side, where Jews had historically lived in overcrowded tenements that afforded little privacy, “private” sexual behavior was often much more “public” than most would have preferred, and the deli was an extension of this private space into the public realm.
Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in the “orgasm” scene in Katz’s Delicatessen from the 1989 Rob Reiner film When Harry Met Sally (Licensed by Warner Bros Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.)
Yet, despite Sally’s explosive, seemingly definitive usurpation of the space, a Jewish woman defiantly has the last word: the well-dressed, elderly customer at the next table (played by the director’s mother, Estelle Reiner) declares in a perfect deadpan, “I’ll have what she’s having.”111 And Jewish women do indeed reclaim the space in the 2007 documentary Making Trouble, in which four female stand-up comics—Judy Gold, Jackie Hoffman, Cory Kahaney, and Jessica Kirson—eat lunch at Katz’s while paying tribute to three generations of female Jewish entertainers in American history, such as Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Joan Rivers, and Gilda Radner.112 But non-Jewish women again take center stage in a flash-mob video from November 201
3, in which twenty female customers at Katz’s simultaneously reenact the scene from the Reiner film.113
Broadway Danny Rose, Allen’s black-and-white 1984 film about a hard-luck theatrical agent, opens with a scene of a group of aging Jewish comics—Corbett Monica, Sandy Baron, Jackie Gayle, and Will Jordan—sitting at a table in the Carnegie Deli, swapping anecdotes about their life on the road. They then reminisce about Danny Rose, the agent, played by Allen. Rose has been reduced to representing such clients as a blind xylophone player, a one-armed juggler, a couple who “fold” balloon animals, and a skating penguin dressed as a rabbi.114 The film highlights the waning of secular Jewish culture, using the deli as a symbol of that decline. According to the film scholar Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, “what Allen locates in the Jewish world of the Catskills” and, by extension, the Carnegie Deli, “and what Danny Rose recreates with his ragtag band of odd ‘acts,’ is the sense of unforced community that existed among a people gathered together to share a culture that would inevitably disappear in the process of Americanization.” Rubin-Dorsky is struck by Allen’s finding a “nurturing spiritual connection to the Jewish past” through the reiteration of the link between Jewish comedy and Jewish food.115
Jewish masculinity is even more explicitly connected to deli sandwiches in “The Larry David Sandwich,” an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which the main character, Larry David, who grew up in Brooklyn but now lives in Hollywood, decides for once to pray at a synagogue for Rosh Hashanah but finds out that the tickets are sold out and that he will have pay a scalper to gain admittance. His attendance at the service proves to be disastrous and results in his being ejected, along with his non-Jewish wife, Cheryl. Larry seems not to care; he realizes that he prefers to spend his time at his favorite Jewish deli, Leo’s, where he has finally achieved the signal honor of having a sandwich named after him.
Ed O’Ross and Larry David in “The Larry David Sandwich” from season 5 (airdate 9/25/2005) of Curb Your Enthusiasm (Courtesy of HBO / John P. Johnson)
The problem for Larry is that “his” special sandwich is not a traditional meat sandwich but one of sable and whitefish. In being a kind of inauthentic deli sandwich, it thus subtly undermines Larry’s claim to true celebrity, as well as his masculinity, as symbolized by the lack of red meat in his sandwich. The latter point is underlined by the fact that Larry is also afraid to shake hands with the deli owner, Leo, because Leo’s handshake is crushing.
Larry’s attempts to trade sandwiches with Ted Danson, whose namesake is a roast beef, coleslaw, and Russian dressing combo, are fruitless. Larry argues, naively, that Danson should not care what the ingredients of his own sandwich are since Danson doesn’t frequent the deli as much as Larry does or bring his father to eat there; Danson, after all, is not Jewish. But Danson refuses the trade—the fish sandwich sounds terrible and is much too ethnically Jewish, and, in any case, Danson knows a good deli sandwich as well as Larry does. Nevertheless, even as deli food became more mainstream, as Curb showed, it also maintained a strong connection to secular Jewish identity, as one of the few remaining links that Jews like Larry had to their Jewish heritage.116
The episode presents the deli as a more viable Jewish space than the synagogue, where the worshipers are shown as bored and impatient. By contrast, the deli is a shown as a place of fun, fellowship, and humor where commercialism can be openly celebrated in its connection to popular culture. While the same characters, including the deli owner, are also shown at the synagogue, the conversations among them revolve around the deli sandwiches, not the lofty spiritual matters that one might expect them to be discussing on the Jewish New Year.
For these characters to have sandwiches named after them makes them feel that they have achieved true recognition; having other people eating “their” sandwich causes tremendous pride and pleasure. To get “up on the board” in a synagogue might mean having your name on a plaque on the wall; this honor is acquired simply by giving money. But to be “up on the board” at the deli is a sign of real fame.
The Yuppies Rule: The Rise of Gourmet Kosher Food
Beginning in the 1980s, Modern Orthodox Judaism, which promoted the idea that Jews could participate equally in American society and yet still maintain fidelity to religious law, gained strength. While Hasidic Jews had colonized neighborhoods in Brooklyn beginning in the interwar period and had seen their numbers climb dramatically in the years after the Holocaust, it was Modern Orthodox Jews who experienced the most dramatic rise in both visibility and influence.
One leading Orthodox rabbi, Walter S. Wurzburger, was quoted in a front-page article in the New York Times noting that the “vigor as well as the image” of Orthodox Judaism had been “completely revitalized.” Indeed, he crowed, “Gone are the predictions of the inevitable demise of what was widely dismissed as an obsolete movement that could not cope with the challenges of an ‘open’ society.”117
The resurgence of Orthodox Judaism spelled trouble for the typical kosher delicatessen. Many modern Orthodox Jews lacked nostalgia for the forms of Jewish culture that had been so important to their second-generation parents. Unless a delicatessen were glatt kosher, meaning that it adhered to the most rigid standards (including closing on the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays), they would generally avoid eating in it. Even to be seen walking into a non-glatt kosher delicatessen exposed one to the risk of ostracism from the community, under the assumption that observers might be misled into eating there themselves.
Delicatessen food was widely perceived as low class. Bryan Miller, restaurant critic for the New York Times, noting the expansion of kosher dining options in the city, observed that Jews appeared eager to shed what he called the “gastronomic barbells” of delicatessen food. The hearty food served in delicatessens represented, he averred, the weight of the immigrant Jewish heritage, which Jews self-consciously cast off in the act of adapting their heritage to meet the needs of upward social and economic mobility.118
The more “yuppified” that Orthodox Jews became, the more that they tended to disdain the deli. Some restaurants combined deli favorites with other types of food; for example, Jacob’s Ladder in Cedarhurst, Long Island, served not just kosher matzoh ball soup, chopped liver, cold cuts, and potted brisket of beef but also hamburgers, barbequed chicken wings, spareribs, and chicken fricassee. But others avoided deli food entirely and sold more cosmopolitan, gourmet fare. On the Upper West Side, Orthodox Jews flocked to Benjamin of Tudela (named after a globe-trotting medieval Spanish rabbi) for its kosher steaks, chops, duck, chicken, and fish. The restaurant’s brick walls, charcoal-gray rugs, and bouquets of wildflowers all bespoke an affluent clientele.
Nanou, a kosher French restaurant in downtown Manhattan serving the cuisine of Provençal, featured roast duck with orange sauce on its menu, along with grilled veal chops with mushroom sauce. In the Riverdale section of the Bronx, owner Michael Posit took his nonkosher French restaurant named Dexter’s and turned it into a kosher restaurant that served chicken breast stuffed with veal mousse and medallions of beef with a sauce made from red wines, shallots, and thyme.
Other kosher restaurants soon rushed to occupy the upscale market niche, including Café Masada and La Kasbah (both serving North African cuisine) and Levana (serving a mix of Italian and French cuisine, with sauces and condiments “painted” on the plate). On Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood formerly crammed with Jewish delis, the latest dining establishment was Little Budapest, a fancy Hungarian Jewish restaurant. And many Jews—and non-Jews—when they weren’t eating out, took advantage of dozens of kosher cooking classes at the Ninety-Second Street Y, organized by Batia Louzon Plotch, a Sephardic woman from Tunisia who sought to expand the idea of kosher food. “What they knew about Jewish food was Eastern European,” she said of her students. “In my family, Jewish food is couscous [on] Friday night.”119 A master Japanese chef, Hidehiko Takada, taught the course on sushi, and the Chinese cookbook author Millie Chan taught the course on Northern Chinese cuisin
e. Other chefs instructed budding chefs to prepare kosher versions of Thai, Persian, Iraqi, Northern Italian, and Indian food.
Another new trend was the kosher gourmet club, in which a group of couples met once a month in one of their homes, with each couple bringing a different dish from the cuisine of the month, which could be anything from Cajun to Hawaiian to Fiji. These would often be quite extravagant affairs, with each couple vying to bring the fanciest dish and the hosts finding the appropriate music, dress, and decor to accompany the chosen cuisine. One of the group members might even be responsible for giving a d’var Torah (minisermon, or commentary on the Torah) in keeping with the dinner’s theme.120
At the same time that nonkosher deli food was growing in popularity among Jews and non-Jews alike, kosher food was also becoming more sophisticated and increasing its appeal. Trends toward kosher food that was healthy, international, and gourmet accelerated through the 1990s and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the Upper West Side of New York, one could eat in a kosher sushi restaurant one night and a kosher Mexican restaurant the next. A spate of new kosher cookbooks emphasized Sephardic cuisine, which is based much more on fruits and vegetables than is meat-heavy Ashkenazic cookery. The Jewish delicatessen began to seem increasingly like a throwback to an earlier age, its fare hopelessly prosaic, unhealthy, and low class. As the humorist Sam Levenson pointed out in a Saturday Review article that was reprinted for years on the back of the Second Avenue Deli’s menu, the deli was a remnant of a world that was sadly “all but destroyed by upward mobility.”121
Thus, by the turn of the millennium, the Jewish delicatessen had become, in the words of the writer Richard Jay Scholem, “almost as obsolete as the buggy whip,” given “the healthy eating movement, with its emphasis on low fat, cholesterol and calorie food, the diminution and diffusion of this area’s Jewish population and the coming of age of a new generation without nostalgic memories of Jewish deli food.”122 The journalist Joseph Berger found that a small number of delis, such as the Second Avenue and the Carnegie, still functioned as what he called “Disneylands for tourists or nostalgia seekers who want to savor a way of life that is passing on.”123