by Ted Merwin
David Sax rhapsodizes about the freshness of the food at the Second Avenue Deli, at a time when many delis serve frozen french fries and day-old bread; he is also impressed by its continuing to serve mostly forgotten Ashkenazic dishes such as gribenes (fried chicken skins) and p’tcha (calf’s-foot jelly). But recapturing the past through food is tricky. As the food maven Arthur Schwartz pointed out to me, the experience of eating is about so much more than the actual food that one is consuming. This is why, he thinks, food “always tastes better on vacation.” Paraphrasing a book on the cuisine of Naples, Schwartz averred that the best clam sauce that you ever ate is the one that you enjoyed in Italy, on a veranda overlooking the sea, with your lover whispering in your ear.48
In line with Schwartz’s point about the context in which food is consumed, this book has examined some of the intangible aspects of the Jewish deli that made it such a crucial gathering space for the Jewish community—one that enabled it to sustain Jews not just physically but emotionally and socially as well. What are the Jewish “third places” of today? Aaron Bisman, the former head of JDub Records, which promoted Mattisyahu (the formerly Hasidic reggae singer), sees many younger Jews in their twenties and thirties as attracted to a “culture of choice” rather than a “religion of obligation.” While the immigrant enclaves of the turn of the twentieth century were what he calls “bastions of Jewish life,” he sees younger Jews as having “often lost the connection to their history, culture, and identity as Jews.” He points out the paradox that while they often feel like outsiders in American culture, given the predominantly Christian influence in American society, they also often feel estranged from their Jewish identity, given that they are so assimilated into American society. Without either synagogue or deli, both of which promoted Jewish identity within an American milieu, how can Jews feel comfortable either as Americans or as Jews? Perhaps the third space concept no longer works in a technologized world, in which Bisman views the nascent forms of Jewish community as inherently “fluid,” with “no borders,” and “existing outside the walls of any particular space.”49
Jews have become so integrated into mainstream culture that the deli is viewed as a throwback to an earlier era, in which unfamiliar Jewish foods symbolized the extent to which Jews were still aliens in American society. For example, in “So Jewtastic,” a VH1 video about Hollywood stars, wrestlers, musicians, and other celebrities who openly celebrate their Jewish ethnicity, Jewish deli food is shown to be both unrecognizable and unpalatable by most Americans. The comedian Elon Gold asks a slew of patrons of various ethnicities at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles if they can recognize a particular Jewish food that he shows them—almost none of them know that it is gefilte fish. He then demonstrates a circumcision on a frankfurter. The segment implicitly mocks the idea that Jews still have a cuisine worth eating, an interesting perspective given that the video was sent to directors of Jewish Community Centers throughout the country to be used to inspire young Jews with pride in their heritage.
Some leaders of the American Jewish community insist that only by revitalizing the synagogue can Jewish communal life be restored. Gary Rosenblatt, publisher of the New York Jewish Week, views Jewish newspapers and magazines as a venue in which Jews from different backgrounds and varying levels of religious observance find both a voice and a place of discussion and debate. But Rosenblatt, who grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, finds a physical “third space” in the modern Orthodox synagogue in Manhattan where he prays every weekday morning before work in order to say kaddish for his recently deceased mother. The regulars at the morning minyan, he points out, seem to gather as much to schmooze as to pray.50
Others, such as Rabbi Daniel Smokler, a Hillel rabbi at New York University, point toward the primacy of Jewish text as a “Jewish commons” of its own. Smokler’s argument is that while the “American commons is a practice rooted in shared space, the Jewish commons is a practice rooted in shared text.” Smokler has been very successful in bringing together particular “affinity” groups of college students—Persian Jews at UCLA, gay Jewish men at NYU, and so on—to study sacred Jewish texts together. Smokler takes the idea of the third space and applies it to the activity of studying sacred text, of promoting what he calls a “good, serious conversation,” one that “dignifies both the rich tradition of text and honors our own alienation from that tradition.”51 What an intriguing, paradoxical idea—that what Jews share above all is their “alienation” from their own heritage, their sense of being outsiders to their own religion. Isn’t this to some extent what the deli, as a secular Jewish alternative to the synagogue, was always about?
Then again, the meaning of the deli has changed for each generation of American Jews. The delicatessen (or what we could think of a delicatessen, with a focus on pickled meats) was almost unknown in eastern European Jewish life and was also not well established on the Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century—despite the tremendous nostalgia with which the delicatessen came to be invested.
The delicatessen only came into its own as Jews came into their own—as the second generation discovered the pleasures of eating out and felt most comfortable doing so in each other’s company. At its height in the interwar period, this Jewish gathering place was, paradoxically, a kind of way station, a staging ground or springboard for Jews to enter American life on equal terms with other Americans. The delicatessen nurtured their hopes and dreams, giving them a powerful sense of security and belonging. When the barriers to participation in American life fell in the wake of the Second World War, the meaning of the delicatessen changed yet again, becoming—especially for those Jews who remained in the New York area—just one choice of eatery among many.
As Jews moved to the suburbs, they also moved more into the mainstream of American society and ultimately turned their back on delicatessen food in favor of more gourmet, international, and healthier fare—even as the kosher meat companies sought to increase their market share by selling to non-Jews. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the delicatessen had long ceased to be a place where Jews gathered on a regular basis; indeed, there were few spaces that Jews, whether religious or secular, went to be with other Jews.
The story of the delicatessen exemplifies the overarching shifts that have taken place in American Jewish life, in which, even as the majority of Jews have become more secular (as the recent Pew Survey of American Judaism shows),52 this secular identity has lost much of its actual content; the overwhelming majority of American Jews say that they are “proud” to be Jewish but do little in the way of connecting concretely to their tradition. Moreover, while the consumption of Jewish food is, for many Jews, one of the sole ways in which they relate to their heritage, this food is taking all kinds of forms nowadays, sometimes playing on “traditional” delicatessen fare but often incorporating ingredients and styles of cooking that bear little or no relation to that type of food. And so, as time goes on, the delicatessen fades further and further into the past as a viable space either for Jewish gathering or for Jewish gastronomy.
As long as both Jews and non-Jews want to eat “traditional” Jewish food, delis will always exist in our culture. If they die out, they will be resurrected and reinvented in some form in the future. But they will probably never occupy the centrality in American Jewish life that they once did, as they helped to bridge the world of the immigrants and their children with the promise and freedom of America.
Notes
Introduction
1. Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Penguin, 1993).
2. Seth Wolitz, “The Renaissance in Kosher Cuisine,” Policy Forum 18 (Jerusalem: Institute of the World Jewish Congress, 1999).
3. John Mariani, America Eats Out: An Illustrated History of Restaurants, Taverns, Coffee Shops, Speakeasies, and Other Establishments That Have Fed Us for 350 Years (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 75.
4. Quoted in Dinah Shore, The Celebrity Cookbook (New York: Price, Stern, Sloan, 1966), 38.
5. Quoted in Ted Merwin, “Homeland for the Jewish Soul,” New York Jewish Week (7/26/2011).
6. Richard Condon, And Then We Moved to Rossenarra (New York: Dial, 1973), 114–120.
7. Daniel Stern, “Jewish New York,” in Alan Rinzler, ed., The New York Spy (New York: David White, 1967), 31. See also Tom Wolfe, “Corned Beef and Therapy,” in Rinzler, New York Spy, 9–19.
8. Hilton Als, “The Overcoat,” Transition 73 (1997): 6–9. To make prospective donors laugh, black panhandlers (beggars) in New York in the 1990s asked passersby—many of whom were Jewish—to give them change for the “United Negro Pastrami Fund.”
9. Joan Nathan, Jewish Cooking in America (New York: Knopf, 1998), 185; emphasis added.
10. Interview with the author, 1/15/2004.
11. Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 46.
12. Soupy Sales, Soupy Sez: My Life and Zany Times (New York: M. Evans, 2003), 176.
13. Gary Anderson, “The Expression of Joy as a Halakhic Problem in Rabbinic Sources,” Jewish Quarterly Review 80.3–4 (1990): 234n35.
14. Bava Metzia 26B, with Rashi commentary about the association of mustard with royalty, derived from the story of Abraham’s serving the angels a meal of three bull tongues with mustard (Gen. 18:1–15).
15. Edward Gibbon and Henry Hart Milman, The Life of Edward Gibbon (Paris: Baudry, 1840), 106.
16. See Bee Wilson, Sandwich: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2010).
17. See Ted Merwin, “The Delicatessen as an Icon of Secular Jewishness,” in Simon Bronner, ed., Jewishness: Expression, Identity and Representation (Oxford, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 195–210.
18. Hasia Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 201.
19. Diner, Hungering for America, 200.
20. Quoted in Ted Merwin, “Hold Your Tongue,” New York Jewish Week (1/13/2006).
21. Gary Portnoy, who wrote the song with Judy Hart Angelis, grew up in a Jewish family that lived first in Brooklyn and later on Long Island. See Randolph Michaels, Flashbacks to Happiness: Eighties Music Revisited (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005), 145–149. I asked Portnoy if he thought about Jewish delis at all in writing the song, and he said that he did not but that his family did regularly drive into Manhattan to eat at Katz’s Delicatessen. Email to the author, 5/09/2012.
22. Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 10.
23. Sybil Taylor, Ireland’s Pubs (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 15.
24. Jennifer Nugent Duffy, Who’s Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American Identity (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 113.
25. “Little Italy in New York,” New York Times (5/31/1896), 32.
26. Arthur Schwartz, Arthur Schwartz’s New York City Food: An Opinionated History and More than 100 Legendary Recipes (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2008).
27. These sexual associations remain with us today. Unlike the penis, which tends to shrivel up in the bath, sausages and meats swell up when immersed in the salt water that “cures” or pickles them. (Both hard salami and pastrami are taken a couple of steps further, being showered with spices and then smoked.) The phrase “hide the salami,” which refers to the disappearance of the penis in the vagina, is only one of many slang terms relating to the sausage, including a “salami party” or “salami factory,” meaning a gathering where there are significantly more men than women in attendance. Common expressions for male masturbation are to “slap,” “slam,” or “stroke” the salami. And “Jewish corned beef,” “Jewish national,” and “kosher dill” are all slang phrases used to refer to a circumcised penis. Is it any wonder that Meg Ryan’s “orgasm” in When Harry Met Sally takes place in a Jewish deli?
28. Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840–1920 (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 133.
29. J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Establishment (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 29.
30. Chris McNickle, To Be Mayor of New York: Ethnic Politics in the City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 185.
31. See Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Jewish Vote,” Virginia Quarterly Review 62 (Winter 1986): 1–20.
32. Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber, Harpo Speaks (New York: Limelight, 2004), 166.
33. Interview with the author, 5/3/2009.
34. Laurie Ochoa, “Just What Is a Delicatessen Supposed to Look Like Anyway?,” Los Angeles Times (3/11/1990), 99.
35. Quoted in Elaine Markoutsas, “Delis, the Originators of Fast Food: Pile on Ambience, Don’t Hold the Mustard,” Chicago Tribune (8/11/1977), A3.
36. Patric Kuh, “What’s Not to Like?,” Los Angeles (10/2007), 118–127.
37. Ira Wolfman, Jewish New York: Notable Neighborhoods and Memorable Moments (New York: Universe, 2003), 43.
38. Ted Merwin, “The New Heights of Nouvelle,” Jewish Week (3/21/2008), A4–A5.
39. Quoted in Wendy Gordon, “Deli: Comfort Food for the WWII Generation,” Forward (2/21/2012).
40. Arthur Schlesinger, “Food in the Making of America,” in Paths to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 234–255.
41. See, for example, Warren Belasco, Appetite for Change (New York: Pantheon, 1990) and Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Noah Bernamoff and Rae Bernamoff, The Mile End Jewish Cookbook (New York: Random House, 2012); Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, eds., Food and Culture: A Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007); Counihan, Food in the U.S.A. (New York, Routledge, 2002); Darra Goldstein, ed., The Gastronomica Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Gil Marks, Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (New York: Wiley, 2010); Nick Zukin, The Artisan Jewish Deli at Home (Riverside, NJ: Andrews McMeel, 2013).
42. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 89.
43. Arjun Appadurai, “Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia,” American Ethnologist 8.3 (1981): 494.
44. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000).
45. Barry Kessler, “Bedlam with Corned Beef on the Side,” Generations, Fall 1993, 2–7.
46. Michael Alexander, “The Meaning of American Jewish History.” Jewish Quarterly Review 96.3 (2006): 426.
47. Sharon Lebewohl and Rena Bulkin, 2nd Avenue Deli Cookbook (New York: Villard, 1999); Arthur Schwartz, Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited (New York: Ten Speed, 2008); Maria Balinska, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Laura Silver, Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food (Boston: Brandeis University Press, 2004); Jane Ziegelman, 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (New York: Harper, 2011); David Sax, Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen (New York: Mariner Books, 2010).
48. See Leah Koenig, “Goldbergers and Cheeseburgers: Particularism and the Culinary Jew,” Zeek, Fall–Winter 2006, 13–22.
49. See Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968). See also Merwin, “The Delicatessen as an Icon of Secular Jewishness.”
50. Telephone interview with the author, 1/17/07.
Chapter 1. According to the Customer’s Desire
1. Personal collection of the author.
2. Interview with the author, 2/3/2010.
3. William Oldys and John Malham, The Harleian Miscellany: or, A Collection of Scarce, Curious, and Entertaining Pamphlets and Tracts, as Well in Manuscript as in Print, Found in the Late Earl of Oxford’s Library, Interspersed with Historical, Political and Critical Notes, vol. 2 (London: R
obert Dutton, 1809), 182.
4. Henry Finck, Food and Flavor: A Gastronomic Guide to Health and Good Living (London: John Lane, 1914), 99.
5. Interview with the author, 2/3/2010.
6. Jean-Paul Aron, Art of Eating in France: Manners and Menus in the 19th Century (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1975), 24–25.
7. Abba Kanter, “Fun Der Kolbasa Biz Der Delicatessen Store” (From the Sausage to the Delicatessen Store), Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (11/1930), 19.
8. Harry Gene Levine, “Pastrami Land: The Jewish Deli in New York,” Contexts (Summer 2007), 67, http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~hlevine/Pastrami-Land.pdf. Rabbi Gil Marks speculates that the word pastirma was ultimately changed to pastrami in order to rhyme with salami. Gil Marks, Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (New York: Wiley, 2010), 450.