Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (27 page)

1
. “Restaurant!,”
Mad
16.16 (1964).

2
. Joseph Weingarten,
An American Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial Speech
(New York: self-published, 1954).

3
. See Jeffrey S. Gurock,
Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920–2010
(New York: NYU Press, 2012), 102–103.

4
. Howard Cosell,
Like It Is
(Chicago: Playboy, 1974), 281.

5
. See Jim Sleeper,
The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York
(New York: Norton, 1991).

6
. Green Flag,
The Jewish Travel Guide: 1960
(London: Jewish Chronicle, 1960), 145.

7
. “2 Boys, 16, Are Fatally Knifed by Lame Man in Store Robbery,”
New York Times
(11/26/1964), 43.

8
. Jonathan Rieder,
Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 22.

9
. “Department Stores and ‘Chains’ to Occupy Space in Final Unit of Glen Oaks Shops,”
New York Times
(1/15/1950), R1. See also Lila Corwin Berman, “The Death and Life of Jewish Neighborhoods,”
Sh’ma
(6/1/2014), http://shma.com/2014/06/the-death-and-life-of-jewish-neighborhoods/.

10
. Edward S. Shapiro,
A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 147.

11
. Mickey Katz,
Mish Mosh
(Capitol Records, 1957), LP.

12
. Greg Lawrence,
Dance with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins
(New York: Berkley Trade, 2002), 3.

13
. Susan Thaler, “My Father, the Deli Man,”
New York Times
(6/15/1985), 23.

14
. Harry Gersh, “The Jewish Paintner,”
Commentary
(1/1948), 64.

15
. Jackie Mason,
I’m the Greatest Comedian in the World, Only Nobody Knows It Yet!
(Verve, 1962), LP.

16
. Rachel Bowlby,
Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 84.

17
. Alan M. Kraut, “The Butcher, the Baker, the Pushcart Peddler: Jewish Foodways and Entrepreneurial Opportunity in the East European Immigrant Community, 1880–1940,”
Journal of American Culture
6.4 (1983): 80.

18
. William M. Freeman, “The Old Standby Becomes a Luxury,”
New York Times
(5/14/1961), F1.

19
. Personal collection of the author.

20
. Susan J. Thompson and J. Tadlock Cowan, “Durable Food Production and Consumption in the World- Economy,” in Philip McMichael, ed.,
Food and Agrarian Orders in the World-Economy
(Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 1995), 36.

21
. Jane Nickerson, “News of Food,”
New York Times
(3/19/1947), 22.

22
. Joselit,
Wonders of America
, 192.

23
. See Heinze,
Adapting to Abundance
.

24
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New York Times
(1/2/1957), 86.

25
. J. Tevere MacFadyen, “The Rise of the Supermarket,”
American Heritage
(10–11/1985), 28.

26
. Leonard Lewis, “Waldbaum, Suburb Star, Clinging to Ethnic Image,”
Supermarket News
(1/14/1980), 1, 28.

27
. Mark H. Zanger, “Ethnic Foods,” in Andrew F. Smith, ed.,
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 436.

28
. “Meat Processors Reaping Bonanza,”
New York Times
(12/11/1955). This type of meat was associated with African American “soul food,” rather than white Protestant fare. See Doris Witt,
Black Hunger: Soul Food and America
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

29
. Marilyn Halter,
Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity
(New York: Random House, 2000), 13.

30
. Interview with the author, 1/14/2004.

31
. Interview with the author, 12/15/2007.

32
. See Tom Reichert,
The Erotic History of Advertising
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003).

33
. See Keith Lovegrove,
Pageant: The Beauty Contest
(New York: teNeues, 2002).

34
. Carol Adams,
The Pornography of Meat
(New York: Continuum, 2003), 12.

35
. J. Leonard Shaub, executive vice president of the Rockmore Company (the ad agency employed by the company), said the ad’s intention was to “emphasize the nutritional value of a product which a child always wants but shouldn’t have too much of. But this is sometimes the only thing a parent can get him to eat, and if it’s nutritional, he will be getting the food value he needs.” “How Agency Helped Crash Non-Jewish Markets,”
Advertising Agency Magazine
(7/6/1956), 27.

36
. Lizabeth Cohen,
A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
(New York: Knopf, 2003), 119.

37
. Collection of the author.

38
. The campaign was called “What I Would Do for a Hebrew National Hot Dog.” Found in “How Agency Helped Crash Non-Jewish Markets,” 26.

39
.
Music from the Yiddish Radio Project
(Shanachie, 2006), CD.

40
. Levy’s Rye Bread ad,
Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine
(8/1931), 10.

41
. Robert Glatzer,
The New Advertising: The Great Campaigns from Avis to Volkswagen
(New York: Citadel, 1970), 55.

42
. Bernard Weinraub, “From Ordinary Faces, Extraordinary Ads,”
New York Times
(2/21/2002). See also “Judy Protas, 91, Writer of Slogan for Levy’s Real Jewish Rye,” obituary in
New York Times
(1/12/2014), A22.

43
. Jonathan Sarna,
American Judaism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 272.

44
.
Gentleman’s Agreement
, directed by Elia Kazan (Twentieth Century Fox, 1948).

45
. Will Herberg,
Protestant–Catholic–Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 13.

46
. Ausubel,
Treasury of Jewish Humor
, 355–356.

47
. Quoted in Raphael Patai,
The Jewish Mind
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 452; Eli Lederhendler,
New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950–1970
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 110.

48
. Gay,
Unfinished People
, 161.

49
. Samuel Persky, “New England Testimony,”
Commentary
(7/1946), 48.

50
. Warren Belasco, “Ethnic Fast Foods: The Corporate Melting Pot,”
Food and Foodways
2 (1987): 1–29.

51
. Belasco, “Ethnic Fast Foods,” 10–11.

52
. Quoted in Katherine J. Parkin,
Food Is Love: Food Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 113.

53
. Belasco, “Ethnic Fast Foods.”

54
. Herbert Koshetz, “Colgate Slates Riviana Merger,”
New York Times
(2/13/1976), 59.

55
. Lawrence van Gelder, “Deli Food on a Grand Scale: 500,000 Frankfurters a Day,”
New York Times
(4/6/1986), B39.

56
. Belasco, “Ethnic Fast Foods,” 28.

57
. Peter Cherches, “Chinese Food, the Early Years,”
Word of Mouth
(blog) (1/2/2007), http://www.petercherches.blogspot.com/2007/01/chinese-food-early-years.html.

58
. Nevertheless, the film director Mel Brooks remembered about when he was growing up in Brooklyn, “As long as [my mother] was cooking, we never went to a Chinese restaurant. I mean the pot roast, the knaydlach, the stuffed gedempte, all those things with a ‘chuch’ and ‘chach’ at the end—they melted in your mouth.” Quoted in Hanna Miller, “Identity Takeout: How American Jews Made Chinese Food Their Ethnic Cuisine,”
Journal of Popular Culture
39.3 (2006): 432.

59
. Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer,
Growing Up Jewish in America: An Oral History
(New York: Bison Books, 1999), 88. The radio host Jesse Brown grew up in Toronto, but his experience is the same as many Jewish New Yorkers: “Why, in the Jewish neighborhood where I grew up, are there eight Chinese restaurants but no Chinese people? Why is Chun King’s won ton soup as much a part of my culinary tradition as my grandma’s matzoh ball soup? Why are my parents more likely to run into the Silversteins from next door at Lee Gardens in Chinatown than at the fruit market around the corner?” Jesse Brown, “Jews and Chinese Food” (audio), Jesse Brown’s website, http://www.jessebrown.ca/radio.html (accessed 10/5/2007).

60
. Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine, “New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern,” in Barbara G. Shortridge and James R. Shortridge, eds.,
The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 166.

61
. Allison James, “Cooking the Books: Global or Local Identities in Contemporary British Food Cultures?,” in David Howes, ed.,
Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 87.

62
. Tuchman and Levine, “New York Jews and Chinese Food,” 170. See also Andrew Coe,
Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jennifer 8. Lee,
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
(New York: Twelve, 1999); Joshua Eli Plaut,
A Kosher Christmas: ’Tis the Season to be Jewish
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012); and Haiming Liu, “Kung Pao Kosher: Jewish Americans and Chinese Food in New York,”
Journal of Chinese Overseas
6 (2010): 80–101.

63
. Philip Roth,
Portnoy’s Complaint
(New York: Vintage, 1967), 90.

64
. Jesse Brown,
Search Engine
radio show, April 24, 2007, http://www.neatorama.com/2007/04/24/jews-chinese-food/.

65
. Miryam Rotkovitz, “Kashering the Melting Pot,” in Lucy M. Long, ed.,
Culinary Tourism
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010), 175.

66
. Ruth Grossman and Bob Grossman,
The Chinese-Kosher Cookbook
(New York: Pocket Books, 1999).

67
. Interview with the author, 11/27/2009.

68
. Bernstein’s on Essex menu, personal collection of the author.

69
. Henry Roth,
Call It Sleep
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), 320.

70
. Quoted in Richard Juliani and Mark Hutter, “Research Problems in the Study of Italian and Jewish Interaction in Community Settings,” in Jean A. Scarpaci, ed.,
The Interaction of Italians and Jews in America
(Staten Island, NY: American Italian Historical Association, 1975), 47.

71
. Interview with author, 7/7/2010.

72
. John Mariani, “Everybody Likes Italian Food,”
American Heritage
40.8 (1989), http://54.201.12.217/content/“everybody-likes-italian-food”. See also Mariani,
How Italian Food Conquered the World
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

73
. Interview with author, 12/15/2007.

74
. Mimi Sheraton, “A Twin Success in Italian Cuisine,”
New York Times
(7/8/1983).

75
. Mimi Sheraton, “From Alan King, Tales of a Happy Eater at Large,”
New York Times
(10/28/1981).

76
. See Mariani,
How Italian Food Conquered the World
.

77
. Quoted in Mimi Sheraton, “ The Food Tastes of Tastemakers,”
New York Times
(11/3/1982), C1.

78
. Ari L. Goldman, “Rivington St. Wine Tour,”
New York Times
(1/13/1978), C15.

79
. Jenna Weissman Joselit, “How a Slum Became a Shrine,”
Jewish Social Studies
2 (1996): 54–63.

80
. Hasia Diner,
Lower East Side Memories
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 99.

81
. Calvin Trillin, “A Sunday-Morning Tale,”
New Yorker
(2/24/1973), 114–115.

82
. Patricia Wells, “Delivering the Goods, Any Way,”
New York Times
(6/27/1979), C3.

83
. Mimi Sheraton,
Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 26.

84
. Ad for Coca-Cola,
Look
magazine (6/30/1970), 16.

85
. “Samurai Deli,” originally aired 1/17/1976, on
Saturday Night Live: The Best of John Belushi
(Lions Gate, 2005), DVD.

86
. Interview with the author, 4/14/2010.

87
. Peter N. Carroll,
It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 307.