Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (16 page)

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.
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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.
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(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.”
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)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.

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.”
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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.

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.”
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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.

One sees this shift in the Academy Award–winning 1947 film
Gentleman’s Agreement
, in which Gregory Peck plays a journalist who pretends to be Jewish in order to write a magazine article on anti-Semitism; he adopts none of the cultural or ethnic aspects of Judaism but simply announces that he is Jewish
by religion.
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The rise of religion preempted Jewish ethnicity by substituting the social life of the synagogue for that of the delicatessen. True, as the sociologist Will Herberg noted, this newfound religiosity was often void of true meaning; it was a “religiousness without religion, a religiousness with almost any kind of content or none, a way of sociability or ‘belonging’ rather than a way of reorienting life to God.”
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But it sped the acculturation of Jews into American society by putting Judaism on an equal footing with other religious groups. This was summed up in the title of Herberg’s influential book
Protestant–Catholic–Jew
, in which he argued that Jews had become part of Christian America by emphasizing the religious rather than cultural aspects of their identity.

In order to find a specifically Jewish means of fitting into a society that placed a premium on morality and public religious behavior, Jews built palatial suburban synagogues as fortresses against assimilation. (Some people jokingly referred to this as an “edifice complex.”) While relatively few members—including, surveys showed, the congregational lay leaders—were interested in attending services more than a few times a year, the synagogue could generally muster a good turnout with a Saturday-night cultural program or Sunday-morning bagel brunch.

Even as Jews downplayed their ethnicity, then, Jewish food remained a central component of postwar Jewish identity. In
Treasury of Jewish Humor
, published in the early 1950s, the folklorist Nathan Ausubel used the term “Culinary Judaism” to refer to a food-based Jewish identity and detailed the lengths to which Jews went to devour their favorite dishes, including delicatessen meats.
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As the sociologist Seymour Leventman put it, a “gastronomic syndrome” could be diagnosed among Jews, one that “lingers on in the passion for bagels and lox, knishes, blintzes, rye bread, kosher or kosher-style delicatessen, and good food in general.”
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In order to survive the transformed gastronomic landscape in which the relatively few Jewish delicatessens that opened in the suburbs found themselves, they needed to appeal to non-Jews as
well as Jews. But they also did not want to alienate their base of Jewish customers by serving food that was so nonkosher that it would offend them. It was this balancing act, the historian Ruth Glazer (who later became Ruth Gay, when she married the historian Peter Gay) recalled, that her father engaged in when he opened an “unreconstructed” delicatessen at the end of a subway line in Queens. A kosher delicatessen sporting a sign with Hebrew letters, he was informed, would turn these non-Jews against him from the beginning. And most of the Jews no longer kept kosher or wanted to be seen eating in a kosher establishment.

So he opened a “kosher-style” delicatessen, in which traditional Jewish foods were served but the meat was not kosher. Jewish women felt free to come in to ask for advice on how to prepare Jewish food, while increasing numbers of non-Jews, who originally viewed the deli as a “curiosity,” submitted to the entreaties of Jewish friends to come in and order pastrami, a word that they often mispronounced in amusing ways. Nevertheless, according to Glazer, the store became for Jews and non-Jews alike a “symbol of traditional Jewish living,” despite its departures from fidelity to Jewish dietary law.
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If the fare at Glazer’s father’s delicatessen created such harmony between the Jews and non-Jews of the town, the New Haven attorney Samuel Persky joked, perhaps anti-Semitism could be combated if, rather than “distributing educational pamphlets dedicated to the truth about the Jew, we can so manage it that every rock and rill in this land of liberty be permeated by the gracious aroma of hot corned beef and pastrami.”
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