Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (23 page)

Some of the nostalgia for the Jewish deli is for the time in which Jews from across the political and ideological spectrum regularly broke bread together. For a major split has regrettably occurred within the American Jewish community, with few Jewish contexts now present in which religious and secular Jews meet on a regular basis. In addition, most traditionally minded Jews are unwilling to eat in delis that are open on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, and less observant Jews are unwilling to pay high prices (up to twenty dollars for a kosher soup-and-sandwich combination) for the privilege of eating kosher deli food. Except in smaller cities such as Memphis and St. Louis, where there are so few Jewish restaurants that the local kosher deli still attracts a wide range of customers, delis are less able to bridge differences between various types of Jews.

Ethnic Jewishness of the standard eastern European variety is on a steep decline. Few Jews speak Yiddish any more, except in ultra-Orthodox enclaves in Brooklyn and upstate New York, where it remains the everyday language. Jewish theaters
throughout the country struggle to find an audience. Films and television shows that include Jewish characters may have Jewish references but rarely have Jewish themes. Non-Jews often seem more attracted to Judaism than Jews themselves are, as reflected in an episode of
Curb Your Enthusiasm
in which Larry David’s character’s non-Jewish wife makes a Passover seder, despite his contemptuous attitude toward the ritual. In many ways, Jews seem to be waving farewell to the religion and culture that once sustained them and that once undergirded so much of American culture in general.

One has only to glimpse the long lines of tourists waiting outside the Carnegie Deli in Times Square to appreciate that “destination” delis still play a role, if only to provide a taste of New York history to hungry tourists. The few remaining midtown delis, with their extravagant decor and overstuffed sandwiches, are still part of the uplifting of excess, the over-the-top quality of our popular culture. But the Jewishness of the Jewish deli has somewhat evaporated; indeed, a perusal of one hundred reviews revealed the mention of the word “Jewish” in only a small fraction of them. Much more likely to be mentioned was the fact that
When Harry Met Sally
was filmed there, suggesting that a knowledge of the deli scene in the film conditions customers’ experience of eating there as much as anything else.

Many Ashkenazic Jews have embraced Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food in recent years, trading fatty deli foods for lighter dishes cooked in olive oil—dishes that tend to feature fruits and vegetables rather than meat. The longing for Jewish deli also reflects the fact that many “deli” foods—the term has become quite elastic—have now become so much a part of the overall American diet that soon few will remember that their consumption was once essentially limited to immigrant Jews and their children. Pastrami (or a cheap cut of beef that is spiced and smoked to resemble old-fashioned Jewish pastrami) is retailed at almost every Subway and Quiznos sandwich franchise, with posters showing how the meat is “piled high” on the bread, just as in a traditional Jewish deli. The mainstreaming
of delicatessen food is almost complete. Not that certain deli dishes are likely to survive outside of New York and outside of a traditional delicatessen—foods like rolled beef, tongue, and stuffed derma (beef intestine filled with fat, flour, and water).

Even the Second Avenue Deli is now selling smoked fish, which was traditionally reserved for appetizing stores. The word “deli” has lost its exclusive connection to meat, even in New York, to the extent that among the most famous “delis” in New York are Zabar’s (a take-out gourmet store and kitchenware emporium), Barney Greengrass (a bagel and smoked fish restaurant), and Russ and Daughters (an appetizing store).

Assimilation, neighborhood change, the diversification of the American Jewish population, the constantly widening range of food choices—all have had a deleterious effect on the deli. As a waiter at Ratner’s reflected not long before the restaurant’s closing, “This area was once home to the most densely populated Jewish community in the world, and home to the world’s finest kosher cuisine. But these days, instead of high-rise chopped liver sandwiches on rye, we have high-rise buildings.”
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As the delicatessen loses its primary place in American Jewish culture, Jewish food in general continues to assume an even greater place in the construction of American Jewish identity. There is much talk of “gastronomic” Jews or “bagel and lox Jews” (the term “pastrami Jew” has not yet been coined) who presumably connect to their Jewish identity chiefly through their stomachs. But, as discussed earlier, many Jewish foods—bagels are a prime example—have become so much part of the mainstream American diet that they have slipped their Jewish moorings. Outside of New York, even pastrami is bereft of its Jewish associations. At my local gas station in central Pennsylvania, I can buy a hot pastrami, brisket, or corned beef sandwich from the self-service kiosk, and it will be made to order before my gas has finished pumping.

Even in major cities, the delicatessen has become a museum piece, as exemplified in a 2006 exhibit in Philadelphia at the
National Museum of American Jewish History. “Forshpeis! A Taste of the Peter H. Schweitzer Collection of Jewish Americana” grouped memorabilia such as advertising signs, vintage kosher products, and cookbooks around iconic items such as a Formica-topped kitchen table and a deli counter. The counter was surrounded by menus, invoices, pickle crocks, a pillow in the shape of a Zion Kosher salami, and a counterman’s paper hat reading “Ask for Mrs. Weinberg’s Chopped Liver.” And a Jewish food exhibit in Baltimore, “Chosen Food,” which opened in 2011, featured items from my own collection, including a large neon sign from a shuttered New York deli called Pastrami Queen, a deli slicer and scale, and other memorabilia from delis throughout the country. Patrons could leave the exhibit and head around the corner to Attman’s, one of the few old-time Jewish delis that still exist in that city.

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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),
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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.