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.
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: Robert 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.
9. John Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food (New York: Jason Aronson, 1993), 77.
10. David L. Gold, “When Chauvinism Interferes in Etymological Research: A Few Derivations on the Supposed Vulgar Latin Derivation of Rumanian Pastrama—Pastrama, a Noun of Immediate Turkish Origin (With Preliminary Remarks on Related Words in Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Judezmo, Polish, Russian, SerboCroatian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Yiddish),” in Studies in Etymology and Etiology, ed. F. Rodríguez González and A. Lillo Buades (Alicante, Spain: University of Alicante, 2009), 271–375.
11. Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied, 169.
12. Diner, Hungering for America, 164–165.
13. Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1987), 14.
14. Molly Pulver Ungar, “From Zetz! to Zeitgeist: Translating ‘Rumenye, Rumenye,’” in Pierre Anctil, Norman Ravvin, and Sherry Simon, eds., New Readings of Yiddish Montreal / Traduire le Montreal Yiddish (Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa Press, 2007), 118.
15. Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 115.
16. Phyllis Glazer and Miriyam Glazer, The Essential Book of Jewish Festival Cooking (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 243.
17. Yeskheskl Kotik, Mayn Zikroynes (My Memories) (Warsaw, 1913).
18. See Glenn Dynner, Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also Marni Davis, Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 6.
19. Aharon Rosenbaum, “Memories of the Past,” trans. Jerrold Landau, in M. Yari-Wold, ed., Rzeszow Community Memorial Book (Kehilat Raysha sefer zikaron) (Tel Aviv, 1967), available online at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/rzeszow/rzeszow.html.
20. Phyllis Kramer, ed.,1891 Galician Business Directory (New York: JewishGen, 2000), http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Poland/galicia1891.htm.
21. Gavriel Lindenberg, “Our Town as I Remember It,” trans. Yehudis Fishman, in Sh. Meltzer, ed., The Book of Horodenka (trans. of Sefer Horodenka) (Tel Aviv, 1963), available online at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/gorodenka/gor117.html.
22. David Shtokfish, Jewish Mlawa: Its History, Development, Destruction (trans. of Mlawa Ha-Yehudit; Koroteha, HitpatKhuta, Kilyona Di Yidishe Mlawe; Geshikte, Oyfshtand, Unkum) (Tel Aviv, 1984), available online at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/mlawa/mla429.html/.
23. Ida Marcus-Kerbelnik and Bat-Sheva Levitan Kerbelnik, eds., Kelme—An Uprooted Tree (trans. of Kelm—‘Ets Karut) (Tel Aviv, 1993), available online at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/kelme/Kelme.html.
24. Referenced in Condon, And Then We Moved, 115.
25. Edwin Brooks, “The Romantic Origin of the Delicatessen Foods,” Chicago Jewish Food Merchant (4/1936), 32.
26. “Love, Sausages, and Law,” New York Times (3/27/1875), 3.
27. “Christmas Dainties: The German-American Must Have the Old Familiar Things That Come from the Fatherland,” New York Tribune (12/16/1900), 3.
28. L. H. Robbins, “Rest for the Delicatessen Man?,” New York Times (8/15/1937), 117.
29. “Klein Deutchland: Glimpses of Daily Life in the Recognized Little Germany of This Metropolis,” New York Herald (11/11/1894), 2.
30. Edward Eggleston, “Wild Flowers of English Speech in America,” Century 47.6 (1894): 853.
31. H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (New York: Knopf, 1921), 103n36. Among other English words that derived from German, Mencken listed pumpernickel, lager-beer, wienerwurst, bock-beer, and schnitzel. Mencken idealized German culture and was known, in other books, for making virulently anti-Semitic statements, such as that “the case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go in the world.” H. L. Mencken, introduction to The Anti-Christ, by Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Sharp, 1999), 14.
32. H. T. Webster, “They Don’t Speak Our Language,” Forum and Century 90.6 (1933), 62. For a list of contemporary deli terms, including pistol for pastrami, CB for corned beef, and Coney for hot dog, see Milton Parker and Allyn Freeman, How to Feed Friends and Influence People: The Carnegie Deli (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), 59.
33. Brooklyn Daily Eagle (3/29/1885), 12.
34. Wong Chin Foo, “A Chinese Delicatessen Store,” reprinted in Bismarck (ND) Daily Tribune (8/7/1891), 3.
35. “Queer Dishes in Shops,” New York Tribune, illustrated supplement (12/12/1897),12.
36. Donna Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Foods and the Making of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 95.
37. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat, 10–35.
38. George E. Walsh, “Queer Foreign Foods in America,” American Kitchen Magazine 16 (11/1901): 65.
39. Walsh made an exception for German sausages, which he insisted “have no meaning whatever except to German-born people,” since he averred that each type of sausage—such as schinkenwurst, zugenwurst, blutwurst, and lieberwurst—came from a particular German district and appealed mainly to those who hailed from that region. Walsh, “Queer Foreign Foods,” 66.
40. Walsh, “Queer Foreign Foods,” 67.
41. Forrest Chrissey, The Story of Foods (New York: Rand McNally, 1917), 463–472.
42. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 56.
43. By 1917, according to a Jewish communal survey, it was estimated that one million Jews in the city were buying meat from kosher butchers and that the average consumption of meat was 156 pounds per capita. See The Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917–1918 (New York: RareBooksClub, 2012), 319.
44. In 1886, baked beans also first became popular in London, after Henry John Heinz sold five cases of samples to Fortnum & Mason, the gourmet food store famous for its wide selection of canned goods.
45. Patricia Volk, “Deli,” American Heritage Magazine 53.1 (2002), http://www.americanheritage.com/content/deli. See also Patricia Volk, Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family (New York: Vintage Books, 2002). Volk’s descendants also went on to become inventors in their own right; his son developed the wrecking ball, while his equally entrepreneurial grandson, also named Sussman, concocted double-ended cigarette lighters and trash-can cleaners.
46. Marcus Ravage, An American in the Making (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917), 88. D. H. Hermalin, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, estimated that throughout the city, Rumanian Jews—who numbered twenty-four thousand in New York—owned 150 restaurants, 200 wine cellars, and 30 coffeehouses. Hermalin described the fashion by which the Rumanians, “over a cup of black coffee and through the blue smoke curling up from their cigarettes . . . indulge in a game of cards or chess.” D. H. Hermalin, “The Roumanian Jews in America,” American Jewish Yearbook 3 (1901–1902): 101–102.
47. Esther Levy, Jewish Cookery Book (Philadelphia: W. S. Turner, 1871), 40. The first Jewish cookbook ever auctioned, it sold at Swann Auction Galleries in 2010 for $11,000. Gabriela Geselowitz, “Jewish Cooking, 19th Century Style,” New York Jewish Week (3/24/2010). The first Yiddish cookbook in the United States was not published until the turn of the twentieth century; it was Hinde Amchanitzki’s Lehr-bukh vi azoy tsu kokhen un baken (Cooking and Baking Textbook), first printed in New York in 1901. African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress.
48. Levy, Jewish Cookery Book, 39.
49. See Paula Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” American Jewish History 70 (1980): 91–105.
50. See Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
51. Sammy Aaronson and Albert Hirshberg, As High as My Heart (New York: Coward-McCann, 1957), 18–19.
52. Rischin, Promised City, 80.
53. Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 16.
54. Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (New York: Persea Books, 1999), 165.
55. Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 34.
56. The sociologist Shlomo Katz was reminded, he wrote, of the “distasteful and indelicate superabundance of Jewish restaurants, the staggering mounds of food in delicatessen stores in Jewish neighborhoods, the endearing diminutives applied to a gut shtickele (‘fine piece of’) something or another.” Katz suggested that the parents, by making their children fat, could make them “sufficiently buttressed against the hostile world.” Shlomo Katz, “Heritage,” in Elliot Cohen, ed., Commentary on the American Scene (New York: Knopf, 1953), 5–6.
57. David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 13.
58. Sabine Haenni, The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 5.
59. Maurice Hindus, Green Worlds (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), 94–95.
60. Susan J. Matt, “A Hunger for Home: Homesickness and Food in a Global Consumer Society,” Journal of American Culture 30.1 (2007): 13.
61. Quoted in Matt, “A Hunger for Home,” 13.
62. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 209.
63. Benjamin Reich, “A New Social Center: The Candy Store as a Social Influence,” Year Book of the University Settlement Society of New York, 1899.
64. Bella Spewack, Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side (New York: Feminist Press of the City University of New York, 1995), 43.
65. Jillian Gould, “Candy Stores and Egg Creams,” in Ilana Abramovitch and Seán Galvin, eds., Jews of Brooklyn (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2001), 204.
66. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 237.
67. David Freedman, Mendel Marantz (New York: Langdon, 1925), 80.
68. Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal had imported their way of deep frying fish—pescado frito—to England, prompting Thomas Jefferson to mention in a letter that he had eaten “fish fried in the Jewish fashion.” See Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York (New York: Knopf, 1996), 113. See also Alan Davidson, The Penguin Companion to Food (New York: Penguin, 2002), 359.
69. “Stalls for Fried Fish,” New York Times (11/12/1899), 12.
70. John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 29.
71. Darra Goldstein, “Will Matzoh Go Mainstream? Jewish Food in America,” in The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, vol. 4 (Los Angeles: Casden Institute, 2005).
72. See Harold P. Gastwirt, Fraud, Corruption, and Holiness: The Controversy over the Supervision of Jewish Dietary Practice in NYC, 1881–1940 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974).
73. See Maria Diemling, “As the Jews like to Eat Garlick: Garlic in Christian-Jewish Polemical Discourse in Early Modern Germany,” in Leonard J. Greenspoon, Ronald A. Simkins, and Gerald Shapiro, eds., Food and Judaism (Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 2004), 218.
74. Sara Evans, Born for Liberty (New York: Free Press, 1997), 163.
75. Samuel Chotzinoff, A Lost Paradise: Early Reminiscences (New York: Arno, 1975), 184.
76. Isaac Reiss (Moishe Nadir), “Ruined by Success,” translated from the Yiddish by Nathan Ausubel, in Ausubel, Treasury of Jewish Humor (New York: Doubleday, 1951), 36–39.
77. Classified section, New York Herald (2/19/1888), 19.
78. Annie Polland, Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 96–97. Kosher meat is produced from biblically permitted animals (those that have cloven hoofs and that chew their cud), which are slaughtered with a single stroke of a sharp blade across the carotid artery, cut into pieces with a knife that has had no contact with dairy products, and then soaked and salted to remove any traces of blood.
79. Sholem Aleichem, Motl Peyse dem Khazns Zun (Motl Peyse, the Cantor’s Son) (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1997). The translation is mine.
80. Ad for Barnet Brodie Genuine Kosher Meat Products, Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (8/1931), 18.
81. “Court Is Mystified by Delicatessen,” New York Times (4/29/10), 3.
82. Hyman Lipman v. Max Parker, et al., in M. E. McDonald, ed., Lackawanna Jurist 16 (1/29/1915–1/21/1916): 82–86.
83. Batya Miller, “Enforcement of the Sunday Closing Laws on the Lower East Side, 1882–1903,” American Jewish History 91.2 (2003): 269–286.
84. Soon v. Crowley, 113 U.S. 703, 710.
85. Miller, “Enforcement of the Sunday Closing Laws,” 278.
86. “Will Obey the Law,” New York Herald (7/7/1895), 6. One wonders how many of the delicatessen owners were Jewish and likely closed their stores on Saturdays.
87. “Grew Eloquent on Delicatessen,” New York Herald (7/30/95), 4.
88. “Overzealous on Excise,” New York Times (8/27/1895), 8.
89. “‘Delikatessen’ on Sunday,” New York Times (2/8/1899), 6.
90. “Sunday Delicatessen,” New York Times (3/28/1899), 6.
91. May Ellis Nichols, “Exit the Maid,” Outlook 125 (5/12/1920): 79.
92. “Raines Law Delicatessen,” New York Times (2/7/1899), 5.
93. “Delicatessen Men’s Festival,” New York Times (7/31/1899), 7.
94. “Then and Now,” Life (11/18/20), 921.
95. Chotzinoff, Lost Paradise, 182.
96. Kazin, Walker in the City, 34.
97. Ella Eaton Kellogg, Science in the Kitchen (Chicago: Modern Medicine, 1893), 29–31.
98. See Harvey Levenstein, Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 32.
99. Sonia Kochman Davis, “A Dietician Looks at the Kosher Delicatessen Store and its Customers,” Jewish Criterion (Pittsburgh, PA) (3/30/28), 59–62. For more on the perceived link between kosher food and poor health during the 1920s, see Kochman Davis, “The Kosher Diet—What It Is,” Jewish Criterion (11/18/27), 41–42.
100. “To the White Coat and Apron Brigade,” Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (6/1931), 7.
101. Barnett Brodie ad, Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (8/1931), 18.
102. Theodore Krainin, “‘Kosher’ and the Jewish Dietary Laws,” Jewish Forum (1/23), 79.
103. Chelsea Delicatessen advertising card, collection of the author.
104. Diane Janowski, Our Own Book—A Victorian Guide to Life—Homespun Cuisine, Health, Romance, Etiquette, Raising Children and Farm Animals (Elmira, NY: New York History Review Press, 2008), 46; originally published by Weekly Gazette and Press (Elmira, NY), 1888. Delicatessen customer Bernard Cooper, who grew up in Los Angeles, recalled, “the glass bottles gave no clue as to the identity of Dr. Brown,” but “I pictured him as a kindly white-coated man not unlike my dentist. In a pristine laboratory filled with bubbling test tubes and beakers, Dr. Brown concocted the amber elixir that washed away the saltiness of corned beef, cut the peppery after-burn of pastrami or kept me from choking on a throatful of brisket.” Every swig of the beverage, he noted, was a “toast to the future, each bottle a triumph of science.” Bernard Cooper, letter to the New York Times (3/10/1996).
105. Leah Koenig, “Cel-Ray Soda Grabs New Fans,” Forward (7/18/2012).
106. LeRoy Kaser, “In the Delicatessen Shop, a Jewish Monologue,” in Dialect Monologues: Readings and Plays (Dayton, OH: Paine, 1928), 146–147.
107. For more on Hebrew comics, see Ted Merwin, In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006). The Yiddish accent sounds more German than Yiddish—very few non-Jewish comics strove to reproduce a bona fide Yiddish accent. Most of their audiences couldn’t tell the difference anyway.
108. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
109. Quoted in Ronald T. Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Back Bay, 2001), 188.
110. See Gastwirt, Fraud, Corruption, and Holiness.
111. Gastwirt, Fraud, Corruption, and Holiness, 122–123.
112. “Kosher Meat Man Held in High Bail,” New York Times (4/20/1933), 25.
113. People v. Jacob Branfman & Son, 263 NYS 629, 147 Misc. 290 (City Court, 1933).
114. “The New Kosher Law,” Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (6/1936), 1.
115. Gastwirt, Fraud, Corruption, and Holiness, 78–79.
116. “Ending a Scandal,” Yiddishes Tageblatt/Jewish Daily News (4/5/1922), 8.
117. “75 Years Ago in the Forward,” Jewish Daily Forward (3/9/2007).
1. There are three published versions of this scene; the only one that contains the delicatessen references is the one that Groucho printed in his scrapbook, The Groucho Phile. But improvisation was an integral part of vaudeville, and since Groucho performed this scene for years, ad-libbing all the while, there is no way to know when the delicatessen references were introduced. Groucho Marx, The Groucho Phile: An Illustrated Life (New York: Galahad Books, 1979), 41.
2. See Samuel Zanvel Pipe, “Napoleon in Jewish Folklore,” in YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, vol. 1 (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1946), 294; and Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 226.
3. Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
4. George Jean Nathan, “Clinical Notes: The Sandwich,” American Mercury 8 (5–8/1926): 237–238.
5. Despite the popularity of competitive eating, its dangers are coming to public attention, especially after a man choked to death while competing in a hot-dog-eating contest in South Dakota on July 4, 2014. “Man Dies at South Dakota Hot Dog Eating Contest,” New York Times (from the Associated Press) (7/8/2014).
6. Roger Abrahams, “The Language of Festivals: Celebrating the Economy,” in Victor Turner, ed., Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 161–177.
7. Allan Sherman and Bud Burtson, The Golden Touch, unpublished ms., Du 27189 (registered on 4/2/51), Library of Congress, act 1, scene 1, p. 3. Thanks to Mark Cohen for sharing a copy of the manuscript with me. For a discussion of the musical, see Mark Cohen, Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2013), 58–66.
8. See Ted Merwin, “The American Dream, on Rye,” New York Jewish Week (12/11/2012).
9. Jack Waldron, “Max’s Delicatessen,” undated ms., *T-Mss 2008–001, Smith and Dale Papers, Additions (1898–1987), Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library.
10. Marx, Harpo Speaks, 166.
11. Nathan, “Clinical Notes,” 237–238.
12. Jim Heimann, Make I Take Your Order? American Menu Design, 1920–1960 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998), 16.
13. Earl Wilson, “Famous Lindy’s Waiters,” Beaver County (PA) Times (9/19/1969).
14. Jerome Charyn, Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2003), 9.
15. Curled, tinted strips of paper—or cellophane—were emblematic of the delicatessen; the humorist George S. Kaufman, satirizing Life magazine’s “Calendar” for October 17, 1922, joked that it was that date when the “last New York delicatessen store [stopped] using colored paper sauerkraut for window decoration.” Quoted in Simon Louvish, Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 166.
16. Montague Glass, “Kosher Restaurants,” Saturday Evening Post (8/3/1929).
17. Arnold Manoff, “Reuben and His Restaurant—The Lore of a Sandwich,” interview with Arnold Reuben, conducted on December 18, 1938, American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1940, MSS55715: Box A722, Folklore Project, Life Histories, 1936–39, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
18. Nowadays, by contrast, fewer than two dozen shows open on Broadway each year.
19. For the Jewish involvement in Hollywood, see Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Anchor Books, 1989). For the Jewish involvement in Broadway, see Merwin, In Their Own Image.
20. Rian James, Dining in New York (New York: John Day, 1930), 29.
21. Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 63.
22. Manoff, “Reuben and His Restaurant.”
23. Max Asnas, Corned Beef Confucius (Kimberly 11006, n.d.), LP.
24. Gutterman reported on plans, which did not come to fruition, to make a biopic about Asnas, with Edward G. Robinson considered for the lead. Gutterman quoted the sportswriter Murray Robinson to the effect that Asnas “moves serenely through a maze of comical woes which would unhorse a lesser spirit. Max has troubles with customers, partners, comedians, mustard pots, waiters, chefs, panhandlers, countermen, horse players and grammar. He beats them all down without drawing a deep breath.” Leon Gutterman, “Our Film Folk,” Canadian Jewish Chronicle (7/23/1954), 8.
25. Martin Kalmanoff (pseud. Marty Kenwood), Aaron Schroeder (pseud. Matt Kingsley), and Eddie White, “When Mighty Maxie Makes with the Delicatessen,” undated ms., Martin Kalmanoff Papers, 1928–2002, Box 100, Folder 47, Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library.
26. Others claim that the iconic sandwich was invented by a cook in Reuben’s Delicatessen, who named it after his boss. But the sandwich is also attributed to Reuben Kulakofsky, a wholesale grocer in Omaha, Nebraska, who played a weekly poker game with a group of men who fixed their own sandwiches to eat while they played. The Reuben eventually appeared on the menu of The Blackstone, a local hotel that was owned by Kulakofsky’s poker buddy Charles Schimmel. The story about Annette Seelos is almost certainly fabricated, since Chaplin was making a film in Hollywood at the time, and in any event there is no record of an Annette (whom Reuben also referred to as “Anna”) Selos appearing in any of Chaplin’s films. Furthermore, just as there are a number of competing stories about how the Reuben came to be, there are many variations on the Reuben. The 1920s menu lists a number of “Reuben” sandwiches, including Club a la Reuben Special, Reuben’s Special, Reuben’s Paradise, Reuben’s Tongue Delite, and Reuben’s Turkey Sandwich with Russian Dressing.
27. Program for Ziegfeld Follies of 1931, 17, Ziegfeld Follies File, Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library.
28. Quoted in Jane Stern and Michael Stern, Roadfood Sandwiches: Recipes and Lore from Our Favorite Shops Coast to Coast (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), 227.
29. Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls: The Stories of Damon Runyon (New York: Penguin, 1992), 93. Oddly, Runyon seems to have associated delis with fish more than with meat; instead of writing that a character “ate” in a deli, he coined the expression “tore a herring.” Woody Allen employs this expression in one of his novels. When Allen’s narrator serves his nanny—who is writing a vituperative tell-all book about her employers—poisoned tea, she exclaims, “Gee, this is something new. We never tore a herring at eleven-thirty in the A.M.” Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy (New York: Random House, 2008), 62.
30. Irving Berlin, “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” copyrighted 8/21/1929; introduced by Harry Richman and Joan Bennett in the film Puttin’ on the Ritz, directed by Edward Sloman (United Artists Productions, 1930).
31. See Ralph Keyes, I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech (New York: Macmillan, 2009), 246.
32. See Merwin, In Their Own Image.
33. Leon de Costa, typescript of Kosher Kitty Kelly, Library of Congress, act 2, p. 11. For a longer discussion of the play, see Merwin, In Their Own Image, 105–109.
34. Private Izzy Murphy, directed by Lloyd Bacon (Warner Brothers, 1926).
35. See Ted Merwin, “The Performance of Jewish Ethnicity in Anne Nichols’ Abie’s Irish Rose,” Journal of American Ethnic History 20.2 (2001): 3–37.
36. The Delicatessen Kid, directed by Walter Fabian (Universal, 1929).
37. See Ted Merwin, “Serving Up Food with Attitude,” New York Jewish Week (4/3/2009).
38. The writer Sharon Rudnick has recalled that it was a “mixed blessing to get her because she was so incredibly slow. But she was so entertaining it made up for the service.” Quoted in Sue Fishkoff, Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority (New York: Schocken, 2010), 91. When Kassner was encouraged to retire, she sued the deli for age discrimination; she won the suit, but only after she had already passed away at the age of eighty-three. Thomas Zambito, “Dead Waitress Wins Harass Suit,” New York Daily News (4/30/2009).
39. Earl Wilson, “Famous Lindy’s Waiters,” Beaver County (PA) Times (9/19/1969).
40. Alan Richman, “Oldest Living,” GQ (10/2000), http://www.gq.com/food-travel/alan-richman/200602/professonial-jewish-waiter. Spelling error in original.
41. Robert Sylvester, “The Broadway Gang Eats Here,” Saturday Evening Post (7/15/1961), 51.
42. Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 34.
43. “No Hashers: Waitresses Must Have Tact and Charm,” Literary Digest (5/1/1937), 26–27.
44. Levine, “Pastrami Land,” 67.
45. “Pesach Burstein, Vol. 1,” Pesach Burstein, Judaica Sound Archives, Florida Atlantic University, http://www.faujsa.fau.edu/burstein. Special thanks to Mike Burstyn (son of Pesach Burstein) and to Mark Altman for help in translating the song. Burstein’s five albums of recordings for Columbia can be accessed through the Judaica Sound Archives on the website of the Florida Atlantic University. See also Eric Byron, “English Acquisition by Immigrants (1880–1940): The Confrontation as Reflected in Early Sound Recordings,” Columbia Journal of American Studies, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cjas/byron1.html (accessed 2/2/2009).
46. Ethel Somers, “Glorifying the Home Dinner,” Liberty (1/29/1927), 67.
47. Untitled article, Life (11/1/1929), 16.
48. Daniel Fuchs, Homage to Blenholt (London: Constable, 1936), 242.
49. “With the Procession,” Everybody’s Magazine 10.1 (1904): 709.
50. L. H. Robins, “Rest for the Delicatessen Man?,” New York Times (8/15/1937), 117.
51. Bertram Beinitz, “Our Town and Its Folk: A Delicatessen and Some Others,” New York Times (3/29/1925), XX2.
52. “Says ‘Delicatessen Wife’ Is Grounds for a Divorce,” New York Times (5/2/1925), 17.
53. “Poor Meals Break Homes,” New York Times (9/16/1920), 8.
54. Florence Guy Seabury, “The Delicatessen Husband,” in The Delicatessen Husband: And Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926), 31.
55. Seabury, “The Delicatessen Husband,” 29.
56. Seabury, “The Delicatessen Husband,” 42.
57. Silas Bent, Machine Made Man (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1930), 33.
58. Arthur Kober, “Nobody Can Beat Friedkin’s Meats,” in Harold U. Ribalow, ed., A Treasury of American Jewish Stories (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1958), 223.
59. Jo Sinclair, Wasteland (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946), 105.
60. “News Plan,” Printer’s Ink 114 (3/24/1921), 79.
61. Montague Glass, “Welcome to New York: Fishbein and Blintz Discuss New York versus the Rest of the U.S.,” Life 80 (8/31/1922), 20.
62. “Standard Meals? Enter the Delicatessen,” Baltimore Sun (11/7/1926), E23.
63. “Standard Meals?,” E23.
64. Robins, “Rest for the Delicatessen Man?”
65. Louise Gertner, “What New York Eats in the Hot Summer Days,” Yiddish Daily Forward (7/27/1937), 4.
66. S. J. Wilson, Hurray for Me (New York: Crown, 1964), 98. In a review of the novel in the Chicago Tribune, the critic Digby Whitman wrote, “[It] glows with the unique warmth of what I can only call the tribal life of the underprivileged Jew.” Digby B. Whitman, “Luminous Novel Re-creates Small Child’s World,” Chicago Tribune (2/23/1964), L1.
67. Thomas F. Dwyer to Benjamin Koenigsberg (6/16/1931), Benjamin Koenigsberg Collection, Box 11, Folder 1, Yeshiva University Archives. Reported numbers of kosher delicatessens fluctuated widely. Two years earlier, according to a report by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, there were approximately two thousand nominally kosher delicatessens in New York City, along with ten thousand kosher butchers, although half of all these were found to be in noncompliance with strict kosher regulations. “Seek Greater Enforcement of Kashruth Laws in New York,” Jewish Criterion (Pittsburgh, PA) (6/7/1929), 4.
68. Samuel Popkin, “The Delicatessen Industry,” Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (5/1932), 12–13, Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library.
69. Popkin, “The Delicatessen Industry,” 13.
70. David Ward and Oliver Zunz, The Landscape of Modernity: New York City, 1900–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 266.
71. See A. H. Raskin’s review of Max Danish’s The World of David Dubinsky, in which Raskin criticizes the book for failing to provide “an adequate sense of personal piquancy of a union leader as full of spice as the pastrami and pickled tomatoes he loves to munch at Lindy’s or the Stage Delicatessen.” A. H. Raskin, “The Man behind the Union,” New York Times (11/10/1957), 306.
72. Daniel Rogov, “You Expected Maybe Pâté de Foie Gras?,” in Daniel Rogov, David Gershon, and David Louison, The Rogue’s Guide to the Jewish Kitchen (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Post Press, 1984), 23.
73. Laurie Ochoa, “Just What Is a Delicatessen Supposed to Look Like, Anyway?,” Los Angeles Times (3/11/1990), 99.
74. Ruth Glazer, “West Bronx: Food, Shelter, Clothing,” Commentary (6/1949), 582.
75. According to the report, 98 percent of cattle and also 98 percent of calves that were slaughtered in New York were killed according to the kosher laws; however, only about half of the meat consumed by the city’s inhabitants was slaughtered locally. “Half of All Meat Used in New York Is Kosher,” Jewish Daily News (5/29/1921), 16.
76. Jacob Cohn, The Royal Table: An Outline of the Dietary Laws of Israel (New York: Bloch, 1936).
77. “Dietary Laws of ‘The Royal Table,’” Literary Digest 123 (1/2/1937), 28.
78. “Feeding the City,” Works Progress Administration Study (8/15/1940), New York City Municipal Archives.
79. Interview with the author, 6/9/2005.
80. Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York: Picador, 2002), 177.
81. See Mordechai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1994). Rabbi Ezra Finkelstein, son of Louis Finkelstein, one of the most prominent rabbis of his day, recalls his father lunching during the mid-1920s at a kosher delicatessen with Cyrus Adler, then president of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Adler ordered a sandwich, while Finkelstein requested a cup of tea. An Orthodox Jewish passerby wearing a black hat and a long beard came into the restaurant and asked them, in Yiddish, if the restaurant hewed to strict standards of kashrut. Finkelstein, not wanting to get into a discussion of why he was having only a cup of tea (which could indeed indicate a lack of trust in the restaurant’s standards with regard to food), shrugged his shoulders. The man took a look at Adler, who was clean shaven, and said to Finkelstein, in Yiddish, “So this other fellow is a non-Jew?” Ezra Finkelstein, e-mail to the author, 11/3/2010.
82. Moore, At Home in America, 75.
83. Moore, At Home in America, 76.
84. Willensky, When Brooklyn Was the World, 190.
85. Isidore P. Salupsky, “An Open Letter to the Storekeepers,” Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (1/1932), 11.
86. Isidore P. Salupsky, “What a Delicatessen Man Should Remember,” Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine (6/1932), 11.
87. “Delicatessen—A Necessary Luxury,” Voice of the Delicatessen Industry (1940), Center for Jewish History, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
88. Interview with the author, 1/7/2002.
89. Ruth Glazer, “From the American Scene: One Touch of Delicatessen,” Commentary (3/1946), 62.
90. Interview with the author, 9/4/2007.
91. Interview with the author, 8/13/2003
92. Interview with the author, 2/12/2005.
93. Interview with the author, 2/10/2005.
94. Kazin, Walker in the City, 34.
95. Midrash Tanhuma, Genesis 1. The Torah refers to itself as eish da’at, “fiery law.” Deuteronomy 33:2.
96. Naomi Seidman, “Alfred Kazin and the Great Beyond,” JBooks.com, n.d., http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Seidman_Kazin.htm.
97. Kazin, Walker in the City, 40.
98. The irony of children watching shoot-’em-up films at the local movie theater was not lost on Goldfried, who knew that the headquarters of Murder Inc., the Italian-Jewish organized crime syndicate, was located in a nearby candy store called Midnight Rose’s. But Goldfried was fearless. When Louis Capone (whom many mistakenly assumed to be related to Al Capone) and a group of his associates came in after Prohibition to persuade the deli owner to buy King’s Beer, a brand that they controlled, he bravely told them to get lost.
99. Interview with the author, 4/2/2007.
100. Louis Menashe, “Sephardic in Williamsburg,” in Ilana Abramovitch and Sean Galvin, eds., The Jews of Brooklyn (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2002), 117.
101. Quoted in Wendy Gordon, “Deli: Comfort Food for the WWII Generation,” Forward (2/21/2012).
102. Interview with the author, 9/4/2007.
103. Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive (New York: Penguin, 1982), 117–118.
104. Leonard Bronstein, an Orthodox rabbi who certified many delis as kosher despite the fact that they were open on Saturday, told me that most kosher delicatessens “did their main business on Shabbos.” He added that it was “always that way; the only date that they closed was Pesach [Passover].” Interview with the author, 6/30/2003.
105. Jeffrey Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 10.
106. Levine, “Pastrami Land,” 67.
107. Susan Stamberg, “From Manhattan to Allentown to Washington, D.C.,” in Alan King and Friends, Matzo Balls for Breakfast and Other Memories of Growing Up Jewish (New York: Free Press, 2004), 3.
108. Jay Cantor, Great Neck (New York: Vintage, 2003), 25; emphasis in original.
1. See Robin Platts, Burt Bacharach and Hal David: What the World Needs Now (New York: Collector’s Press, 2002).
2. Hal David, radio interview with Terry Gross, 9/7/2012, http://m.npr.org/news/NPR+Music+Mobile/160748199.
3. “Topics of the Times,” New York Times (5/25/1945), 18.
4. The average meal for a solider contained forty-three hundred calories, with a third of the total coming from fat. Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 94.
5. A. B. Genung, Food Policies during World War II (Ithaca, NY: Northeast Farm Foundation, 1951), 18.
6. Violet E. Dewey, “Hoard Rationing Memories,” Milwaukee Journal (8/8/1973), 4.
7. Samuel Spiegler, Your Life’s Work (New York: Riverdale, 1943), 146.
8. “Meat Rationing Will Have Effect on Restaurants,” Evening Independent (3/24/1943), 12. In a bid to compel the OPA to modify the point system, delicatessen owners threatened to take advantage of a loophole in the regulations that permitted them to reduce the number of points needed for an item if the item was about to spoil. They plotted, in particular, to band together to slash the points for liverwurst. Jefferson G. Bell, “Point-Cutting War on Rationed Foods Is Begun in City,” New York Times (4/4/1943), 1.
9. “Dinner Guests Set a Ration Puzzle,” New York Times (3/24/1943), 18.
10. Ruth Corbett, Daddy Danced the Charleston (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1970), 119.
11. “Launch Bread and Gravy Month,” Super Market Merchandizing (2/1945), 45.
12. Bentley, Eating for Victory, 92.
13. “Four Meat Concerns Guilty of OPA Charge,” New York Times (12/2/1944), 17.
14. “Delicatessen Strike Off,” New York Times (5/24/1945), 18.
15. “2 Meatless Days Ordered by Mayor; To Be Enforced, New York Times (1/22/1945), 1.
16. “All Delicatessens in City May Close,” New York Times (9/22/1946), 43.
17. “Horse Meat Mart Here Soon Is Unlikely,” New York Times (9/26/1946), 29.
18. Herbert Mitgang, “A Pledge of Remembrance,” New York Times (12/17/1950), SM13.
19. Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing Up in the Borough in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 11.
20. Telephone interview with the author, 10/18/2007.
21. Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 53.
22. Molly Picon, Scrapbook (1925–1932), Center for Jewish History, American Jewish Historical Society.
23. H. L. Kaplan advertisement in Yiddishes Tageblatt / Jewish Daily News (2/26/1917), 3.
24. Barry Kessler, “Bedlam with Corned Beef on the Side,” Generations, Fall 1993, 2–7. See also Gilbert Sandler, Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 132–134.
25. Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon, The Death of an American Jewish Community (New York: Free Press, 1992), 24–25.
26. Mark Friedman, “Looking Back,” Historian (newsletter of the Rogers Park / West Ridge Historical Society) 16.3 (2001): 2.
27. Bill Gleason, “Oscar Keeps Friendship with Yanks, Berra Strictly Kosher,” Chicago American (4/23/1964).
28. Joseph Epstein, “Nostalgie de la Boeuf,” Commentary (2/2010), 41.
29. Moore, To the Golden Cities, 59.
30. Orson Welles, “From Mars,” Commentary (6/1946), 70.
31. Rich Cohen, Tough Jews (New York: Crown, 1999), 14.
32. Murray “Boy” Maltin, 1/4 Pound Lean (Los Angeles: Boy’s Own, 2001), 14.
33. Marcie Cohen Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 45.
34. Collection of the author.
35. Segal’s boasted both a deli counter and a “dairy bar.” Thus, while both meat and dairy were offered, none of the items on the menu combined the two. (Abe’s Kosher Delicatessen in Scranton, Pennsylvania, continues this practice to this day.) Among the offerings were an EDDIE beefILTON stew (“no HAM allowed”) and a Kosher Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato Sandwich. The store was closed from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, as well as on all Jewish holidays. Menu from Rosen’s Delirama, author’s personal collection. A picture of the store can be found in Scott Faragher and Katherine Harrington, Memphis in Vintage Postcards (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2000), 69.
36. Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo, 45.
37. Harry Golden, Only in America (New York: Perma Books, 1958), 113.
38. Clive Webb, Fight against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 109–113.
39. Quoted in Moore, To the Golden Cities, 85.
40. Quoted in Joann Biondi, Miami Beach Memories: A Nostalgic Chronicle of Days Gone By (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2006), 27.
41. Gilbert Millstein, “Who’s Who and Who’s Ain’t along Broadway,” New York Times (12/31/1950), SM6.
42. Edward S. Shapiro, We Are Many: Reflections on American Jewish History and Identity (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 102.
43. Quoted in Biondi, Miami Beach Memories, 58.
44. Harry Gersh, “Kochalein: Poor Man’s Shangri-La,” Commentary (2/1949), 169.
45. Mimi Sheraton, From My Mother’s Kitchen (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 243.
46. Phil Brown, Catskills Culture: A Mountain Rat’s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 43.
47. Brown, Catskills Culture, 17.
48. Brown, Catskills Culture, 89.
49. Interview with the author, 3/3/9/2007.
50. Jane Levi, “An Extraterrestrial Sandwich: The Perils of Food in Space,” Endeavor 34.1 (2010), 7.
51. Levi, “An Extraterrestrial Sandwich,” 6.
52. Quoted in Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (New York: Norton, 2010), 289.
53. Independent Offices Appropriations for 1966: Hearings, Volume 9 (Washington, DC: U.S. Congress, 1965), 912. See also Barton C. Hacker and James M. Grimwood, On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010).
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. “Kosher Products Show Swift Rise,” 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.
88. Barry Glassner, “Fitness and the Postmodern Self,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 30 (6/1989): 183.
89. Glassner, “Fitness and the Postmodern Self,” 186.
90. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, 310.
91. “Eating Right for Less: Salt and Fats Linked to Health,” Milwaukee Journal (11/24/1975), 23.
92. Barbara Gibbons, “Slim Gourmet,” Reading Eagle (4/13/1977), 41.
93. Robert C. Atkins, Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution (New York: Bantam, 1981), 269–270.
94. See Frances Moore Lappe, Diet for a Small Planet (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971).
95. Isadore Barmash, “The Big Kosher Salami War,” New York Times (6/6/1987), 37.
96. Stop & Shop advertisement, The Hour (Norwalk, CT) (5/25/1977), 15.
97. Leonard S. Bernstein, “Death by Pastrami,” Literary Review, Spring 2001, reprinted in Leonard S. Bernstein, The Man Who Wanted to Buy a Heart (New York: UNO, 2012).
98. “The Fatigues,” Seinfeld, season 8, episode 6, originally aired 10/31/1996 (Sony Pictures, 2012), DVD.
99. Josh Kun, “The Yiddish Are Coming; Mickey Katz, Antic-Semitism, and the Sound of Jewish Difference,” American Jewish History 87.4 (1999): 368.
100. M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 88.
101. Ken Kalfus, “Shine On, Harvey Bloom,” Commonweal (4/22/1994), 15.
102. Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 19.
103. Isaac Rosenfeld, “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” in Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader, ed. Mark Shechner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 146–147.
104. Eve Jochnowitz, “‘Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army’: Sites of Jewish Memory and Identity at Lower East Side Restaurants,” in Hasia R. Diner, Beth Wenger, and Jeffrey Shandler, eds., Remembering the Lower East Side (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 212–225.
105. See Dana Evan Kaplan, Contemporary American Judaism: Transformation and Renewal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 161–205.
106. Skyscraper, book by Peter Stone, lyrics by Sammy Cahn, and music by Jimmy Van Heusen, 1965 original cast recording (DRG, 2002), CD.
107. Woody Allen, “Thus Ate Zarathustra,” New Yorker (7/3/2006).
108. Shepard Sobel, “From the Director,” in A Playgoer’s Supplement to Hamlet, Pearl Theatre Company, 2007–2008 season brochure, 8.
109. Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 98.
110. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. ed. (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000).
111. When Harry Met Sally, directed by Rob Reiner (MGM, 1989), DVD.
112. Making Trouble, directed by Rachel Talbott (Jewish Women’s Archive, 2007), DVD.
113. See “‘When Harry Met Sally’: Flash Mob Recreates Iconic Deli Scene,” Hollywood Reporter (11/14/2013). For the video, see Improv Everywhere, “Harry Met Sally Orgasm Scene Prank—Movies in Real Live (Ep 7),” YouTube (11/12/2013), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shC016PnxPs.
114. Broadway Danny Rose, directed by Woody Allen (Orion Pictures, 1984), DVD.
115. Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, “The Catskills Reinvented (and Redeemed): Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose,” Kenyon Review 25.3 (2003): 264–281. This deli connection is made throughout Allen’s oeuvre; in Bananas, for example, Allen’s character orders a thousand sandwiches with coleslaw from a band of revolutionaries in the jungle. Bananas, directed by Woody Allen (MGM, 2000), DVD.
116. “The Larry David Sandwich,” Curb Your Enthusiasm, season 5, episode 1, originally aired 9/25/2005 (HBO Studios, 2006), DVD.
117. Kenneth A. Briggs, “Orthodox Judaism Is Buoyed by a Resurgence in New York,” New York Times (3/29/1983), A1.
118. Bryan Miller, “Kosher Dining Out: The Options Grow,” New York Times (10/8/1986), C1.
119. Jacqueline Rivkin, “The Ys of a Kosher Cooking School,” Kosher Gourmet (3/1989), 6–7.
120. Jacqueline Rivkin, “Kosher Gourmet Clubs Provide Adventurous Eating,” Kosher Gourmet (6–8/1987), 6.
121. Sam Levenson, “Oh Cuisine!,” Saturday Review (3/1/1980).
122. Richard Jay Scholem, “A Stalwart of Old-Fashioned Deli Fare,” New York Times (1/18/1998).
123. Joseph Berger, “As Delis Dwindle, Traditions Lose Bite,” New York Times (5/15/1998), B1.
124. “Facts about New York City,” Harpers (4/1998).
125. Jonathan Mark, “When the Bronx Had Delis,” New York Jewish Week (3/15/1996).
126. Quoted in Ted Merwin, “Serving Up Food with Attitude.” Text/Context, supplement to New York Jewish Week (4/3/2009), http://www.thejewishweek.com/special_sections/text_context/serving_food_attitude.
127. David M. Herszenhorn, “Knishes or Kimchi: Last Kosher Deli Closes on Union Street,” New York Times (8/6/1995), C6.
128. Samuel Freedman, “Indiana Pastrami? Hebrew National Plans Move,” New York Times (8/8/1986), B3.
129. Elliot Weiss, “Packaging Jewishness: Novelty and Tradition in Kosher Food Packaging,” Design Issues 20.1 (2004): 48.
1. Quoted in Ted Merwin, “Hold Your Tongue,” New York Jewish Week (1/13/2006).
2. Andy Newman, “Hold the Mustard, Maybe Forever,” New York Times (1/6/2006), 1.
3. Ron Rosenbaum, “Where Is the Schmaltz of Yesteryear? Christmas Eve in a Jewish Deli,” Slate (12/27/2007), http://www.slate.com/id/2180953.
4. Adam Gopnik, Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York (New York: Random House, 2007), 64–65.
5. What a Pickle: The World’s Greatest Deli Musical, directed by Henry Chalfant and Wayne Lammers (Tribabka Films, 1999), VHS.
6. See David Sax, “Shiva for the Stage Deli,” The Jew & the Carrot (blog), Forward (11/30/2012), http://blogs.forward.com/the-jew-and-the-carrot/167020/shiva-for-the-stage-deli/. See also Ted Merwin, “The American Dream, on Rye,” New York Jewish Week (12/11/2012).
7. Stewart Ain, “Kosher Delis Close across Long Island,” New York Jewish Week (4/2/2014).
8. Interview with the author, 5/23/2014.
9. Andrew Adam Newman, “After 123 Years, Manischewitz Creates Kosher Food for Gentiles,” New York Times (12/26/2011), B3.
10. William Alden, “Equity Fund Buys Maker of Matzos,” New York Times (4/7/2014), B4.
11. Paul Rudnick, “Yummy” (Shouts and Murmurs), New Yorker (6/2/2014), 35. The idea of serving deli food to Christians on Christmas Eve also animates Mike Reiss’s comical children’s book about a deli owner who fills in for Santa Claus. See Mike Reiss, How Murray Saved Christmas, illustrated by David Catrow (New York: Puffin, 2004).
12. See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
13. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 12.
14. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 11.
15. Willensky, When Brooklyn Was the World, 190.
16. Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979), 31.
17. Interview with the author, 3/12/2008.
18. Mimi Sheraton, “Lost, Then Found—New York Classics,” New York Times (7/31/2012), D1.
19. Quoted in R. W. Apple, “Bagging the Endangered Sandwich,” New York Times (9/15/1999), F13.
20. Darra Goldstein, “From the Editor: Food from the Heart,” Gastronomica 4.1 (2004), http://www.gastronomica.org/food-from-the-heart/.
21. Daina Beth Solomon, “Wexler’s Brings the Deli Revolution to L.A.,” Forward (5/7/2014).
22. Julia Moskin, “Everything New Is Old Again,” New York Times (5/27/2014).
23. Michael Kaminer, “The New York Jewish Deli Meets the 21st Century, and the Results Are Geshmak,” Washington Post (7/17/2014).
24. Devra Ferst, “Shabbat Dinner Faces the Future with Panache,” Forward (10/17/2012).
25. Panel discussion at ABC Carpet, New York City Wine and Food Festival, 10/13/2012.
26. Josh Ozersky and David Sax, “Debating the Deli,” Jewish Daily Forward video on Vimeo, http://vimeo.com/58913579 (accessed 3/21/2014).
27. Julia Moskin, “Can the Jewish Deli Be Reformed?,” New York Times (4/14/2010), D1. See also Bonnie Hulkower, “Michael Pollan, Saul’s Deli Secret Pastrami Hawker?,” Treehugger (3/2/2010), http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/michael-pollan-sauls-deli-secret-pastrami-hawker.html.
28. Moskin, “Can the Jewish Deli Be Reformed?”
29. Glenn Collins, “Beef from Creekstone Farms Impresses New York Chefs,” New York Times (3/24/2010), D1.
30. Interview with author, 10/13/2012.
31. Interview with the author, 10/19/2013.
32. Moskin, “Can the Jewish Deli Be Reformed?”
33. Interview with author, 10/19/2013.
34. Noah Bernamoff and Rae Bernamoff, The Mile End Cookbook: Redefining Jewish Comfort Food from Hash to Hamantaschen (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2012), 14.
35. Interview with author, 10/13/2012.
36. Margaret Eby, “Mile End, Russ and Daughters Both Plan Bars,” Forward (9/22/2013).
37. Interview with Michelle Kiefer, 5/20/2011, Nona Brooklyn, http://nonabrooklyn.com/deli-defiant-mile-end%E2%80%99s-noah-bernamoff-does-it-his-way/#.UZNxJzfCuZA (accessed 8/15/2012).
38. Moskin, “Can the Jewish Deli Be Reformed?”
39. Interview with the author, 10/19/2012.
40. Lisa Keys, “High on the Hog,” Tablet (2/5/2010), http://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/25147/high-on-the-hog.
41. Josh Ozersky, “How Traif Came to Williamsburg,” Huffington Post (12/15/2010), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-ozersky/how-traif-came-to-william_b_796891.html.
42. Adeena Sussman, “Haimish to Haute in New York,” Forward (3/28/2012).
43. See Sarah Zorn, “Our Favorite Jewish-ish Dishes,” Brooklyn Magazine (11/12/2013).
44. Mary Kong-Devito, “Bigger Is Better at Harold’s Deli,” Girl Meets Food (blog) (12/7/2009), http://dc.eater.com/tags/girl-meets-food.
45. “Mother of Mercy! Is This the End of Katz’s?,” New York (5/17/2007), http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2007/05/mother_of_mercy_is_this_the_en.html.
46. “Food and Drink,” in Kenneth M. Gold and Lori R. Weintrob, eds., Discovering Staten Island: A 350th Anniversary Commemorative History (New York: History Press, 2011), 88.
47. Bonnie Goodman, “The Higher East Side of New York,” PresenTense (blog) (2/22/2008), http://presentense.org/node/389.
48. Interview with the author, 6/19/2007.
49. Interview with the author, 2/14/2008.
50. Interview with the author, 1/3/2014.
51. Daniel Smokler, “Toward a Third Space—New Dimensions of Jewish Education for Emerging Adults,” paper presented at Hillel Conference at NYU (6/2010).
52. Pew Research, Religion & Public Life Project, A Portrait of Jewish Americans (10/1/2013), http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/.