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A new exhibit on Jewish delis explores the roots and rise of a uniquely American phenomenon
(New York Jewish Week) — It was a stupendously bad idea to arrive at the press preview for the New-York Historical Society’s new exhibit, “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli,” on an empty stomach.
The exhibit — which originated at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles and opens in New York on Friday, Nov. 11 — traces the mouthwatering history of the Jewish deli, beginning with the first waves of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These new Americans created a “fusion food born of immigration,” according to the exhibit, adapting Eastern and Central European dishes like pastrami and knishes to meet Jewish dietary needs and serving them all under the same roof.
From there, the exhibit examines how delis evolved and, as Jews left cities for the suburbs in the mid-20th century, how they spread from coast to coast. Relying on a mix of archival materials, informative panels, interactive displays and more, “I’ll Have What She’s Having” seems uniquely designed to make visitors crave a pastrami sandwich.
(Sadly, while a tray of babka and rugelach were laid out for the opening, there is no actual pastrami available on site.)
It’s also, as Louise Mirrer, the president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society said in her opening remarks, “a trip down memory lane” for any native New Yorker.
Most of all, “I’ll Have What She’s Having” establishes the Jewish delicatessen as a uniquely American phenomenon. Writer Lara Rabinovitch, a curator of the exhibit who has a PhD in history and Jewish studies, said there were “important caveats” before she got involved in its creation. “If we’re going to do this exhibition, it cannot be grounded in nostalgia and kitsch,” she told me. “It has to be grounded in research, in archival research, and it has to take the Jewish deli as a part of the American landscape — not as a Jewish niche object of rarified Jewish pleasure.”
The now-shuttered Carnegie Delicatessen in New York in 2008. (Ei Katsumata/Alamy Stock Photo)
“Because, to me, and I fundamentally believe this, the Jewish deli is a part of American culture,” she added. “And it is something that all Americans take part in, in one way or another, whether it’s through pop culture, or through actually going to the Jewish deli, or working in Jewish deli.”
This Americanness is emphasized throughout the exhibit, which includes an area dedicated to Levy’s iconic “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye” ad campaign and explanations of how many delis added a wider array of cuisines to attract more diverse customers. There’s also a focus on the deli in pop culture, which includes costumes from the deli scenes seen on the Amazon Prime hit “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”
Fascinatingly, one thing the exhibit doesn’t do is define what a deli actually is. “We came up with it as a community, a place where people gather to eat Jewish food of one kind or another, but it’s always changing,” Rabinovich said. “I mean, we all know, in certain capacities, what a Jewish deli is. But it’s sort of like pornography — it doesn’t have a definition, but you know it when you see it.”
Case in point: This version of “I’ll Have What She’s Having” has an area dedicated to dairy restaurants — not something that most people would associate with the classic Jewish deli. (For those who keep kosher, delis and dairy restaurants must be kept as separate as the meat- and milk-based dishes that they serve.)
Other New York-centric details include an area dedicated to “Bagels Over Broadway,” examining the relationship between iconic eateries like the Carnegie Deli and Stage Delicatessen — both closed, alas — and the greater theater community. There’s also an area on delis in the outer boroughs, including Ben’s Best Kosher Delicatessen, which was a popular gathering place for Holocaust survivors in Rego Park, Queens.
Among the compelling artifacts on display are a bottle of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda from 1930s; a meat grinder from the early 20th century for making kishke, salami and the like; and matchbooks from delis of yore.
Particularly notable is historical proof that New Yorkers did, in fact, listen to Katz’s Delicatessen’s famous slogan, “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army”: On display is a 1944 letter from Italy from Private Benjamin Segan to his fiancée in Manhattan. “I had some tasty Jewish dishes just like home,” he writes, describing how his mother had sent him a, yes, salami.
According to the New-York Historical Society, by the 1930s, there were an estimated 3,000 delis in the city — today, only about a dozen remain. One classic survivor is Katz’s — the setting for the famous “When Harry Met Sally” scene that inspired the title of the exhibit. Third-generation owner Jake Dell told me that “food, tradition-slash-nostalgia, and atmosphere,” are the reasons for his deli’s enduring appeal today.
Among the items on view: a uniform from the 2nd Avenue Deli, left, and costumes from the set of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” (Lisa Keys)
Because, here in New York, especially, there are numerous options for deli delights, from the old-school classics to newer establishments like Frankel’s in Greenpoint. I remarked to Rabinovitch that there is something slightly incongruous about standing beneath the iconic 2nd Avenue Deli sign inside a museum. Here, its Hebraic letters are viewed as an artifact; meanwhile, while it’s no longer at its original Second Avenue location, we could still go there for lunch.
“You don’t have to go that far,” she pointed out. “You can go across the street to Nathan’s hot dog cart. And that is the Jewish deli, also. It’s literally a part of the American landscape. It’s part of the New York landscape. There is a trope, ‘Oh, the deli is dying, you can’t get a pastrami sandwich anywhere.’ We believe the deli is everywhere. It’s just how you think about it.”
As much as I loved this sentiment, I’m not really a street meat kind of person. It was a sunny, unseasonably warm morning, and I had a terrible urge to blow off the rest of the day, head to Katz’s for a pastrami sandwich and spend the afternoon wandering the Lower East Side.
But I had an article to write. So I hopped on a Citi Bike, headed to midtown, and picked up a bagel that I could hold one-handed as I wrote this story.
“‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli” is on view at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, beginning Friday, Nov. 11, 2022 through Sunday, April 2, 2023.
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The post A new exhibit on Jewish delis explores the roots and rise of a uniquely American phenomenon appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America
The new documentary Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, produced by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, is fast, entertaining and a good introduction to the topic.
Focusing mainly on the musical side of the story, but covering ‘straight plays’ as well, the film opens with a superb ‘warm-up act’: “Hu Tsa Tsa,” a stock Yiddish vaudeville number performed by the widely mourned Bruce Adler, who died in 2008 at age 63. Bursting with charm and talent, Adler, scion of a top Yiddish vaudeville family, demonstrates that Yiddish theater used to be pretty damned lively.
What follows is the oft-told story of the rise and decline of the American Yiddish theater, beginning with its prehistory in the Purimshpiels — the annual performances that for centuries served as the only secular entertainment in the Ashkenazic world. From there the film takes us to Yiddish theater’s 1876 birth in Romania, courtesy of Avrom Goldfadn, a.k.a. “The Father of Yiddish Theater.”
The film also describes Yiddish theater’s arrival in America, which, thanks to massive Jewish immigration, quickly became its capital. We learn of its influence on American theater’s styles of acting and set design. And the film describes the decline of its audience, due to assimilation and the immigration quotas of the 1920s.
There’s an excellent section on “The Big Four” Yiddish theater composers — Joseph Rumshinsky, Alexander Olshanetsky, Abe Ellstein, and Sholom Secunda. All in all, the documentary does a fine job of teaching the aleph-beyz, the ABCs, of the history of Yiddish theater to the uninitiated.
The most impressive aspect of Immigrant Songs is its well-crafted pace. Though there are a few snippets of vintage Yiddish cinema (Yiddish theater’s “kid brother”), most of the film consists of recent concert footage, some well-selected photographs and ephemera, and a lot of talking heads. Almost every prominent Yiddish theater historian was interviewed for it, along with several musicologists, an archivist, Yiddish actors, directors, producers, etc. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.) Director Jeff Janeczko cuts between the interviewees so smoothly — sometimes in mid-sentence — that it feels like they’re in the same room and feeding off each other’s energy. The movie just flies by.
There are a few errors. Marc Chagall is described as an important designer of Yiddish theater; actually he designed one minor production in Russia in 1921, and never did another. In a bizarre, and biblically illiterate, statement, one interviewee claims that Jews hadn’t developed a theater culture earlier because the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” forbade the construction of sets. (Actually it’s about idol worship.)
Another interviewee claims that the Yiddish play Der Yeshiva Bokher; oder, Der Yudisher Hamlet — The Yeshiva Student; or, The Jewish Hamlet (Yiddish plays then often had subtitles), is closely patterned on Shakespeare’s tragedy. In truth, the play — written by Isidore Zolotarevski, the prolific writer of shund (“trash”) melodramas — is not only awful, but is as close to Shakespeare as baked ham is to your grandmother’s kreplach.
The film’s biggest fault, however, is its short running time (45 minutes). This is a rich topic, and too much is left by the wayside in the interest of brevity. There’s nothing about what shund melodramas felt like, why they appealed to their audiences, and why they became the only thing a lot of people know about Yiddish theater.
There’s also nothing about the World War I-era wave of shtetl plays, which reflected immigrants’ homesickness without indulging in nostalgia, and provided some of Yiddish theater’s shining moments with plays like Green Fields, The Empty Inn and Tevye. And the most important play in the Yiddish canon, The Dybbuk, is never mentioned.
Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the film’s emphasis on music, there is no examination of Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway’s music. (Cole Porter — ironically, the only gentile among the major composers of Broadway’s Golden Age — had a pronounced Jewish lilt in a number of his songs, and he actually attended Yiddish theater regularly.)
The film’s last section is about the renewed interest in Yiddish that began in the 1970s and ’80s with the klezmer revival. Much of it focuses on the 2018 Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, whose success was predetermined the moment the production was announced.
For the overwhelming majority of American Jews, from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated, Fiddler is all they know about the lives of their ancestors. And though it’s a world-class piece of musical theater, as a work of social history Fiddler is as phony as a glass eye. Nevertheless, for American Jews it’s a sacred text.
Fiddler was a huge hit, but it was a gimmick, a one-off, whose success does very little for the future of Yiddish theater. Worse, the Yiddish — not the text, but the lines spoken by most of the actors — was often mispronounced and had the wrong intonation. (One elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native Yiddish speaker from Czechoslovakia, told me he didn’t understand a word the actors said, and spent the whole evening reading the English supertitles.)
What follows the Fiddler section in Immigrant Songs is mostly bromides. But the best current Yiddish theater reflects the kind of fresh thinking that keeps the form alive.
An occasional well-presented museum piece, like the Folksbiene’s 2016 revival of Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, is a very worthwhile project (though it, too, suffered from poorly spoken Yiddish). But the most dynamic contemporary Yiddish theater is, in Jeffrey Shandler’s apt phrase, “post vernacular” — i .e., the use of Yiddish is self-conscious, a deliberate choice rather than something that’s done automatically, as it would have been a century ago when there were a lot more Yiddish speakers in the world.
An example of this is the 2017 neo-realist film Menashe, which could far more easily and conventionally have been made in English. Or a well-known piece done in Yiddish translation, like Shane Baker’s stunning Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot, can become something much more valuable than a mere stunt. The Yiddish version, under Moshe Yassur’s straightforward direction, humanized the play, stripping it of the encrusted pretentiousness that had hidden its soul. (When it was presented in the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Ireland, multiple audience members approached the cast afterwards with the same reaction: “I don’t speak a word of Yiddish. But I’ve seen Godot five or six times, and this is the first time I understood it.”)
There’s a lot to be learned from Immigrant Songs. If you find yourself hungry for more, you couldn’t do better than to seek out YIVO’s online Yiddish theater course “Oh, Mama, I’m in Love!” But by all means, start with Immigrant Songs. It’s a very entertaining and informative appetizer.
The post New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America appeared first on The Forward.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”