In a display of history and nostalgia, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles is memorializing a fading cuisine: the Jewish delicatessen.Credit...Joel Barhamand for The New York Times

The Jewish Deli: An American Tale Told in Pickles and Pastrami

By Adam Nagourney The New York Times

“I’ll Have What She’s Having,” a traveling exhibit on the Jewish delicatessen, looks back at a vibrant institution fueled by immigration and irresistible food.

In a display of history and nostalgia, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles is memorializing a fading cuisine: the Jewish delicatessen.Credit...Joel Barhamand for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — The colors are fading, but the photograph of the Carnegie Deli from 2008 still calls up a world of heaping pastrami sandwiches, pungent smells of brine and smoke, and tourists lined out the door onto Seventh Avenue in New York.

A few steps away, a kosher carving knife, a pushcart, a pickle barrel and a battered traveling valise used by immigrants from Lithuania are lined up against a wall. They conjure the Lower East Side of a century ago, bustling with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, in the midst of creating a cuisine and a new kind of restaurant.

This attic’s worth of artifacts sprawls through “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli,” an exhibit chronicling the rise of that restaurant culture in America. It is by all indications the most sweeping survey of this culinary institution attempted by a major museum. (Why that name? Do you have to ask?)

The museum, though, is far from the tenements of Lower Manhattan: The Skirball Cultural Center, about 20 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, created the show and over the next year will send it to three other venues around the country, including the New-York Historical Society.

ImageA collection of advertisements for Levy’s rye bread that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s.Credit...Joel Barhamand for The New York Times

A waitress uniform and a cash register from Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles.Credit...Joel Barhamand for The New York Times

It’s not real: A food designer mock-up of matzo ball soup.Credit...Joel Barhamand for The New York Times

The exhibition is an exploration of the food and culture that thrived in New York and later Los Angeles, with their large Jewish and show-business communities, along with cities like Chicago, Houston, Miami and Indianapolis. As such, it surveys the story of immigration as a force behind changing American tastes: The pushcarts, as the curators note, foreshadowed the food trucks now operated by a new generation of immigrants. A grainy film clip near the start of the exhibit shows police officers fanning out to clear carts from a New York street in the early 1900s, a scene reminiscent of the 2020 crackdowns in Los Angeles on unlicensed food vendors.

“This show is making the argument that the Jewish deli is an American construct,” said Cate Thurston, one of the curators. “It’s an American food and it’s born of immigration.”

But there is also something elegiac about the exhibit, a reminder that delis and the food they served are no longer as prevalent as they were 50 years ago, even in Jewish life. The show is an exercise not only in history, but in nostalgia. There were an estimated 3,000 Jewish delis in New York City in the 1930s; now there are just a few dozen, according to the New-York Historical Society.

The children of the immigrants who built their lives behind a deli counter did not, as a rule, follow their parents into the family business. Growing up, they showed more interest in Chinese and Italian food than in the smoked meat, bagels and knishes that filled their family tables. The demand for kosher food, prepared under rabbinical supervision, is nowhere near as strong as it was in those first decades after the immigrants arrived. There are now “deli counters” at most supermarkets. And many delicatessens were not able to survive the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Cate Thurston, left, and Laura Mart, curators at the Skirball, conceived the exhibition. “We often go pretty wacky with the ideas,” Ms. Mart said.Credit...Joel Barhamand for The New York Times

“What does this mean when Jewish culture becomes part of a museum exhibit?” said Ted Merwin, the author of “Pastrami on Rye,” a 2015 history of the Jewish delicatessen. “Is my experience already in the past, a fossil? Is it sort of a last gasp?”

There is no doubt that “I’ll Have”— with its menus from the Stage Deli in New York (now closed, like the Carnegie Deli), and its celebration of matzo ball soup, chopped liver, knishes, kugel, salami and pickled herring — draws people who want to relive the memory of a grandmother or uncle or neighborhood long changed. But Lara Rabinovitch, a food writer and historian who helped curate the exhibition, said this was not intended as a sentimental journey.

“When I came on board I had two caveats: One is we had to treat the Jewish deli as part of the American landscape,” she said. “And two, we could not succumb to kitsch and nostalgia. When it comes to Jewish food, deli or Jewish food can evoke a lot of conversations and a lot of kitsch and nostalgia.”

A cigarette vending machine, still filled with stale packs of smokes, was retrieved from the Kibitz Room at Canter’s Deli on North Fairfax Avenue.Credit...Joel Barhamand for The New York Times

“We think it’s the sort of perfect history exhibition,” Ms. Hofer said, adding, “We can attract the visitors to an exhibition like this and then surprise them with all kinds of history.”

There are few things more New York than the Jewish deli; sitting down for an overstuffed, and overpriced, pastrami sandwich at the Second Avenue Deli or Katz’s Delicatessen has typically been on any tourist’s must-do agenda. Yet this exhibition was conceived by two women who live in the San Fernando Valley and are curators at the Skirball, a center devoted to Jewish culture.

“We are both Valley Girls,” Laura Mart said of her and her colleague, Ms. Thurston. “We like to eat. And we were having one of our 4 p.m. snack breaks and kind of spitballing different ideas. We often go pretty wacky with the ideas, and then break it down from there.”

The Los Angeles metropolitan area has the second-largest Jewish population in the United States, and more than its share of classic Jewish delis. Jessie Kornberg, the Skirball’s chief executive, said she thought there were advantages to telling the story from outside New York.

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A vintage menu from the Stage Deli in Manhattan, a reminder of how many once famous delicatessens have disappeared from the streets of Manhattan.Credit...Joel Barhamand for The New York Times

“Much of the history of the deli has been told by New Yorkers, or with a focus on New York delis,” Ms. Kornberg said. “This exhibition is intentionally national in scope, which no doubt reflects our perspective as a West Coast institution.”

Though the Jewish deli was born in New York, as Jews started moving to other places, so did the restaurants.

“Jews have migrated across the country,” said Ziggy Gruber, the star of “Deli Man,” a 2014 documentary on Jewish food, who now runs a delicatessen in Houston. “The reason you find a lot of delicatessens in L.A. is because of all the Jews, with the invention of motion pictures, who migrated to Los Angeles.”

New York, a city that has never walked away from a fight, could be forgiven for feeling a little put off by this West Coast interloper. But Ms. Hofer of the New-York Historical Society said she was drawn to the Skirball idea the moment she heard it.

“It’s not just a New York story, it’s an American story,” she said. “So there’s no competition over who gets to tell it.”

The exhibition will also head to Houston and to Skokie, Ill.: At each stop, it will be tweaked to include local lore.

From coast to coast: The Skirball exhibit includes artifacts from New York and Los Angeles.Credit...Joel Barhamand for The New York Times

The New York show, which opens on Nov. 11, will survey Jewish delis in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx as well as Manhattan. It features photographs of Mayor Edward I. Koch and Representative Bella S. Abzug in New York delis, and revisits the 1979 quest by Mimi Sheraton, a New York Times restaurant critic, to find the city’s best pastrami sandwich. (The winner: Pastrami King in Kew Gardens, Queens; it has since moved to the Upper East Side, and a sign from that location will be displayed at the historical society.)

Museum exhibits are usually based on sights — a painting, a sculpture, a looping video — and sounds. This one had the challenge of conveying tastes and smells, not an easy task in a gallery where food is not allowed.

An attempt by food stylists to recreate a facsimile of a deli sandwich out of nonfood ingredients turned into an unappealing mess. “We had a minor panic attack about this corned beef sandwich,” Ms. Mart said during a recent walk-through of the exhibition.

Ms. Thurston picked up the story. “We asked for a corned beef with mustard, and the mustard looked like thick, thick American cheese, like a fiesta of treyf” — it mixed meat and dairy, in violation of kosher law. “We couldn’t have it out on the gallery floor.”

The food fabricators went to work, pulling the plastic cheese off the sandwich before deeming it ready for the exhibition.

The exhibition has plenty of striking artifacts that do work in a museum, like the original neon sign recovered from Drexler’s Deli, which was opened by Holocaust survivors in North Hollywood in the early 1950s and is now closed. It bears a yellow star and the word kosher in Hebrew.

The curators retrieved the cigarette machine that stood against a wall at the Kibitz Room at Canter’s Deli, once a late-night hangout for rock stars and actors. And there are matchbooks collected from restaurants across the country, as well as menus from theater-district delis in New York, many with sandwiches named after performers — like the Ginger Rogers Special and the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis.

There is also, appropriately enough, a screen at the end of the exhibit, replaying the classic deli scene with Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, from the 1989 film “When Harry Met Sally,” that inspired the exhibition’s name.

The exhibit’s Los Angeles run was supposed to end on Sept. 4, but attendance has been so strong that museum administrators have extended it through Sept. 18. “I’ll Have What She’s Having” will no doubt draw much interest when it arrives in New York.

“But I wonder what people will take from it,” said Mr. Merwin, the author. “There’s often a question: ‘Can we bring the deli back?’ I want to say no. How do you turn back the clock? The place that delis occupied in Jewish culture doesn’t exist anymore.”

The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells

The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells

By Sarah Churchwell

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The night before Gone with the Wind’s Atlanta premiere in 1939, there was a ball at a plantation. Dressed as slaves, the children of the black Ebenezer Baptist Church choir performed for an all-white audience. They sang ‘There’s Plenty of Good Room in Heaven’; the actress playing Belle Watling, Rhett Butler’s tart with a heart, wept. The scene is already striking: a painfully literal example of the mythologising of the South for white consumption, redefining slavery as harmless and the slaves themselves as grateful. Yet Sarah Churchwell finds a jaw-dropping detail: ‘One of the little Black children dressed as a slave and bringing a sentimental tear to white America’s eye was a ten-year-old boy named Martin Luther King, Jr, who would be dead in thirty years for daring to dream of racial equality in America.’

Churchwell has written about American mythology before, notably in Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream, as well as in works on Marilyn Monroe and The Great Gatsby. This time it feels like she has hit the motherlode: ‘The heart of the [American] myth, as well as its mind and its nervous system, most of its arguments and beliefs, its loves and hates, its lies and confusions and defence mechanisms and wish fulfilments, are all captured (for the most part inadvertently) in America’s most famous epic romance.’ For Churchwell, ‘Gone with the Wind provides a kind of skeleton key, unlocking America’s illusions about itself.’

This is a bold claim – but Gone with the Wind was, and remains, a phenomenon like no other. Published in June 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s novel sold a million copies before the end of that year, won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and became the bestselling American novel of all time. Even now, it shifts 300,000 copies annually. In 1939, a film version was released, starring Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. Adjusted for inflation, it is the highest-grossing film of all time, ahead of Avatar and Titanic. In 2020, when the South Korean film Parasite – a biting satire on capitalism – won the Academy Award for Best Picture, President Donald Trump expressed his displeasure: ‘What the hell was that all about?’ he asked a rally in Colorado. ‘Can we get like Gone with the Wind back please?’ As usual, his audience understood exactly what he meant.

If the idea that one book and film can be the skeleton key to a whole culture seems simplistic, Churchwell swiftly begins to pile up startling evidence in short, pithy chapters. Race, gender, the Lost Cause, the American Dream, blood-and-soil fascism, the prison-industrial complex, a Trumpist mob storming the Capitol in 2021: it’s all here, and it’s all bound up with the themes of Gone with the Wind. Mythmaking is not just the building of fantasies but also the erasure of truth. The genocide of native peoples, for instance, is not in the book or film, but it was taking place at just the time that Gerald O’Hara would have been acquiring land in Georgia: ‘Scarlett’s beloved Tara is built upon land that was stolen from indigenous Americans a mere decade before her birth.’ Churchwell cuts through these thorny subjects with a propulsive assurance. Her writing is an extraordinary blend of wit, intellectual agility and forcefulness: it’s like being swept along by an extremely smart bulldozer.

Churchwell doesn’t flinch from the horrors that Gone with the Wind belies. The book and film propagate the Lost Cause myth, portraying the South as a place of chivalry, slavery as benevolent and the members of the Ku Klux Klan as honourable men stepping up as the world around them collapses. Churchwell shows us how these myths were constructed from the end of the Civil War onwards, and congealed seventy years later into Gone with the Wind. The reality of the reassertion of white supremacy during and after Reconstruction was, as Churchwell shows, horrific: there is some deeply upsetting material here on the terrorisation of both black people and those whites who did not comply with supremacist social codes. Lynchings were advertised in advance in local newspapers, ‘just as a fun fair or circus might have been’. A typical headline from 1905: ‘Will Burn Negro: Officers Will Probably Not Interfere in Texas’. Eight people were lynched in the year of Gone with the Wind’s publication.

‘Most defences of Gone with the Wind hold that while the novel’s racism is objectionable, it is of its time and in the background, of secondary importance to Scarlett’s appealing psychological strength,’ Churchwell writes. ‘But that defence replicates the novel’s politics, in which white women’s power is preserved at the cost of Black people’s equality.’ When Scarlett and Rhett have sex in the novel, after much emphasis of her whiteness, this is how Mitchell describes it: ‘She was darkness and he was darkness and there had never been anything before this time, only darkness and his lips upon her.’ Churchwell zooms straight in: ‘Darkness, with all its racial connotations, is where moral, social, and erotic disorder collide: the terror and thrill of raw power unleashed.’

Mitchell herself, of course, was a white Southern woman. Churchwell refers to Mitchell’s ‘internalization of white victimhood’: she believed that the oppressed people in her story were white Southerners forced to accept racial equality. Mitchell originally titled her book ‘Tote the Weary Load’, appropriating the title of a slave spiritual, ‘transforming Black suffering into white martyrdom: the people toting weary loads in her novel are always the white plantation class, never the Black enslaved’. Mitchell used some of her wealth to fund scholarships at Morehouse College, a historically black university, yet when she herself had encountered a black student in her history classroom at Smith College, she had thrown a tantrum and demanded to be moved to another class, ‘where she was safe from having to consider either the historical, or actual, existence of Black people’.

The screen version of Gone with the Wind could not entirely ignore the existence of black people, so it toned down the book’s racist language as well as some of its racial violence. There is a degree of irony in Scarlett, whose ‘magnolia skin’ is heavily fetishised, being played by Vivien Leigh, who probably had Indian ancestry. The producer, David Selznick, and Leslie Howard, who played Scarlett’s first love, Ashley Wilkes, were both of Jewish origin. Howard, says Churchwell, ‘categorically refused to read Gone with the Wind’. Most notably, though, the film’s black cast had to be persuaded to work on a white supremacist project. Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for her performance as Scarlett’s maid, Mammy, was born to parents who had both once been enslaved. Her father was a veteran of the Union Army who had fought in the Civil War. McDaniel insisted she had taken the role for the money: ‘she had chosen between $700 a week to play a maid, or $7 a week to be a maid.’ Yet she and Butterfly McQueen, who played Prissy, must have cared a bit about what they were doing. Both lobbied to have one of the novel’s most-used words – rendered by Churchwell as ‘nxxxxr’ – excised completely from the screenplay. Eventually it was, though only after Selznick struck a deal with the censors to eliminate it in return for being allowed to keep Rhett Butler’s final ‘damn’.

The film may have softened the book’s language and violence; it may have presented the Ku Klux Klan as a ‘social club’ without using its name. Yet it could not change the meaning and the message of the book, because, as Churchwell shows, they are embedded in every character, every action, every twist and turn of the story. Some argued that the film made the Lost Cause myth more palatable to a wider audience: the black-run New York Age described it as a ‘$4,000,000 sugar-coating of Southern mythology’. Churchwell suggests that the elimination of that one objectionable word ‘had the unfortunate effect of persuading many white audiences that nothing objectionable had happened in the first place’.

How might modern Americans begin to unpick this carefully woven myth? In the first place, they would have to want to – and it’s clear from the last few years that many would rather keep it intact. Churchwell’s excoriating analysis is energising, but she does not provide a revelation. I ended the book thinking of Scarlett’s last line in the movie, which is banal but hints at the possibility of change: ‘After all, tomorrow is another day.’ Perhaps, one day, the change will go against her