The Detroit Jewish News Digital Archives

The bagel quest is heading to Michigan this weekend. I know that Detroit has some deep bagel roots so I wanted to be well prepared for my visit. I posed some bagel questions to the 'Detroit Jewish History' Facebook group and a few folks suggested I search the Detroit Jewish News Digital Archives. This was an incredible treasure trove of bagel history. I typed "bagel" into the search engine and in the blink of an eye 7,936 entries presented themselves to me.  I skimmed through one hundred years of stories, and advertisements (and more advertisements,) and more bagel jokes than I thought existed. This was a fascinating deep dive into how bagels were talked about between 1920 and today.  There were some very random entries such as  the 'Bagel and the Constitution' article from 1996 when a Klan leader went before the Congress Committee on Un-American Affairs to "expose the kosher food business." And it turns out there was a song about bagels and lox recorded by Apollo Records  in 1946. You can listen to it here. ​ 

Every decade had its version of a bagel themed social gathering...some with lox, some with pizza bagels, some with donuts and some for the 'lox and bagel dating circuit.' Viewed through the lens of the bagel, these almost 8,000 entries had a lot to say about Jewish assimilation.  Below is a small sampling of some of my favorite entries. 

(Sign up here to be emailed the latest bagel quest missives.)

---

​The bagel entries really got going in the 1940s with 211 mentions of bagels. Many of them were were in reference to bagel and lox breakfast served during WWII to American soldiers. Bagel advertisements became a common thing. One of my favorite ads were for "Bob the Bagel Boy." After their WWII service, Bob Schorr, and his brothers Mickey and Jack opened this delivery service because they got tired of waiting in line for their bagels. 

---

---

I always understood the phrase, 'bagel and lox Jew' to be a shorthand of sorts to describe someone who is a culturally identified and not a particularly religious Jew.  Whether this is an insult, praise, or benign is in the mind of the beholder. This phrase showed up over and over again in the archives. And it is possible I found the origin of this phrase. In 1946 rabbi from Glencoe, Illinois wrote about a member of the congregation who described himself with pride as a 'bagel and lox Jew.' He viewed this statement as a tragedy and wrote, "Actually they have no Jewish consciousness at all. They have picked up a few affinities they might describe as Jewish but they are matters of habit, or of the palate. There is no Jewishness in there hearts or in their homes. If they are happy that way, well and good. We have lost them and we are sorry to see them go. The bakeries and the herring stories will also be open to supply them with bagels and lox."  I was a bit surprised that this debate/argument was happening then - I would have thought in the years immediately following the Holocaust we wouldn't be quibbling with who was Jewish enough. This article and phrase was referenced and debated many times in the decades to come in the Detroit Jewish News archives.

---

The 1950s and 1960s had plenty of ads for bagels, with the New York Bagel Company, Manhattan Bagel Bakery, and the Bagel Palace taking up the most ad space. My takeaway from all these ads and bagel gatherings is that there were plenty of bagel shops to chose from in Detroit in the 50s. There were a surprising number of bagel themed plays and performances and at least monthly a bagel and lox brunch was advertised.

---

---

There were 843 entries in the 1970s and no small percentage of them were about Lenders Bagels. Lenders was not afraid to throw out a great deal of money to advertisement and it paid off in becoming a national bagel juggernaut. Modern production was going to replace the human made bagel operation whether Lenders happened or not. And once it became mass produced and available at a grocery store it was inevitable that the bagel would assimilate from an ethnic food item to a more generic part of the American diet. Looking through all the Lender's ads and the relentless pairing with Philadelphia cream cheese, Harry Lender seemed to really put a lot of energy into making sure the bagel was not seen as a Jewish delicacy to be eaten with smoked and kinda smelly fish.

---

---

The 1980s was a big decade for Detroit bagels with more than 2,100 entries. While there were a lot of ads, debates about how Jewish the bagel remained, and Lenders selling their bagel business to Kraft, the   entries regarding the 'bagel files' got a lot of attention. Some of the folks in the Cranbrook school admission process drew a bagel next to the names of Jewish students. Many articles declared the bagel to no longer be Jewish and to have thoroughly assimilated, yet here it remained a Jewish identifier. 

---

---

---

---

The 1990s had 2,217 bagel entries. It was the Bagel Barometer' that caught my attention. It took me awhile to realize that I wasn't missing  bagel articles on the newspaper page, and this was how they ranked movies. 

---

---

From the Yiddish bagel jokes from the 1940s to more current cartoons, there were a surprising amount of bagel humor entries. 
​

---

Between the close to 300 comments I got from the Detroit Jewish History Facebook group singing the praises of the Detroit bagel and the close to 18,000 entries I skimmed from the Detroit Jewish News - people from Detroit love their bagels. And they are not afraid to go bagel-to-bagel with New York City bagels. I will be tasting some this weekend and will report back and let you know if I share their confidence in the Detroit bagel.

---