In the popular — and memorable — 1960s ad campaign that proclaimed “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish rye,” the punchline came not with the slogan, but the photos. Each ad included a portrait of someone who was not generically, Ashkenazi Jewish: a Native American, a young Asian boy and a young African American boy, each eating a sandwich with Levy’s.
You also don’t need to be Jewish to love Jewish deli, though Jews, particularly those with Eastern European roots, have had a love affair with the succulent corned beef, pastrami and chopped liver; briny, tangy sour pickles; earthy malty rye bread and the Holy Grail of brunch: a bagel and schmear.
Jewish delis have defined and inspired generations of Jews as a third place to be Jewish beyond home and synagogue. These mom-and-pop businesses, many begun by immigrant pushcart peddlers, also became a space to share a slice of Jewish life with the rest of the neighborhood and world.
The history of American Jewish delis, which parallels the history of American Jews, is appetizingly told in “I’ll Have What She’s Having: The Jewish Deli,” which is on view at the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum through Aug. 20. Created by the Los Angeles-based Skirball Cultural Center in 2022, this history of Jewish culture forged by food, has also been seen in New York, Houston and Skokie, Illinois.
While the exhibit provides an overview of deli culture, it leans heavily on the Los Angeles experience once the retrospective hit the mid-20th century. Among the highlights is a video tracing Jewish food’s appearance in Hollywood films and television programs, from Jerry Lewi’s paeon to salami in the Army to the classic babka incident on “Seinfeld” to a Willy Wonka-esque tribute to pickles, matzah ball soup and pastrami on “Saturday Night Live” featuring Ben Stiller.
Throughout the exhibit, artifacts ranging from a 19th-century halef, or kosher butcher’s knife, to a 1940s neon Hebrew National sign to ephemera like postcards, matchbooks and menus from delis spanning New York, Miami, Atlantic City, Chicago and beyond that tell this story and — for those of a certain age — encourage viewers to marinate in their memories of a perfect sandwich or slice of cheesecake while getting taste buds watering.
Is D.C. a Deli Desert?
Many New York, Cleveland, Chicago and other Jewish transplants to the DMV region have long opined that D.C. is a Jewish deli wasteland, lamenting the lack of adequate bagels, decent corned beef or authentic matzah ball soup, not to mention those beloved though less mainstream items like tongue, kishka or schmaltz herring.
“It’s different here than the Lower East Side’s traditional immigrant Jewish deli story that you hear about,” said Jonathan Edelman, collections curator at the museum. “But that’s true of D.C. Jewish history in general.” Washington, D.C., was never an immigrant port of entry he noted. “Jews came to Washington a little bit later and there was no Lower East Side …. Jews were living in all four quadrants of D.C. until the 1950s. So, you don’t have one concentration of the Jewish community,” he said.
“Washington is also a southern city, and I think that also plays a role,” he added. “You also have people coming to Washington, more so now, but even back them from all over the country. They were drawn to the city by work opportunities, particularly in the government.”
Edelman delved into deli history in the District and its surrounding suburbs to supplement the Skirball material. He began by putting the word “delicatessen” into search engines of old newspapers like the Washington Post, Evening Star and the Washington Times Herald.
In Washington, Jewish delis first appeared as kosher meat purveyors in market spaces. These evolved as Jewish demographics and industrialization evolved. “We were not seeing a traditional sit-down deli restaurant with a pickle bar and a hot pastrami sandwich,” Edelman said. “It was meat counters very often paired with other things. The Jewish-owned ones were often liquor stores and delicatessens. By the 20th century, the liquor store had a small lunch counter where you could sit and get a sandwich.”
In the early 20th century, these meat counters and peddlers moved into brick-and-mortar mom-and-pop corner groceries. Edelman calls them the bodegas of their era. But following World War I, hundreds of these family-owned stores were prevented from purchasing from mainstream wholesalers.
They banded together to create DGS, District Grocery Stores, a cooperative that sold to and supported local Jewish markets. While DGS stores have disappeared throughout the city, they made their mark by servicing neighborhood needs with fresh and packaged goods and liquor for generations.
Comet Liquor at 18th and Columbia in the heart of Adams Morgan opened in 1940 and became a famous example of that format, the curator said. The exhibit includes a photo of Sydney Drazen, the Comet’s final owner, standing in front of the storefront on Columbia Road in the 1990s.
Other local deli stories in the exhibit include the history of Katz’s Kosher Supermarket, opened by Charles (Chaim) Katz, a Holocaust refugee from Vilna (now Lithuania), who resettled in the D.C. area in the late 1940s.
In 1950, he bought a market on Georgia Avenue, NW, and used his kosher butchering skills to supply meat to the burgeoning Jewish population moving northwest to the Maryland suburbs. In 1964, Katz’s moved to University Boulevard East and 10 years later it relocated to a full-sized grocery store in Rockville, where it became the largest kosher supermarket in the region. (Today, it’s the site of Moti’s Market.)
While D.C. and its suburbs aren’t known and beloved for an abundance of Jewish delis, over the past century moving into the 21st century, these spaces have become an archetypal representation of Jewish foodways and the Jewish community in the public sphere.
The deli is open to all and over the decades many a non-Jewish customer has fallen in love with matza ball soup or a well-stocked pickle bar. And in an era where much of U.S. culture revolves around food and drink, there’s no better way to explore the history of Jewish Washington and Jews in America than through its food and deli culture. And you don’t have to be Jewish to love Jewish deli.
“I’ll Have What She’s Having: The Jewish Deli” through Aug. 20, at the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum, 575 3rd St. NW. Admission $10-$15. Free for children 12 and under and for members. CapitalJewishMuseum.org or @capJewishmuseum.
Deli Programs:
• Industry Night Podcast with food influencer Nycci Nellis, May 16, 23, 30, June 6, 2-3 p.m. Free.
• After Sunset Deli Nights, May 30, 6-9 p.m., $10-$25
• Family Day: Delicious Deli, June 2, 9:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Free.
• Film: “Jewish Delis: Something to Kvell About,” June 23, 1 p.m. Free.
• Author Talk: Ted Merwin on “Pastrami on Rye,” July 10, 6 p.m. Free.
Lisa Traiger is Washington Jewish Week’s arts correspondent.