Bagels Aren't Sacred, They're Tacky
The bagel may be the greatest gift bestowed by Jews on American culture. Of course there are other contenders. A solid case could be made for the Broadway musical, for the noun schmuck and the verb schlep, for Blazing Saddles, for Bella Abzug’s hats. But the bagel is way up there, ranking high in the pantheon of definitively Jewish things that became distinctly American things—in the bagel’s case, a possibly more American thing than the proverbial slice of all-American apple pie, at least as far as 2018 market share goes.
In fact, Jews didn’t just transmit bagel love to the goyim. They transmitted bagel lore and bagel wisdom, bagel theory and bagel practice. The purist halakha governing bagels—how they should be made, what they should look like, how they should taste, what should and shouldn’t be cooked in or piled on them—has permeated American life so profoundly that bagel purists can found be just about everywhere. On a road trip not long ago, I made a pit stop in a Dunkin Donuts on the outskirts of a tiny central New Hampshire town, about as far outside the cultural orbit of New York City Jewry as it is possible to travel in the northeastern United States. The woman standing in line in front of me was as self-evidently a New Englander of Protestant stock as my great-great-great grandmother was a Krakow Jew, yet when her bagel order arrived—a flimsy slab of bread-like matter, a kind of coffee table coaster with a hole in the middle—she curled her lip and unleashed a soliloquy on the theme “You call this a bagel?” to rival the rantings of the prophet in Isaiah chapter 10.
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