Thursday, February 15, 2007
Jewish food and the failure of Socialism in the US
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Why didn’t Socialism ever take deep roots in the US? According to Werner Sombart, German sociologist (1863-1941), Socialism in America foundered on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie. This profound thought may have been in the minds of the Israelis in their relationships with Palestinians until a bad mix of Sharon and outside Arab propagandists brought on the Second Intifada, the basic source of the current strife in the Middle East. The Israelis thought that providing the Palestinians of Gaza and the Green Zone with good enough livelihood to build houses and buy TV sets, small cars and appliances, wold bring peace, while the Arabs’ inability to unify samong themselves would diffuse the unrest. Sombart’s observation has the basic truth in it. Unfortunately, the enemies of peace found the means to string together an overarching surface unity that , however tentatively, brings together the warring factions – Persian Shias, Arab Sunnis and Shias, Druses, Kurds, and other subsets of Islam.
The Sombart quote came into my life while listening to Prof. Hassia Diner (NYU) lecture on Jewish ethnic food. She claims that there is really no such; there are ethnic Jewish foods, as eaten in the various European communities. The gefillte fish from Lithuania is much different from that of Roumania, the latter is much sweeter. The really common aspects are in the community controlled treatment of meat.
Kashruth or kosher rules were actually enforced through the Tsarist Russian government, as a means of collecting taxes from the Jewish community, a regressive form of taxation, making the poorest pay equally with the rich. Contemporary authors called it corrupt, as well as providing a livelihood for the enforcers. Not that Jewish life was rich with meat; a chicken might be affordable on weekends, to be shared with the poor of the shtetl (poor stufents in the yeshiva would be rotated to the wealthier residents for meals, not always eating with the family), the rest of the week food was monotonous. Potato , introduced in the 17th century, was the mainstay, vegetables were scarce, and a weak soup was the recurring meal for the poor.
Immigration to the United States was largely driven by need for food. Dr. Hasia Diner’s book, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2003) makes the point that it was not only the Jewish wave that was so inspired. Coming to New York, the port for Jewish arrivals of the main immigration period, from the latter half of the 19th century through the 1920s, the availability of rich of the food was the greatest benefit, and the new arrivals soon learned to enjoy the food of other communities. The Hungarian Jews brought the goulash to the table, the Polish contributions potato kugels, dill and sorrell, black bread came from the Ukraine, and stuffed cabbage, variously known as prakkes, holishkes or golubkes, came from everywhere. Bagels were “mazeldik” or full of good luck, because their round shape denoted the eternal cycle of life.The German Jews had meat, corn beef and pastrami, and delicatessen, and the Mediterranean people introduced olives and squah into the diet. The Jewish taste for Chinese food – chop suey then – dates back to the 1880s.
America provided its own contributions. When Proctor and Gamble discovered Crisco, the vegetable oil based shortening, it was advertised in the Jewish press with pyramids and camels, as a butter look-alike that can be used with meats, on the theme of “come out of the desert.” It came about because P&G had started turning cottonseed oil into soap, as a substitute for animal fats, to fight the high prices of the meatpackers, and, after developing hydrogenation, saw the product as a butter substitute. Alas, trans-fats…
Eating out was introduced in America, and Abraham Cahan of the Daily Forward, the great explicator of American ways to new arrivals , took credit for introducing the term “ausessen” into the Y vocabulary.
The dairy restaurant was an American invention too. The monotonous shtetl diet was very unhealthy, and health authorities in Europe had expressed their concerns about the absence of milk products and vegetables in the food for children. Once on these shores, with rich food available at low prices, the Jewish community expanded its culinary interests.
Incidentally, glatt kosher is a creation of the 1970s, as an expression of the strict Kashruth observances of the super orthodox Hassidic Jews.
Wally Dobelis also thanks Robert Sternberg, and Lisa Schiffman of the Jewish Post..
Why didn’t Socialism ever take deep roots in the US? According to Werner Sombart, German sociologist (1863-1941), Socialism in America foundered on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie. This profound thought may have been in the minds of the Israelis in their relationships with Palestinians until a bad mix of Sharon and outside Arab propagandists brought on the Second Intifada, the basic source of the current strife in the Middle East. The Israelis thought that providing the Palestinians of Gaza and the Green Zone with good enough livelihood to build houses and buy TV sets, small cars and appliances, wold bring peace, while the Arabs’ inability to unify samong themselves would diffuse the unrest. Sombart’s observation has the basic truth in it. Unfortunately, the enemies of peace found the means to string together an overarching surface unity that , however tentatively, brings together the warring factions – Persian Shias, Arab Sunnis and Shias, Druses, Kurds, and other subsets of Islam.
The Sombart quote came into my life while listening to Prof. Hassia Diner (NYU) lecture on Jewish ethnic food. She claims that there is really no such; there are ethnic Jewish foods, as eaten in the various European communities. The gefillte fish from Lithuania is much different from that of Roumania, the latter is much sweeter. The really common aspects are in the community controlled treatment of meat.
Kashruth or kosher rules were actually enforced through the Tsarist Russian government, as a means of collecting taxes from the Jewish community, a regressive form of taxation, making the poorest pay equally with the rich. Contemporary authors called it corrupt, as well as providing a livelihood for the enforcers. Not that Jewish life was rich with meat; a chicken might be affordable on weekends, to be shared with the poor of the shtetl (poor stufents in the yeshiva would be rotated to the wealthier residents for meals, not always eating with the family), the rest of the week food was monotonous. Potato , introduced in the 17th century, was the mainstay, vegetables were scarce, and a weak soup was the recurring meal for the poor.
Immigration to the United States was largely driven by need for food. Dr. Hasia Diner’s book, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2003) makes the point that it was not only the Jewish wave that was so inspired. Coming to New York, the port for Jewish arrivals of the main immigration period, from the latter half of the 19th century through the 1920s, the availability of rich of the food was the greatest benefit, and the new arrivals soon learned to enjoy the food of other communities. The Hungarian Jews brought the goulash to the table, the Polish contributions potato kugels, dill and sorrell, black bread came from the Ukraine, and stuffed cabbage, variously known as prakkes, holishkes or golubkes, came from everywhere. Bagels were “mazeldik” or full of good luck, because their round shape denoted the eternal cycle of life.The German Jews had meat, corn beef and pastrami, and delicatessen, and the Mediterranean people introduced olives and squah into the diet. The Jewish taste for Chinese food – chop suey then – dates back to the 1880s.
America provided its own contributions. When Proctor and Gamble discovered Crisco, the vegetable oil based shortening, it was advertised in the Jewish press with pyramids and camels, as a butter look-alike that can be used with meats, on the theme of “come out of the desert.” It came about because P&G had started turning cottonseed oil into soap, as a substitute for animal fats, to fight the high prices of the meatpackers, and, after developing hydrogenation, saw the product as a butter substitute. Alas, trans-fats…
Eating out was introduced in America, and Abraham Cahan of the Daily Forward, the great explicator of American ways to new arrivals , took credit for introducing the term “ausessen” into the Y vocabulary.
The dairy restaurant was an American invention too. The monotonous shtetl diet was very unhealthy, and health authorities in Europe had expressed their concerns about the absence of milk products and vegetables in the food for children. Once on these shores, with rich food available at low prices, the Jewish community expanded its culinary interests.
Incidentally, glatt kosher is a creation of the 1970s, as an expression of the strict Kashruth observances of the super orthodox Hassidic Jews.
Wally Dobelis also thanks Robert Sternberg, and Lisa Schiffman of the Jewish Post..
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 6:53 AM 
