Chapter one: Losing my religion

But it’s not my fault! 

See, my mom’s side of the family has had a turbulent relationship with Judaism, to say the least. When my Uncle Barry was learning the Torah for his bar mitzvah, he got into an argument with the rabbi because he wanted to know what he was saying, but the rabbi wouldn’t tell him. Then, when my Uncle Denis ran into his rabbi years later, the guy who devoted his life to the study and practice of Judaism, up and left the faith because he said it was “bogus.” These minor squabbles aside, I’m going to do what all the other Rosenbergs in my family have done since birth. That being to blame my Bubbie and Pop Pop for how I turned out.

Well before my mother was born, my Bubbie, Yiddish for grandma, and Pop Pop got effectively “excommunicated” from their local temple in Chicago after the administrators learned of Pop Pop’s illegal friends and family discount. Accidental money laundering scheme now awry, my Bubbie, Pop Pop and my uncles all moved to the San Fernando Valley of California, and my mother was born soon thereafter, well removed from her Jewish, Chicagoland roots. 

But this isn’t to say I spite my mom for raising me wrong. That she should have given me a bar mitzvah, deprived me of bacon and other delectable cured meats or taught me the Torah. While this all comes from my subjective experience of how I engage with Judaism, I love how I was raised; I basically got all the good without the mandatory Friday Shabbat or Saturday temple. Despite my Jew-ish-ness, I still grew up with all the same religious values, like a belief in the importance of a strong moral and academic education. I make a darn-good brisket, if I do say so myself. I celebrate every Rosh Hashanah with an apple and honey for a sweet new year. And, perhaps, most importantly … 

I love bagels.

Which, is in fact, its own kind of Judaism.  

Chapter two: Bagel and lox Jewishness

But not all hope was lost. After getting their New Haven bagels into supermarkets thanks to new freezer technology, polyethylene bags and mold inhibitors to ensure a longer shelf-life, Murray Lender and his dad, Harry of Lender’s Bagels, needed a way to stay competitive in a market stuffed with carb commodities like Wonder Bread. An additional problem unique to the bagel was that the Lenders simply couldn’t hand-roll them fast enough, especially after their annual sales tripled from 1955 to 1959, with 50% coming from grocery store retail. In search of a machine that could shape these rolls with holes, the Lenders came to California, where they found Daniel Thompson, a science teacher and inventor of the Thompson Bread Machine, which could form these dough rounds at factory scale for the first time in bagel history. Their partnership revolutionized the bagel-making industry, allowing for them to become widely spread, shelf-stable, supermarket commodities.  

Bagels, and certainly a bagel and lox, emerged as an easily accessible cultural vestibule for dispersed Jewish families in the suburbs. But even though this “Bagel and Lox Jewishness” was initially sneered at as a shorthand for those who have lost contact with their cultural identity, Irving Howe, the American literary and social critic whose parents were Jewish immigrants, stated in 1979 that Bagel and Lox Jewishness represented, “residual attachments to foods, a few customs and a garbled Yiddish phrase,” that signifies, “not merely self-serving nostalgia but blocked yearnings for elements of the past that seemed spiritually vital.” While most of us were not lucky enough to grow up down Delancey, grab a pastrami on rye and a Cel-ray soda from Katz’s, then pop over to Russ and Daughters for some caviar, we were always able to reach into our pantry shelves and pull out a bagel.