Bagels why jewish

Join Our Newsletter Empower your Jewish discovery, daily. Sign Up. Discover More. Mira Fox Mira Fox is a reporter at the Forward. J Goldberg. Recommend this article Did antisemitism forge the bagel we know and love?

Send to. Add a message. Send me a copy. Thank you! This article has been sent! The changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution — such as the steamships that brought wheat from the New World, and the new kinds of engines that propelled the grindstones of the flour mills — helped to make the bagel cheaper and more popular. In addition, the legends surrounding its symbolic shape are numerous — and sometimes outlandish. The circular bread, which has parallels in other European cultures, likely migrated with the Jews who came to Poland from France and Germany in the 12th century.

In their new homeland, where, unlike in Western Europe, Jews were not prohibited from entering professional guilds, the Jews were permitted to work in the baking trade, among others.

Thus, the way was paved for the bagel to become associated with the Jewish community. Waves of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe brought the bagel with them to the New World, where it became one of the foods most identified with the Jewish community, and in time an integral part of New York and American cuisine.

In Israel, the bagel has not quite become part of the local canon, and traditional bagel bakeries can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The David brothers say the times require them to add other items to their bakery menu such as a marvelous pretzel, made from the same dough, but thinner and crispier. But the traditional round bagel, bread without a beginning or end and with a hole in the middle, is more than enough reason to make the pilgrimage to their shop just north of Haifa.

Ronit Vered Nov. Updated: Apr. We would go to the []Bronx and bring back some bagels. If our neighbors knew what the rolls were, they were Jewish. If they stared at them in bewilderment, we would know they were not. You are what you eat, goes the saying, and it applies to bagels just as well. As the distinctions between the origins of European Jewry Russian Jews, Hungarian Jews, Polish Jews, etc became homogenized into the new grouping of American Jews, all European Jews clung to the bagel as a marker of cultural identity, as the distinctions between each Jewish group was erased.

So as Yiddish declined, the bagel rose. In this round piece of boiled-and-baked dough, lies the story of how ordinary people fought to retain a grasp on their identity.

It is the story of the modern Jewish experience making room for the past Jewish experience. Home Share Search. Email Facebook Twitter. Give Podcast Subscribe.