The Great Midwest Bagel Quest

Telling the untold story of the Midwest Bagel

I am a New York Jew living in the Midwest just looking for a great bagel. I started on this self-appointed quest in January 2024, after my mom died. She was the last link to my family's Yiddish roots and was the culture bearer for our family. I have lived happily in the Midwest for the last thirty years, but I have never shaken the feeling that I am not living in the right place. I miss the anxious energy, the sharp sense of humor, people inserting themselves in my business. I contend that this attitude and my childhood memories can be distilled down to the New York-style bagel...my cultural comfort food...a bagel that has been properly kneaded, fermented, boiled, and baked.

For the past year, I have been traveling around the Midwest, visiting bagel stores, taste testing Midwestern bagels, and judging them from the NY bagel standard. Each time I travel with a friend who lives in the Midwest but was born and raised in the greater NY area. Before visiting a city, I read through the Jewish newspaper digital archive to learn its bagel history. The quest brings together many of my favorite things. A great bagel. Chitchatting with strangers. Talking to small business owners to learn their small business origin story. Researching history to find out when the bagels (and Jews for that matter) first came to Midwestern cities.

WHAT MAKES THE MIDWEST BAGEL AN UNTOLD STORY?

The dominant bagel narrative is that bagels are a NYC Jewish food and that New York defines American Jewish culture. I am part of that narrative and have never questioned my New York-centricness, even after thirty years of living in the Midwest. But this quest has shown me that there is a bit more nuance here. The bagel’s origin story begins in Europe. It landed in the United States in NYC, specifically in the Lower East Side, when Jewish immigrants settled there. By 1900, 70 bakeries existed on the Lower East Side, and a few years later the International Beigel Bakers’ Union was created to monopolize bagel production in the city. So it is definitely with cause that in the 1960s the New York Times declared New York City to be “the bagel center of the free world.” But any credible bagel historian knows that bagels could be found throughout the U.S. prior to mass production. In the articles and books about the history of bagels, the point is made that before bagels went mainstream, bagels were made anywhere with a Jewish immigrant enclave. But this is mentioned as a side note, more of a parenthetical, to the real story of the bagels, the NYC story.

Maria Balinski, who is the most referenced bagel historian thanks to her wonderful book, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, writes that “The bagel road to Middle America, was built in the 1960s and 1970s.” I know she meant that once the mass production of bagels was underway, you could find bagels in the supermarkets of every town in Middle America, not just the Jewish enclaves. But that isn’t what she wrote and that is not what gets quoted by people writing bagel articles and using her book as a reference. The thousands of articles that have been written about bagels, by journalists and historians and they don’t include the parenthetical about all Jewish enclaves, and each article reinforces the idea that only NYC and the surrounding area had bagels. I understand how this smaller piece of history got dropped out of the bagel story, we all pick and choose what we focus on when writing an article. And the sweeping rags to riches of the NYC Jewish immigrant bagel, with its muscular Bagel Baker Union 338 history is the better story. But as I dug through newspaper archives and old bagel history books, I kept finding a statistic that was quoted over and over again that was annoying me. “NYC had 30 bagel bakeries in the 1960s and ten other bakeries elsewhere in the country.” Hmmm…I wasn’t so sure about that.

I first saw this quote early in my research in June Roth’s 1979 book, The Bagel Book. Roth was a syndicated columnist and the author of 36 cookbooks. As I got deeper into the Jewish newspaper archives and learned of dozens of Midwest bagel shops through my casual research, I dismissed her ten bakeries comment as someone who had been lazy about research. But then I saw the exact quote in the 1977 article in the Kenosha News by the UPI Family Editor, “Bagelmania sweeps country”. In a 1975 Racine Journal Times article, “Bagel Becomes an Institution” by an AP News features Writer. Then in a 1975 Sheboygan Press article by an AP news feature writer, “Bagels have blossomed beautifully”, I found the original source of the quote. Murray Lenders is quoted saying “Until the 1950s, the bagel in this country was almost exclusively an ethnic food in New York’s Jewish community. There were about 40 bagel bakers in the entire United States and 30 of them were in New York.” This quote, which was most likely a marketing effort by Murray Lenders, became the truth that everyone centered their bagel story around. And now, in a surprising twist to me in my bagel quest, I would like to disprove this historical point.

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I am going to be sharing my findings on the bagel quest on this Substack. Please share with your bagel-loving friends who you think might be interested. I do most of my bagel reporting on Instagram, so you can follow along here. My niece composed a bagel quest traveling ditty, you can listen below.

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(Proving my point: the Milwaukee bagel bakers go on strike in the 1940s)

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