by Eli Hinerfeld

During the winter break of the 2023–24 academic year, I traveled home to Chicago to conduct research for my thesis on the history of delis in the United States. Although I did not end up writing my final project on the topic, this trip was crucial in changing course through a realization that the sources I collected would not amount to a fruitful full-length history thesis. However, the trip was not in vain. The practice of organizing and executing several interviews over the course of a week, traveling throughout the city and enriching my own understanding of the city I grew up in was invaluable.

The initial goal of my trip was to visit every significant deli in the Chicagoland area, speak to their owners, and find both consistencies and disparities in the institutions. Simultaneously, a traveling exhibit “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli” was being presented in the special exhibitions space at the Illinois Holocaust Museum (IHM) in Skokie; the stars had aligned for an action-packed deli extravaganza.

In preparation for the trip, I spent the prior month scheduling interviews at the IHM, Manny’s Cafeteria and Delicatessen, The Bagel, Kaufman’s Bagel and Delicatessen, and with members of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society. While I reached out several times to a much larger swath of local delis, the locations above were the only ones responsive and willing to indulge a senior history student in his eating escapade.

Despite the rich slate of interviews and eye-witness research I was set to conduct, the product of my encounters with the delis did not produce the results I had anticipated for my thesis. While my interviews were fruitful for a slice-of-life journalistic article, the rich historical sources I sought were not there. Many of my conversations surrounded the day-to-day life of owning a deli matched with the pressure set by local Jewish communities to appeal to their nostalgia for traditional Jewish food. While some historical discussions were had, mostly in reference to the foundation of each establishment, the owners were rightfully so caught up in running a successful business that my liberal arts intrusion was unusual and potentially disruptive to the busy flow of daily business.

Nonetheless, the conversations I recorded at the delis, the food I ate, and the observations I made of each establishment encompass a rich source-base waiting to be used for a personal historical project, a podcast, or some other creative form that has yet to occur to me. Matched with the research I have already conducted on Midwest Jewish foodways and Jewish-American food history, this project could very well take the form of a fantastic, smaller project.

The interview I conducted with the curator of the deli exhibit at the IHM, the impromptu interviews I solicited at the museum with guests, and the exhibit itself added immensely to this source-base. In its essence, the showcase featured the localized socio-economic and the large-scale cultural impact of delicatessens in the United States. It highlighted delis as both a driving assimilating space for recent Jewish immigrants and as a secure third place for that same community.

Additionally, this exhibit helped me gain confidence in my decision to base my thesis in Chicago. A consistent qualm raised throughout the historiography of Jewish foodways, and similarly apparent at the exhibit, is that Jewish-American history is largely based in New York. The gravitational pull of the city is inevitable as it welcomed by far the largest number of Jewish immigrants in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. However, the experiences of Jews throughout the nation should not be ignored. Although I did not specifically pursue delis in Chicago, this research allowed me to understand Chicago Jewish culture in the early-twentieth century in a way that enriched my final thesis topic: the rebranding of Jewish identity at the 1933 Chicago International Exposition.

Overall, despite the unintended direction and product of the trip, my travel with the Evalyn Clark Memorial Travel Fellowship was crucial in enriching my understanding of quotidian Jewish life in Chicago and in shaping my eventual thesis. Tracking the structure of the Jewish community and the unifying spaces it benefitted from specifically in the interwar period were essential to the production of my final project. I am grateful for the opportunity granted to me by this fellowship, and I am undoubtedly a better historian and citizen of Chicago because of my research.