Tablet Magazine

The Rise of the Jewish Grocer

From kosher butchers, fruit peddlers, and herring dealers on the Lower East Side to supermarket innovators across the country

People vote with their feet, or so we’ve been repeatedly told. If the latest presidential election is any indication, people also vote with their stomachs. According to just about every political pundit given to Monday morning quarterbacking in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, the high price of groceries—$7 and change for a container of cream cheese, $10 for a box of breakfast cereal—catapulted voters in his direction. Groceries don’t often figure in the news except when they upset the apple cart—either as a political factor, as they did in 2024, or as the catalyst for demonstrations over a century earlier. In 1902, for instance, residents of the Lower East Side and other hard-hit Jewish neighborhoods throughout the greater New York area took to the streets in protest against what they took to be the exorbitant cost of kosher meat, then a household staple for many. The resulting melee, vividly detailed most recently in Scott Seligman’s “The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902,” generated fierce headlines, raising concern lest things get out of control, prompting hot-headed Jewish immigrant housewives to storm the purlieus of the well-to-do. Most of the time, though, groceries are grist for neither the journalist’s nor the historian’s mill, though well they might be. What people have for dinner and where they shop for provisions; which items are available and which are hard to find; how people learn to cook and from whom—all these ingredients make for a good story and the stuff of history, too. Then, as now, food reflects the ways in which ordinary people earned their keep: On the Lower East Side in 1913, for instance, 259 grocers, 216 butchers, 56 fruit dealers, 30 fish dealers, 19 herring dealers, and seven butter-and-egg dealers turned to the Hebrew Free Loan Society for financial help. It also demonstrates the process by which many landsmen sought to become modern by “cooking American,” while others dug in their heels by maintaining their culinary ties to the old country, refusing to give white bread a try. ...

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Jewish Book of the Year

The Jewish Book Council has awarded the Jewish Book of the Year to Lee Yaron, author of 10/7: 100 Human Stories. Read here for the excerpt Tablet featured from Yaron, an Israeli investigative journalist.

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How to Be a Jew

How to Be a Jew ... Who Claims Israel

Author and proud Scottish Jew Ben M. Freeman joins us to talk about his latest book, which explores the millennia-long history of Jews’ ties to Israel

February 5, 2025

Tablet talks about Judaism a lot, but sometimes we like to change the subject. Maggie Phillips covers religious communities across the U.S.—from Christians to Muslims, Hindus to Baha’i, Jehovah’s Witnesses to pagans—to find out what they’re talking about.

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Roundtables on the state of the American Jewish community, bringing together people from a shared demographic or background—everyday people with personal opinions, not experts who earn their salaries discussing these issues.

Zionism: The Tablet Guide

The definitive guide to the past, present, and future of modern Judaism’s most fantastical and magnetic idea—and the West’s most explosive political label.

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Encyclopedia

anti-semitism

[ˈæn-ti-ˈsɛ-mɪˌ-tɪ-zəm ] noun

Anti-Semitism is not a social prejudice against Jews; it’s a conspiracy theory. In fact, it’s the oldest and most powerful conspiracy theory...

Photographic illustration by Barry Downard/Debut; portait of Black: Nechama Jacobson; original photo of Bob Dylan © Barry Feinstein Photography, Inc. Used with permission from The Estate of Barry Feinstein
Photographic illustration by Barry Downard/Debut; portait of Black: Nechama Jacobson; original photo of Bob Dylan © Barry Feinstein Photography, Inc. Used with permission from The Estate of Barry Feinstein
The New Jews

A montage of iconic moments from the Jewish past points the way to a Jewish future—one driven by a generation of new voices

At least Ruth didn’t have to fret about social media. The only thing this Moabite woman, arguably the world’s first convert to Judaism—and ancestor of one King David—had to do was hold on to her mother-in-law and promise to go whither the older woman went. She wasn’t expected to share photos of her challah rising on Instagram, defend Israel on Twitter, bare her soul on Substack, or cultivate small communities of followers on Facebook. Her journey was decidedly private, intimate, all but forgotten if it weren’t for the Bible’s author peeking in and recording the grandeur of her experience for posterity. Today, we have a new class of Ruths, only this time many of them are trying to negotiate some of the most profound and pressing questions facing Jews—about identity and belonging, about money and politics, about making friends and losing faith—along with public or semipublic profiles. They are new Jews, but—if we are lucky—they will be among the most important Jews in the coming years. To illustrate the role we believe Jews-by-choice are increasingly playing in the American Jewish future, we matched each of our interviewees with an iconic image from the recent American past. Because every religious evolution is a conversion—every day brings with it the possibility of changing in ways until now unexpected—the stories these men and women tell us are particularly meaningful, and their wisdom so keenly appreciated. There are, to be sure, many more who share their trajectory, but here, in their own words, are some thoughts from these visible and inspiring people making their journey back home to Judaism. ...

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An ‘Unorthodox’ Celebration of Conversion

Listen to five years of deeply moving personal stories, audio diaries, and reported segments about Jews by choice around the world

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Encyclopedia

conversion

[kən-ˈvɜr-ʒən] noun

There have always been converts to Judaism. If we follow Torah and say that Abraham was the first Jew, then his wife, Sarah, was the first c...

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