Fischer Bros. grocery store in Astoria, Queens, 1930s

Charles Phelps Cushing/ClassicStock/Getty Images

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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

by
Jenna Weissman Joselit
February 03, 2025
Fischer Bros. grocery store in Astoria, Queens, 1930s

Charles Phelps Cushing/ClassicStock/Getty Images

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.

Many years ago, food, or what anthropologists like to call “foodways,” generated a lot of interest from a broad swath of the American body politic. Public health authorities and immigrant officials fretted about the tomatoes and garlic, pickles and pasta, black bread and chicken fat consumed by the newly arrived lest it render them irritable and sluggish, impeding their adjustment to America. The merely curious, in turn, among them the readers of lively metropolitan dailies such as the New York Sun, satisfied a hunger to know more about the city’s latest residents by reading all about them.

In 1902, in the course of researching and writing an article titled “New York’s Big Hebrew City: A Region People Talk About but Seldom Visit,” one of that paper’s unnamed reporters was brought directly in touch with the “dwellers of the Ghetto,” the topographical shorthand by which he and others then commonly referred to the Lower East Side, as if it were a European import rather than an American phenomenon.

The area’s jumbled, noisy, colorful streets peopled by those of the ancient Hebraic faith and practice stirred something in him: a penchant for description, the hoarier, the better. With great relish, this reporter pointed out women who looked like biblical water carriers, men who resembled bearded Talmudists, throngs of children on the street, and everywhere a “touch of the Orient.”

What fascinated the Sun reporter most of all was the centrality of food to the local landscape. Everywhere he turned, he’d happen upon someone or something purveying some sort of comestible. “Every other store and street stand is devoted to foodstuffs,” he observed, wondering if those who called Orchard, Houston, and Grand streets home ever “ceased eating.” Row after row of grocery stores, their wares displayed every which way; butcher shops, whose windows with their dead chickens hanging from a string resembled an “execution ground”; and bakeries, whose strangely shaped loaves gave its windows a “fantastic foreign appearance” vied with numerous pushcarts and stationary street stands to fill a “land so unknown to the mass of the rest of the population that it might as well be Siberia.”

The strangeness of it all drew the journalist’s eye and his pen. Others, especially those who administered the city’s emerging sanitation department and its well-heeled civic supporters, were more apt to recoil, convinced that those who resided on the Lower East Side had absolutely no notion of the cleansing properties of water.

There were also those who, having lived and worked in the neighborhood, thought that tidying up and improving the physical condition and appearance of street and shop wouldn’t be such a bad idea, both on its own terms and for the reputation of the immigrant Jewish community. Advocating modernization—cleaner, more brightly illuminated thoroughfares, for one; fewer pushcarts, for another; more tasteful exteriors and organized store interiors, for a third—they organized themselves into the Lower East Side Chamber of Commerce, its membership a who’s who of downtown real estate interests, ice and coal dealers, piano manufacturers, restaurant owners, clothiers, wholesale food distributors, and a smattering of grocery store proprietors.

It took a while—resistance to change was fierce; financial constraints fiercer still—but eventually, by the late 1920s, grocers like Mr. D. Hoffer, whose East 13th Street store was a dilapidated mess, saw the light. By painting its walls a “warm buff color,” installing new wooden shelves to replace those that sagged, and organizing his stock in ways suggested by the Progressive Grocer, a trade magazine that debuted in 1922, Hoffer drew new customers and watched happily as his revenue increased.

By closely following the periodical’s suggestions to put price tags on every item, to make sure there was no dust or wilted vegetables anywhere, to create cardboard pyramids to house bottled goods, enticing the eye, and to pay attention to window displays, the grocer also became a new man. “A modern store has brought a modern Hoffer,” declared the East Side Chamber News, the house organ of the Lower East Side’s Chamber of Commerce, turning him into a cautionary tale. “Today he insists on his having a clean apron always. His eyes sparkle with enthusiasm and he has developed a dynamic drive for business where once he was content to sit on a pickle barrel and wait for it to come to him.”

For Hoffer and thousands of other independent neighborhood grocers, the greatest obstacle to financial success was not so much dust or disorganization as the A&P, Piggly Wiggly, and other chain grocery stores that had sprung up in the years following WWI. Sweeping the country, they threatened to put Hoffer and his competitors out of business. Between their enhanced purchasing power and the rise of modern food products such as Heinz Baked Beans (“tender, mealy, easy to digest, and wonderfully good to eat”), the humble momma-and-poppa store with its limited inventory and old-fashioned notions of customer service didn’t stand much of a chance.

Some grocery store chains were also owned by Jewish families, most of immigrant origins, but amid the enormous scale of A&P, whose inventory ran to thousands of venues, they’re easy to miss—and unsung. In the Baltimore area, for instance, the Cohens, the Weises, and the Herman Brothers were among the local Jewish grocers who, by consolidating their holdings during the interwar years and in the immediate postwar period, redefined the way their coreligionists shopped for food.

Going big, they planted what had once been a small-scale, local, and highly personal exchange into a broader economic environment with corporate guidelines and standards, rendering the grocery store more of an anonymous business proposition than a communal institution where everyone knew what you were serving for dinner.

Alert to change, Jewish food purveyors went bigger still amid the rapid postwar suburbanization of the country, launching the supermarket, whose broad aisles, bright lights, abundance of mass produced goods, refrigerated cases, self-service, parking lot, and fleets of shopping carts—the 1937 invention of Sylvan Goldman, an owner of the Humpty-Dumpty grocery chain in Oklahoma—transformed food shopping into an outing.

Giant, Food-A-Rama, Food Fair: You know their names and may even have shopped in them yourself. As Jeremy Diamond, a descendant of the Food-A-Rama family—which came to own and operate 48 stores in the greater Baltimore area by the 1980s—documents in his profile Tastemakers II: The Legacy of Jewish Entrepreneurs in the Mid-Atlantic Grocery Industry, their success story had as much to do with America’s capacity to absorb new people and ideas as it did with putting food on the table.

Jenna Weissman Joselit, the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at the George Washington University, is currently at work on a biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan.