Are bagels Jewish? What's Jewish about bagels?

Well, first of all, bagels are basically a pretzel, a form of pretzel. That is to say that like pretzels, they have a high ratio of press to dough, they are boiled and they are baked. The closest relative to the bagel, not very much as we know it, because bagels today are very big and fluffy and more dough than crust, but the closest relative to the traditional bagel would be the obważanek, which is a kind of pretzel you would buy on the street, not unlike the New York pretzels that we that we can buy on on the streets of New York. Our starting point really should be that bagels are in this wider pretzel category. Now, they traditionally were a snack. You could buy them in a bakery. You could buy them at a bagel stand. And they really came into their own in the United States, but it is especially in the last fifty years, that the bagel, as we know it today, emerged. And so how did that happen? First of all, there was a bagel bakers union already from the period of mass immigration between 1880 and World War One. The bagel bakers were at the very bottom of the baking ladder. They had the worst possible working conditions. They formed their own union. And that union in New York was so strong it was very difficult for bagel baking to happen anywhere else.

HHowever, the Lender's Bagels set themselves up in New Haven and there they were actually free to do things that they could not have done outside of the union in New York. One of the things they did that was very innovative is they figured out you could put bagels in a plastic bag, and if you put them in a plastic bag, you could put them on a supermarket shelf. And once you created more demand for them, they could be mass produced, particularly with the introduction by the Thompson family of a bagel forming machine, not just simply a way of mechanizing certain parts of the bagel process, but specifically the forming of the bagel itself. And with the mass-producing of the bagel, it became possible to actually expand the geography of the bagel and all kinds of innovations then ensued so that one could ship frozen bagels and then bake them on the spot, as far as California or Tokyo. Once the bagels really began to spread, they also entered into areas where people had no experience with traditional bagels and all the foods and the customs associated with them, and bagels became subject to the same, I would say, forces as cupcakes and various other foods

- that is to say, they became, if you will, victims, I would say, of infinite variation.

And the infinite variation had everything to do with everything from the size of the bagel, bagel flavours, not only plain bagels, bagels with salt, poppy-seed, sesame seeds, but now a bagel is flavoured with, well, basil, or, most recently in Williamsburg I saw Rainbow Bagels and you could order them with rainbow cream cheese, which the idea of eating food colouring, of course, is anathema, but nonetheless, it's a very sweet gesture.

But I would say that, that kind of variation, of course, enrages the purists and has great appeal to people who are not in any way attached to the traditional bagel.

But on the other end of the spectrum, there's what I would call the heritage bagel. That is to say, those who are interested in, if you will, a kind of a purist approach to the bagel, smaller, higher ratio of crust to dough, no innovative toppings, no flavors, and then served in a more traditional way with cream cheese, lachs, tomatoes, et cetera. The Heritage Bagel is a mainstay of certain places, certainly in New York. And of course, then there are even among those who are very attached to the traditional bagel, there are what we call the bagel wars. The Montreal bagel - no way. The Toronto bagel - absolutely. The New York bagel - maybe. And of course, the Sunday brunch with bagels, lachs, herring, smoked carp, smoked chub, smoked whitefish, cream cheese, with or without scallions, et cetera. That tradition prevails and, of course, bagels turn up along with those accompaniments, as well as egg salad, tuna salad. They show up also at the Shiva table, at the table where people gather after a funeral to console the mourner. And of course, the roundness of the bagel, like the roundness of hard boiled eggs, symbolizes the circle of life. And it's a very fitting food for that occasion.