Stock Images: What Cookbooks, Advertisements, and Chicken Soup Recipes Tell Us About Jewish America

Kosher Butchers Voice

Historian Edward Shapiro tells us that immigrant Ashkenazi Jews considered the butcher "as supplier both a food and religious service" due to the deep importance of kashrut – yet he adds that kosher was not the center of life even for those who did practice observant Judaism, especially as Jews began to Americanize.

The kosher butcher was destined for downfall. Kosher meat was expensive, sometimes double the cost of non-kosher meat; kosher butchers varied in accessibility based on geography and were even less available to Jews who moved out of city neighborhoods to the suburbs. It follows that once it became easy to access processed and packaged kosher goods at supermarkets, there was little impetus to support small kosher butcheries. 

I found these documents, issues of The Kosher Butchers Voice, at the Rubenstein Library at Duke University. They're pieces of archival material not previously digitized, examples of marketing circulators shared through both Jewish urban and suburban neighborhoods. They show the kosher butchery industry in the mid-1950s, on the precipice of that downfall. They contain attempts to convince shoppers to choose a kosher butcher, emphasizing freshness, quality, and history: these are established, trusted vendors, unlike what you might find in any grocery store. They try to match convenience - they'll deliver with refrigerated trucks! They try to speak to multiple consumers in the household - there's instructions intended to aid a woman in cooking and prose written for devout men. Printed right in time for the High Holidays, they try to appeal to a deep religiosity - one that's also on a precipice. 

These issues reflect the Jewish American community's response to decades of American life and suburbanization. They harness both Yiddishkeit and the language of modernity to reach their consumer base. It comes through in fascinating ways.The page numbering seems backward - that's because these read from right to left, just like Hebrew. Hebrew lettering completely covers some pages and Yiddish words are sprinkled throughout the prose. References to Jewish holidays and homemaking seem almost anachronistic – the issues read like they're from twenty years earlier than they are.

These documents are worth reading, exploring, and preserving. I haven't annotated them, but hope I've framed them for future inquiry. 

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