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

Go back 50 years in 5 minutes

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Selling the Jewish-American Dream “For the past one hundred years, Jewish advertising and design have upheld Jewish life in America,” art historian and advertising scholar Kerri Steinberg argues. From kosher butcher circulators in urban neighborhoods at the turn of the century to commercial cookbooks in suburban supermarkets after war, there’s an abundance of ethnic niche advertising targeting Jewish Americans. While social historian Katherine Parkin notes that typically food advertisers only cautiously tied their foods to consumers’ religious beliefs, that was not the case when considering Jewish consumers – for whom religious beliefs were part and parcel with food and consumption. In fact, post-war advertising tactics for packaged goods relied on the commodification of Jewish culture and traditionalism in all its forms – gender norms, holiday observances, kosher status – to reconcile the ambivalence and anxiety of middle-class Jewish existence and to ease the fear of losing Jewish identity.

To effectively market a product, consumers must be able to see themselves in the realm constructed around it. But rather than portraying those anxieties and fears, postwar advertisements depict an idealized, improbable world for Jewish-Americans – one that exemplifies what art historian Elliott Weiss articulates as a nostalgia for something lost and nostalgia for something never possessed. The advertisements I analyze gloss over the reality of the postwar Jewish American experience and instead employ Yiddishkeit gimmicks. In some cases, just using the word "tradition" powerfully resonated with Jewish consumers. With vintage photograph-styled images of cans and Hebraic-inspired lettering, advertisements assured that mass-produced products aligned with both American ideals and Jewish values.

Advertisements for canned kosher chicken soup demonstrate this best. They carry connotations of caretaking and feeding tradition: one Manischevitz soup ad proudly proclaims “Go back 50 years in 5 minutes!” They subtly align Jewishness with middle-class American identity: a manicured, jewelry-adorned woman’s hand – one that looks wealthy – holds up soup that’s identified chiefly as kosher for Passover. They emphasize economy, nourishment, and “real Jewish cooking.”

Notably, not many people are portrayed in kosher canned soup advertisements, aside from a select few caricatures of men or drawings of women’s hands. This starkly contrasts popular postwar advertisements for trayf foods. These often described canned foods in language of modernity but existed in a “retro-sexist” world, complete with nineteenth-century motif and infantilized, dependent women. Across the board, food marketing was slow to adapt to modern womanhood and continued to reinforce traditional gender roles even when women began working outside of the home and assuming roles in their communities. Even though they were selling labor-saving food, advertisers isolated women to the kitchen, treating “cooking as a complete aesthetic and creative experience.”

But retro-sexism doesn’t work for a community that lacked nostalgia for an earlier edition of America, and rather for the comfort and camaraderie of Jewish community. Selling canned soup as something new and modern doesn’t land for a community uneasy with gaining social and financial capital and becoming too assimilated. As I interpret them, kosher soup ads were “predicated on the idea that women played a fundamental role in keeping the faith for their families” while emphasizing convenience and efficiency, fitting the Jewish woman newly in the middle-class: capable and savvy purchasers with broadening roles outside of the home and control over religious and culinary consumption within it. These advertisements served to allay her anxieties. There’s no compromise of tradition for convenience; her time spent in sisterhood or Hadassah doesn’t take away from her food ability to feed her family physically and spiritually. She’s reassured: it’s okay to buy canned soup because it reminds her family of the Old World, reminiscent of what bubbe used to make.