Harry G. Levine’s Pastrami Land

My friend Scott in San Francisco was kind enough to email me this article yesterday, which appeared in the summer issue of Contexts, the quarterly magazine of the American Sociological Association. In it, author Harry G. Levine delves briefly into the sociological and historical origins of deli in New York. There’s great insight here, and deli buffs will surely pick out a few tidbits.

As Levine writes:

Where did these restaurants and this culinary tradition
come from? Nobody thinks that poor Jews in Eastern Europe
ate like this, certainly not in restaurants serving huge sand-
wiches. In their current forms, some of these foods, including
the sacred pastrami, didn’t exist in the old countries. This is a
story of America and New York City.

Click on the Link Below to Download the PDF file of the article.
Pastrami Land