Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Food

A Jewish Sandwich Grows at the Carnegie Deli

A successful off-Broadway show is one thing, but if you really want to know whether you’ve made it in the big city, check the menu at Carnegie Deli.

Last week, the Carnegie Deli unveiled its massive “A Jew Grows in Brooklyn Sandwich” (shown) in honor of Jake Ehrenreich’s off-Broadway show of the same name, about growing up in 1960s East Flatbush, the child of Holocaust survivors.

Click here to read our list of the 10 Jewish Sandwiches To Eat Before You Die

The mostly comedic show — which includes personal stories and music — is being immortalized with a sandwich made of corned beef, pastrami and turkey with lettuce and Russian dressing on rye. It’s topped with a broccoli flower (the “tree”).

The sandwich is so big that when we spoke to Ehrenreich, four days after it was unveiled, he was still eating pieces of it. Two sandwiches had managed to feed his family over the weekend.

“When I saw it, I said no way can one person eat that. But at least I knew better than to use a knife and fork,” Ehrenriech said.

Ehrenreich, who used to be the band leader at the Rainbow Room, said he would often stop off at the Carnegie Deli on his way home to Monroe, New York — dressed in a tux — and pick up a pastrami sandwich. “I’d drive with one hand and eat the sandwich with the other,” he said. “The mustard would end up all over my tuxedo. But what was I going to do — wait until I got home to eat it?”

Brooklyn’s Borough President Marty Markowitz was also on hand last Thursday to declare May 17 “A Jew Grows in Brooklyn” Day in honor of the show and the sandwich.

Recently, the Theater District-area deli named a lox-based sandwich — the “Gold E. Lox” — for comedienne Judy Gold who was performing in her own one-woman-show at the time. And in March, Carnegie created a Tim Tebow-inspired sandwich called the “Jetbow” to welcome the all-American athlete to the New York Jets. The sandwich was made of corned beef, pastrami, roast beef, American cheese, lettuce and tomato on white bread (in a nod to Tebow’s all-American roots — usually sandwiches are on rye).

The “Jew Grows in Brooklyn” sandwich follows in the great Jewish tradition of funny sandwich names. Brooklyn appetizing shop Shelsky’s has the Brooklyn Transplant (fatty kippered salmon, apple horseradish, cream cheese, pickled herring salad, on pumpernickel or rye), Russ & Daughter’s has the Heebster (whitefish and baked salmon salad with horseradish dill cream cheese on a bagel) and Carnegie Deli has the “50 ways to love your liver” (with chopped liver, naturally).

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.