Selling Brooklyn Bagels To An Indian Chief
The Brooklyn Bagel Bakery was founded in Los Angeles in 1953 by Brooklyn transplant Seymour Friedman, whose son, Richard, took over the business in 1981, and ran the bakery until his retirement in 2015.
The ad above illustrates the bakery’s strategy, early in its history, of attempting to appeal to non-Jewish consumers. Today it hangs on the office wall of Friedman’s grandson, Jason Turbow, author of “Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic: Reggie, Rollie, Catfish and Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s,” released last year by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Turbow points out that the majority of the Brooklyn Bagel’s signage did not involve Native Americans.
Liza Schoenfein is food editor of the Forward. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @LifeDeathDinner
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