A Different State of Bagels
What was this circular piece of bread before me? The label said “bagel,” but the flimsy exterior and internal texture like a slice of Wonder Bread led me to believe otherwise. The color of the outside was the same as the inside and, when I picked it up, the crust gave in under my fingers, leaving a sizable dent in the bread. Grate marks crisscrossed its bottom, a sign of mass production. Six of these “bagels” were squished together in a plastic bag. Is this what they call a bagel in Virginia? Had I really made the decision to go to college in the south without first investigating their bagels? I put the bag back on the counter of the William & Mary dining hall. I would find something else to eat for breakfast.
Until I came to Williamsburg, Virginia for college, I did not know that I was a bagel purist. Growing up in Bethesda, Maryland, my D.C. suburb with a large Jewish population, I was unaware that mass-produced bread products have been masquerading as real bagels in the rest of the country. These “bagels” are poor imitations of traditional bagels, which originated in Jewish communities in Poland in the 17th century. Real bagels are first boiled, then baked. The boiling makes the skin of the bagel solid and the inside chewy. In the 1960s, decades after Jewish immigrants brought bagels to America, two men industrialized bagel making: they created machines that steamed the dough while it baked, eliminating the boiling process. The outsides of these “bagels” provide little resistance when bitten into and the insides are identical to ordinary bread. They are simply bagel-shaped bread products.
Bagels are my favorite food. I disagree wholeheartedly with anyone who says that they cannot compose a full meal. There have been many days where I have eaten bagels for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I love their versatility. I love the way that cream cheese complements nearly all bagel flavors. I felt betrayed when I found out that bagels have no nutritional value and on average contain over 400 calories, but I made no change to my bagel consumption.
Bagels — real bagels — are ingrained in my childhood and remind me of home. One of my earliest childhood memories is celebrating the most important Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On Yom Kippur, Jews are expected to go to synagogue and fast all day. Instead, my family and our friends would go to synagogue briefly in the morning, and then head to a Jewish deli usually empty on that day. There, we would order heaping platters of bagels, lox, and cream cheese. Some of the adults wouldn’t eat, since they were fasting, but the rest of us would eat as much as we could. Later, at sundown, we would go to the “break fast,” a traditional dinner celebrating the end of the fast. Many Jewish holidays center around food, so much so that nearly every holiday can be summarized by the familiar joke in the Jewish community: “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” At the break fast, too, were dozens of bagels.
On many Saturday mornings, my mom, my sister, Hannah, and I would wake up and immediately go to Bethesda Bagels, our favorite bagel shop. The store was small and always crowded. The line went out the door and down the street more often than not. The bagel counter, which rested on top of clear drawers full of fresh bagels, faced customers as they walked into the store. Each drawer was labeled with the type of bagel inside it — there were over twenty types. Their scents mixed in the air, creating a unique perfume that I happily inhaled. On the wall behind the counter hung a chalk-board, listing the menu. Yiddish words were mixed with the English; no translations were needed. Foods like gefilte fish, lox, shmeer, and rugelach were familiar to anyone who came into the store.
Hannah and I would stare at the bagels, taking too long to decide especially since we always ended up choosing the same types: Hannah would get plain and I would get sun-dried tomato. We would often buy a dozen bagels to last the week. Going to get bagels together was our family ritual, one of the few times set aside for us to all be together. At Bethesda Bagels, we often ran into people we knew — our friends, teachers, and neighbors. It was rare to go without seeing someone familiar. Later, in high school, my friends and I began going to Georgetown Bagels, a bagel shop close to our high school, for lunch. Dozens of high schoolers would pass through during their lunch periods. Often, students would bring their lunch from home and eat there, even if they didn’t buy anything. The small store was almost like a second cafeteria for our school, but the staff never seemed to mind. They knew that their store served a greater role than just selling bagels.
Bagels were such an ordinary part of my life that I never realized they were different or even not present in other places. Given that bagels are most popular in cities with high Jewish populations, it makes sense that Williamsburg, Virginia, a city that sometimes seems to forget it isn’t actually in the 18th century, would not have traditional bagels. The more time I spent in Williamsburg, the more differences I noticed between the colonial city and my hometown. Bethesda is about 30% percent Jewish, a percentage high enough that everyone is familiar with Jewish culture and language. This was not the case in Williamsburg, which has only one synagogue with about as many members as my class in Hebrew school did. When I used Yiddish words in Williamsburg, I was met with blank stares. This confused me — I had never had to differentiate between English and Yiddish before. Slowly, these words dropped out of my vocabulary. (One benefit, however, was that I was able to kvetch (complain) over the phone to my sister that William & Mary was too goyish (not Jewish) without worrying about being rude; anyone who would be offended wouldn’t understand what I was saying). References to anything Jewish, too, I realized, also went misunderstood. Most William & Mary students hadn’t spent every Saturday of seventh grade at a bar or bat mitzvah as every middle schooler from Bethesda had. Their public schools hadn’t closed on the Jewish High Holidays. Their cities hadn’t displayed a giant menorah next to the Christmas tree. They, overall, had no experience with Judaism or Jewish people. Life in Bethesda, I began to realize, was not the same as everywhere else.
There were larger differences, too. Most of my fellow students knew nothing about my culture. They didn’t know Judaism is a culture, as well as a religion. They didn’t understand how someone could think of themselves as fully Jewish yet not be religious or believe in God. As holidays passed throughout the year, I realized that my William and Mary friends had not heard of most of them. I struggled to describe them. “Purim… is like Jewish Halloween,” I’d say, oversimplifying my favorite holiday. “Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year. And Tu B’Shevat is kind of like Arbor Day, but more fun.” I knew my descriptions were lacking, but it was hard to explain an entire holiday in the minute I had before someone lost interest.
For the first time, too, I felt out of place because I was Jewish. I was unfamiliar with small things that everyone else seemed to have in common. They had grown up watching Christmas movies and Veggie Tales, a Christian T.V. show I had never heard of. Meanwhile, some of the children’s books and movies I had grown up with were unfamiliar to them, books like Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins and All of a Kind Family. I used different words than they did: what I called sufganiyot, they called jelly donuts; what I called latkes, they called potato pancakes. No time was this feeling more prevalent that the early winter, as Christmas decorations began to appear. A series of events, from Colonial Williamsburg’s Grand Illumination to William & Mary’s Yule Log, were labeled as “holiday celebrations,” but I soon realized that the only holiday they were celebrating was Christmas. Both events were scheduled on Hanukkah and neither acknowledged this. They were designed to be fun for everyone, but as I listened to Christmas carols and was surrounded by red and green, I felt like I didn’t belong. Everyone talked about the “holiday season,” but I didn’t see my holiday anywhere.
Not only were many of my classmates unaware of Jewish culture, some of them believed stereotypes that I didn’t even know existed. As I sat in my freshman dorm lounge teaching a few friends how to play dreidel (the traditional Hanukkah game), a boy from my dorm said, “you know, I learned at church that the Jews used dreidels to bargain over Jesus’s body parts after they killed him.” Another hall-mate told me, “people who don’t believe in Jesus go to hell.” Once, someone from my freshman dorm made a group chat for a number of friends and named the group, “Hitler did nothing wrong.” When I immediately sent a message saying that the title was not okay, he changed the name to, “Sorry Sara.”
At home, I never had to explain anything. At home, I never felt out of place for being Jewish. At home, I never encountered anti-Semitism. But in Williamsburg and at William & Mary, with their small Jewish populations, I encountered these things for the first time. No one understood how much these things disturbed me. No one understood why William & Mary’s lack of a sizable Jewish community bothered me. No one knew why I missed home.
No one knew that bagels were Jewish.
Everything came back to bagels.
I was not the only one disappointed with Williamsburg’s lack of bagel options. I had numerous conversations with several of my Jewish friends, many of whom are out-of-state, about the lack of quality bagels. Hillel, the Jewish student organization, was well aware of this concern. Someone mentioned it to the rabbi affiliated with William & Mary’s Hillel. Soon, he had located the closest Jewish bagel shop to campus, a bakery half an hour away in Newport News. That Friday, he had an Uber deliver bags of bagels to campus.
That night, new energy filled the room that Hillel reserves in the Sadler Center every Friday night. Everyone was excited about having real food at Shabbat dinner, instead of the usual seemingly random assortment of snacks. Kosher-certified food is hard to find in Williamsburg, and Hillel funds can only be used to buy items with kosher certification, even though very few students care. Therefore, most Hillel events have an odd assortment of snacks selected only for their kosher label, and not because anyone actually wants to eat them. Many “dinners” have consisted of just Oreos and pita chips.
But this Friday was different. A table, covered in a Hanukkah-themed tablecloth (despite the fact that it was October), was layered with bagels, lox, and cream cheese. The smell of bagels brought smiles to everyone’s faces as they walked in. As we ate, I listened to the conversations around me. Yiddish words were interspersed with English. I overheard two people playing “Jewish Geography,” a conversation in which two Jewish people from different areas try to figure out what connections that have with each other. I heard them mention the name of the youth group I participated in during high school and jumped into their conversation. Someone across the room commented that we had forgotten to say the Shabbat blessings. With our mouths full, we mumbled the familiar Hebrew phrases. The smell of fresh bagels filled the air. For an hour, Williamsburg reminded me of home.
