Over the weekend, while writing about the impending arrival of Gross Bagels in Tivoli, I made what I assumed was a harmless confession. I admitted that despite growing up in Queens—which makes me, if not Jew-ish, then definitely Jewish-adjacent—I have never fully understood the near-religious fervor surrounding bagels. I don’t dislike them. I eat them occasionally. But I’ve never felt compelled to drive across county lines for one, stand in a line that wraps around a block, or engage in heated debate over the merits of sesame versus poppy seed. To me, a bagel has always been what it objectively is: boiled bread.
This, it turns out, was a mistake.
I invited readers to explain what I was missing. If you love bagels, I wrote, tell me why. What followed was less a collection of food opinions than a series of personal testimonies.
One reader recalled growing up in Binghamton with a Brooklyn mother who regarded frozen Lender’s bagels as a kind of culinary surrender. Monthly trips to visit grandparents in Floral Park doubled as supply runs. Bagels were transported home, frozen, and rationed throughout the year. Another described an ongoing search for a Hudson Valley bagel capable of measuring up to the standards established by a Brooklyn childhood. A third informed me, politely but firmly, that I—”Brian. Mahoney, is it?”—should perhaps stay in my own ethnic lane and leave bagels alone.
As the responses accumulated, certain patterns emerged. The first was that nearly everyone had a very specific idea of what constituted a proper bagel. Bagels should be small, not large. They should be chewy but not tough. Crusty but not hard. Dense but not heavy. One reader wanted an exterior that cracked when sliced. Another praised a substantial chew that worked the jaw. A third sought a lightly crusted exterior and enough air in the crumb to allow the flavor to emerge.
What fascinated me was that these descriptions frequently contradicted one another. The ideal bagel seemed to possess mutually exclusive qualities. It was simultaneously dense and airy, chewy and soft, crusty and pillowy. Yet nobody appeared troubled by these contradictions. Each correspondent knew exactly what a perfect bagel was, even if their definitions varied dramatically.
The second pattern was even more revealing. Very few readers discussed flavor in any sustained way. Instead they talked about Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Montreal, grandparents, Sunday mornings, Jewish heritage, and neighborhood delis. One reader boiled the matter down to two words: “Ethnic heritage!”
The bagel itself often seemed secondary to the memories attached to it.
Seeking enlightenment, I called Elana Carlson of Kingston’s Fantzye Bagels. Carlson, who has spent years making and thinking about bagels and whose bagels won top honors at BagelFest last year, listened to my findings and pointed me toward Sam Silverman, founder of BagelFest and self-described Bagel Ambassador.
Silverman began with history, and it turns out bagels have a much more dramatic origin story than I expected. According to Silverman, the first written reference to a bagel dates to 1610 in Poland. At the time, anti-Semitic restrictions limited the kinds of food Jewish bakers could legally produce. Bread occupied a special legal category, and Jews were often excluded from guilds that controlled its production. The solution, according to one longstanding account of bagel history, was ingenious: boil the dough before baking it. Because the dough was cooked in water first, it was no longer technically bread in the eyes of the authorities.
Whether or not every detail of that origin story survives rigorous scrutiny, the broader point remains. The bagel emerged from the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Eastern Europe and remained closely tied to Jewish life for centuries. It was portable, inexpensive, durable, and well suited to urban life. Long before it became the preferred delivery system for scallion cream cheese, it was a staple food carried through generations of migration, hardship, and reinvention.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of Eastern European Jews fled pogroms, persecution, and economic instability, bringing their food traditions with them to cities like London, Montreal, and New York. The bagel crossed the Atlantic alongside them. By the time it arrived on the Lower East Side, it carried not only a recipe but a culture. In that sense, every argument about what constitutes a “real” bagel is participating, however unknowingly, in a conversation that is more than 400 years old.
That history, Silverman believes, helps explain why people can become surprisingly emotional about bagels. They’re not simply defending breakfast. They’re defending tradition. But history alone doesn’t explain why otherwise reasonable adults will drive 40 miles for breakfast.
“Hot bread just speaks to the soul,” Silverman says.
It’s a wonderfully simple explanation, and perhaps the best one. Human beings have been gathering around warm bread for thousands of years. But Silverman believes bagels offer something more than comfort. They offer customization. Walk into a traditional New York bagel shop and you’ll encounter dozens of bagels, spreads, toppings, and sandwich combinations. “Out of those millions of combinations, there is a perfect combination for each and every one of us,” he says. “And so you develop this really intense personal attachment to it.”
My inbox suddenly made more sense.
My readers weren’t describing bagels so much as they were describing their bagels. Each had assembled a Platonic ideal over decades of eating, comparing, remembering, and arguing. Every subsequent bagel was judged against that standard. Susan S., who grew up making pilgrimages from Binghamton to Long Island for proper bagels, now carries home Montreal bagels in her luggage. Bob S. declared the Hudson Valley a “bagel-wanna-be wasteland.” Marc O. mounted a spirited defense of cinnamon raisin bagels. Nobody agreed on the particulars. Everybody agreed they were right.
When I mentioned the common claim that New York bagels are superior because of the city’s water, Silverman gently swatted the idea away. The real advantage, he said, is a century’s worth of accumulated expertise. New York’s Bagel Bakers Local 338 was a trade union founded in the early 20th century that helped establish standards and techniques that have been passed from one generation of bakers to another. “We have a very concentrated pool of skilled labor that exists in New York City,” he says. “Nowhere else in the world has it.”
That’s not to say bagels elsewhere are inferior. Montreal entered the conversation repeatedly in reader responses, usually with the reverence reserved for holy sites. Silverman acknowledged a friendly rivalry but noted that it tends to be more important to Montreal than New York. New York bagels and Montreal bagels, he explained, are distinct traditions. Montreal’s are sweeter, denser, and baked in wood-fired ovens. New York’s rely on long fermentation and malt for flavor. Both have their devotees.
Denise S.’s response took the conversation in a different direction. Instead of describing a beloved bagel, she described a bagel inventor. Denise S. knew Louis Wishinsky of Hurleyville, whose bagel-making machine helped revolutionize commercial bagel production in the 1960s. (Wishinsky’s device is on display at the Sullivan County Museum.) The anecdote was a useful reminder that while many readers experienced bagels as memory and tradition, bagels also have a history of innovation. The same food that evokes grandparents and Sunday mornings was also shaped by inventors, entrepreneurs, unions, immigrants, and industrial machinery. Like most enduring American foods, the bagel turns out to contain multitudes.
Then we arrived at cinnamon raisin bagels.
One reader had denounced raisins not only in bagels but in virtually all baked goods. Another wrote passionately in defense of the cinnamon raisin bagel, preferably eaten hot and plain. Silverman laughed. Sweet bagels, he says, were introduced by Lender’s in the mid-20th century to broaden bagels’ appeal beyond their traditional Jewish audience to gentile audiences. Which is another way of saying that the cinnamon raisin controversy is not really about cinnamon raisins.
For many traditionalists, fruit simply does not belong in a bagel. “Anybody that grew up in a traditional New York household has a firm belief that fruit and sweet does not belong in bagels,” Silverman says. “That is for donuts.” The vehemence of the response is revealing. Nobody is arguing about whether cinnamon and raisins taste good together. They’re arguing about what a bagel is allowed to be. Like most bagel debates, the dispute turns out to be less about ingredients than identity, tradition, and the boundaries of authenticity.
“Certainly identity and tradition,” Silverman says when I ask whether these debates were really about something larger than breakfast.
That may have been the most useful answer of the entire conversation. Because after reading dozens of emails and spending an hour talking with a professional bagel evangelist, I’ve come to suspect that people are not nearly as passionate about bagels as they are about what bagels represent. Family histories. Neighborhood loyalties. Cultural inheritance. Childhood memories. The bagel is simply the delivery system.
Silverman arrived at a similar conclusion from a different direction. After years spent celebrating bagels and organizing BagelFest, he told me that the food has taught him something about people. “People ultimately crave community and crave connection,” he said. “Bagels are the ultimate connector.”
At first that sounded like the sort of thing a Bagel Ambassador might say. Then I looked back through the emails. The woman remembering trips to Floral Park. The Brooklyn expatriates still searching for home. The debates over Montreal and New York. The arguments over raisins. The memories of grandparents and Sunday mornings.
I had asked readers what they loved about bagels. Most of them answered a different question entirely. They told me about grandparents and neighborhoods, childhoods and traditions, migrations and memories. In other words, they told me where they came from.
