Columnist Jim Shultz
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When I was a boy in California in the 1960s, my family was pretty much the only family I knew that ate bagels. Thatâs probably because we were Jewish and bagels are a Jewish thing.
Bagels are to the Jewish people what tacos are to Mexican people â an invention of food so awesome that everyone else just started eating them. But it was not always that way.
Even by the mid-1980s in the U.S. only one in five people had ever tried a bagel. They were mostly made in specialty bakeries that catered to Jewish customers. New York City, of course, was the bagel capital of America then, a place where those great round inventions, slathered in cream cheese, had already begun to seep into the rest of the culture.