A TALE TOLD IN PICKLES AND PASTRAMI

‘The Jewish Deli’ exhibit celebrates culture and food, from New York origins to other cities

The colors are fading, but the photograph of the Carnegie Deli from 2008 still calls up a world of heaping pastrami sandwiches, pungent smells of brine and smoke, and tourists lined up out the door onto Seventh Avenue in New York.

A few steps away, a kosher carving knife, a pushcart, a pickle barrel and a battered traveling valise used by immigrants from Lithuania are lined up against a wall. They conjure the Lower East Side of a century ago, bustling with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, in the midst of creating a cuisine and a new kind of restaurant.

This attic’s worth of artifacts sprawls through “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli,” an exhibit chronicling the rise of that restaurant culture in America. It is by all indications the most sweeping survey of this culinary institution attempted by a major museum. (Why that name? Do you have to ask?)

The museum, though, is far from the tenements of lower Manhattan: The Skirball Cultural Center, about 20 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, created the show and over the next year will send it to three other venues around the country, including the New-york Historical Society Museum and Library.

The exhibition is an exploration of the food and culture that thrived in New York and later Los Angeles, with their large Jewish and show-business communities, along with cities like Chicago, Houston, Miami and Indianapolis. As such, it surveys the story of immigration as a force behind changing American tastes: The pushcarts, as the curators note, foreshadowed the food trucks now operated by a new generation of immigrants. A grainy film clip near the start of the exhibit shows police officers fanning out to clear carts from a New York street in the early 1900s, a scene reminiscent of the 2020 crackdowns in Los Angeles on unlicensed food vendors.

“This show is making the argument that the Jewish deli is an American

RACHEL WALKER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Top, rafters float down the Yampa River between massive canyon walls. Above, Indigenous people who lived in the area left behind petroglyphs and pictographs.

JOEL BARHAMAND THE NEW YORK TIMES PHOTOS Jessie Kornberg, chief executive of the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, with a neon sign for the institution’s traveling exhibit on Jewish delis.

A replica corned beef sandwich and a vintage menu at the Jewish Deli exhibit in Los Angeles.