How bagels became a marker of American immigrant life

Fortune has cast the bagel as a food that tells a wider story about immigration, Jewish life and American choice. In its American Objects series tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary, Fortune traces how a bread brought by Eastern European Jews became a common breakfast order far beyond its original communities.

According to Fortune, the bagel arrived in the United States with Jews from Eastern Europe who were fleeing poverty and antisemitism. It first took hold in New York through street carts and local bakeries, then spread into supermarket freezer cases and daily routines across the country.

Fortune describes the appeal as a contrast in texture: a toasted exterior giving way to a dense, chewy center. The basic form also became a platform for personal preference, from a plain cream cheese spread to taller combinations with fish, tomato, cucumber and red onion.

The choices extend to the dough itself, Fortune noted. Some diners prefer plain or egg bagels, while others look for poppy seeds, sesame seeds, onion, salt or an everything bagel built around a mix of toppings.

From Jewish bakeries to supermarkets

Fortune places the bagel’s American roots in Jewish communities in Poland and the migration of Eastern European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One figure in that commercial expansion was Harry Lender, who came from Poland and worked in a New Jersey bakery before bringing his family to the United States, according to Fortune.

Lender’s sons later expanded the family business from a bakery in New Haven, Connecticut, into national supermarket distribution through frozen bagels, Fortune reported. That shift helped move the bagel from neighborhood shops into homes far from the communities where it first became established in the U.S.

Fortune frames that history as part of a broader pattern of immigrant enterprise. The publication also notes that bagel shops today are run both by descendants of earlier immigrant families and by newer arrivals seeking opportunity in the United States.

A place in Jewish life

Even as the bagel spread, Fortune reports that it kept a distinct role for many American Jews. The food appears at family and religious moments, including celebrations and periods of mourning.

Fortune points to bagels at gatherings after a baby boy’s ritual circumcision, after a bar mitzvah and in shiva homes where families receive mourners after a death. In those settings, the bagel serves as a familiar food placed at the center of communal care.

The series presents the bagel as both ordinary and symbolic: a bread that moved from immigrant neighborhoods into the mainstream while retaining ties to Jewish memory and ritual. For Fortune’s American Objects project, that journey makes the bagel a compact example of how immigrant foods become part of the country’s shared table.

This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.