davka | דוקא | despite everything

mad man

Ad man William Bern­bach devel­oped a num­ber of famous cam­paigns. For our pur­pose today, his most impor­tant is that for Levy’s bak­ery.

Cor­rec­tion (Jan­u­ary 14, 2014): the woman behind the man!

Judy Por­tas died Tues­day, Jan­u­ary 7, 2014 at the age of 91. As the sto­ry in the New York Times reports:

As Ms. Pro­tas, a retired adver­tis­ing exec­u­tive at Doyle Dane Bern­bach who died on Tues­day at 91, well knew, a cam­paign spent sell­ing rye bread to Jews would be a cam­paign squan­dered in preach­ing to the converted.

“We had a local bread, real Jew­ish bread, that was sold wide­ly in Brook­lyn to Jew­ish peo­ple,” she told The New York Times in 1979. “What we want­ed to do was enlarge its pub­lic accep­tance. Since New York is so mixed eth­ni­cal­ly, we decid­ed to spread the good word that way.”

And thus, from Ms. Protas’s large­ly anony­mous pen sprang a slo­gan — “You don’t have to be Jew­ish to love Levy’s Real Jew­ish Rye” — that has far out­lived the actu­al cam­paign, which began in 1961 and ran through the 1970s.

one of the “you don’t have to be
jew­ish…” cam­paign posters

I’ve not been able to learn exact­ly when the phrase was first used, but a Google Engram search sug­gests that the meme took off some­time around 1962 or 1963. After rock­et­ing to star­dom the use of the phrase seems to have plateaued by the end of the decade. Nonethe­less, when you do a Google search on the phrase now, it takes only a quar­ter of a sec­ond to return over a mil­lion ref­er­ences.

[you don’t] have to be Jew­ish — engram

let me count the ways

The phrase has been used in many dif­fer­ent con­texts. These include a com­e­dy album of which there are over 700 clips and vari­ants on YouTube as well as oth­er uses, both commercial:

you don’t have to be jew­ish to love atlantic

and polit­i­cal:

you don’t have to be jew­ish to vote for gore/lieberman

and more per­son­al­ly (and sea­son­al­ly time­ly, because the Hurvitz fam­i­ly pro­duced a leaflet we dis­trib­uted at Yom Kip­pur ser­vices in Los Ange­les in 1966) political:

you don’t have to be jew­ish to oppose the war in vietnam

extending (or paraphrasing) hillel

So, while you don’t have to be Jewish…

…if not you, who?

And, if not now, when?

on “do” and “be”

My col­league and friend Phyl­lis Som­mer who ini­ti­at­ed and set the prompts for #Blo­gElul may not have con­sid­ered the spe­cial nature of the sequence.

There are a cou­ple of places on the Web that explore the “pro­gres­sive” rela­tion­ship of “do” and “be”:

• Hen­ning Schürig shared this in June of 2006:
• To be or not to be. – Shakespeare
• To do is to be. – Nietzsche
• To be is to do. – Sartre
• Do be do be do. – Sinatra
• A vari­ant appears at the Eng­lish Lan­guage and Usage pages of Stack Exchange
• To be is to do. —Socrates [Odd, did Sartre pla­gia­rize Socrates?]
• To do is to be. —Pla­to [And, did Niet­zsche pla­gia­rize Plato?]
• Do-be-do-be-do. —Sina­tra

We do not have Socrates, Pla­to, Niet­zsche, nor Sartre speak­ing their wis­dom in their own voic­es, how­ev­er, we do have Sina­tra. While it may seem a bit odd, Frank sings of appro­pri­ate con­cerns at this time of year: of face to face com­mu­ni­ca­tions as well as of “doing” and “being”. Pay spe­cial atten­tion at minute 2:17.

your lapel buttons

Many peo­ple have lapel but­tons. They may be attached to a favorite hat or jack­et you no longer wear, or poked into a cork-board on your wall. If you have any lay­ing around that you do not feel emo­tion­al­ly attached to, please let me know. I pre­serve these for the Jew­ish peo­ple. At some point they will all go to an appro­pri­ate muse­um. You can see all the but­tons shared to date.