Making Race with Manischewitz: African American Consumers and Jewish Identity, 1940–80

Sammy Davis Jr. crooning “Man o’ Manischewitz” on television advertisements may seem no more than a peculiar remnant of the 1960s; but it speaks to a complex and troubled moment of cultural transmission between the African American and Jewish communities. Manischewitz, the quintessential kosher wine of mid-century America, relied for its profits on an overwhelmingly African American consumer base.

 The first part of the paper will explore how Manischewitz became a wine with a predominantly African American market. The wine’s manufacturers, the Monarch Wine Company,  never planned to reach the African American market. Instead, they discovered in the late 1940s that African Americans were seeking out Manischewitz, and then took steps to expand its market. I will argue the the wine’s appeal to Black consumers stemmed from two factors: its similarity in taste to the sweet wine consumed in the south by African Americans before they migrated to the north, and its designation as a wine for sacramental, religious purposes, symbolized by the highly visible presence of a rabbi on the wine’s label.

The paper then explores how Manischewitz’s highly visible African American consumers became a hindrance for sales to Jews. After 1960, Manischewitz became, in the eyes of upwardly mobile (and increasingly non-observant) Jews, a poor person’s drink unfit for those with a taste for good wine. At the same time, Manischewitz was no longer kosher enough for the resurgent Orthodox population; many switched to similar wines that followed stricter kosher rules.

 The paper will close by suggesting the Manischewitz story is absent from the emerging narrative on the success of kosher food in the last 20 years because most of its non-Jewish consumers were the wrong color; kosher food’s current proponents want their market to be white and upscale, not for the poor and people of color.