Silver believes that the knish was a victim of its own success, arguing that knisheries gave immigrant Jews a living, if only meager, that allowed them to take the first steps up the social ladder. As upwardly mobile Jews left poor neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, the knisheries that boosted economies a generation ago lost business and eventually closed. New knisheries opened where Jewish communities landed: Long Beach on Long Island, Baldwin in Westchester, and elsewhere. The knish sustained itself, but didn’t see breakout success like the bagel did.
As part of her efforts to spread the knish gospel, Silver started teaching classes on its history. At one such class, a Staten Island native named Noah Wildman showed up, finding in Silver a fellow obsessive. Wildman had gone to culinary school, worked at Brooklyn charmer Franny’s, and once wanted to open up his own pizzeria. But he eventually ditched the slice to launch a brief-lived knishery in 2011.
Growing up, Wildman thought every American household stocked knishes. “It had never occurred to me that this wasn’t something that was common from here to California and beyond,” he says.
