Henry S. Levy and Sons

Levy's was founded in 1888 by Henry S. Levy, a Russian Jewish immigrant. The Bakery began at the intersection of Moore Street and Graham Avenue in Brooklyn, NY. In time, it relocated to Park Avenue, and later to 115 Thames Street, where it stayed for nearly sixty years. =="You don't have to be Jewish"==

Levy's is best known for the ad campaign "You Don't have to Be Jewish to Love Levy's Real Jewish Rye", which ran in New York in the 1960s. Large white posters hung in the city's subway system to broadcast the company's new slogan, each bearing a large, photographic portrait of a distinctly non-Jewish person eating a slice of rye bread. Early renditions featured a choirboy, a Catholic cop, and an American Indian, identified in 2022 by a reporter for The Forward as Joseph S. Attean, a railroad engineer and an enrolled member of the Penobscot Nation of Maine (rather than an Italian shoe-shiner as later rumors claimed). Levy's hired ad agency Doyle Dane Berbach for the campaign. Judy Petras, a Jewish copywriter at DDB, wrote the catchy and now timeless tagline herself. The campaign transformed Levy's into New York's top seller of rye, and is often cited as one of the first sensitive and successful uses of cultural and racial identity in public advertising. Others are a part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian. == See also ==