> You used to only be able to get authentic hand-rolled bagels in cities with a large Jewish population, which was exclusive and cool! But now, you can only get authentic hand-rolled bagels in cities with a large Jewish population, which is awful!It's more complicated than that.
First, the article notes that the old-style bagels are hard to find now, even in cities like New York with large Jewish populations where they used to be everywhere. Even though they still had people there who preferred them, they were driven out of those markets by a combination of factors arising from the rise of the machine-made bagel. Since "bagel-maker" isn't a career that an artisan can make a living at anymore, for instance, the knowledge of how those old bagels got made doesn't get passed down from one generation to another like it used to. Eventually that knowledge will be lost, and the machine-made bagel will be the only bagel. So it's not a straight case of everyone's better off; if you're one of the people who lives in those markets and prefers the traditional bagel, you're losing it. It's possible to argue that loss is outweighed by the benefit everyone else in the world gets from having access to any kind of bagel at all, but it's definitely a loss.
Second, it's tied up with longstanding anxieties in the American Jewish community (anxieties that will be familiar to any immigrant minority) about assimilation. On one hand, if you are Jewish or love Jewish culture, it's exciting to see something as central to that culture as the bagel exploding outside the Jewish community to the plates of the nation at large; when Jewish food becomes American food, it helps reinforce the idea that the days when Jews were seen as foreign or alien are over. But the flip side of that is that you can look at the bagel that's landing on all those gentile plates and worry that maybe the price of becoming "American" involves having to give up the distinctiveness that makes Jewish culture Jewish. Is that too high a price for what it buys? How much of traditional Jewish culture can you give up before you've given up your Jewish identity altogether?
None of those anxieties are unique to Jews -- I imagine Americans of Hispanic extraction must feel the same way every time they see a Taco Bell. It's a question that immigrants to America (and those descended from them) of all kinds have always had to grapple with: how do you embrace your new home without completely losing your connection to the old one? How much assimilation is too much?