(JEWISH GROUP) How a Jewish mother from Flatbush became America's most recognizable Italian on TV

Fran Lopate, a 53-year-old former Garment District worker and Jewish mother of four from Flatbush, Brooklyn, was an unlikely model.

But in 1971, Lopate, in the role of an Italian mamma, her Jewish nose passing for Roman, stood behind a red-checkered table in one of the most famous advertising campaigns in American history, smiling warmly as she made a salami sandwich on rye. The text above her read: “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish rye bread.”

Decades later, her son, the longtime radio host Leonard Lopate, who died Tuesday at age 84, remembered what it was like to see posters of his mother across New York. “It was all over the subways, huge posters, and I used to stand in front of her without ever saying, ‘Hey, that’s my mom,'” he told me last fall, sitting with his brother, the noted writer Phillip Lopate, in the living room of Phillip’s brownstone in Carroll Gardens. “But I felt very proud of it.”

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At a time when companies were expected to swallow their ethnic pride or turn heritage into caricature, Levy’s pitched their Jewishness as something everyone could value. And when marketers almost exclusively used perfectly symmetrical white blonde models, the series photographer Howard Zieff chose all Americans over all-American.

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