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Food

Jewish Christmas

Why Jews eat Chinese on December 25, and how a hip Brooklyn deli is modernizing that tradition

By Marc Tracy|December 16, 2010 7:00 AM|49comments
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(Mitch Aidelbaum.)

Mile End opened in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, at the beginning of this year, a deli specializing in Montreal Jewish cuisine: smoked meat instead of pastrami; poutine instead of cheese fries; those flat, sweet things they serve up there instead of what New Yorkers call bagels. Foodies loved the sandwiches. Hipsters loved the Brownstone Brooklyn setting, the Stumptown coffee, and the brunch, which is just exotic enough to be adventurous and just familiar enough to be, well, brunch.

Then, last month, Mile End began to offer an ambitious dinner menu that took your Eastern European Jewish grandmother’s evergreens and ran them through up-to-the-minute, fat-happy trends: shmaltzed radishes, veal cholent, kasha varnishkes with confit gizzards. What was this cool Canadian place doing serving traditional food? “To me, this is what deli is,” Montreal-born Noah Bermanoff, the place’s founder and co-owner, said earlier this week. “I’m not trying super-hard to be Montreal. I’m trying super-hard to serve food as I know it.”

So take a guess what Mile End is serving on Christmas Day. That’s right: Chinese food.

Titled a “traditional Jewish Christmas,” the $35 prix fixe—served to two seatings on Christmas Eve and four on Christmas Day and made right in the kitchen—will start with wonton eggdrop soup, continue to roast duck with smoked-meat fried rice and Chinese broccoli, and end with fortune cookies and orange wedges. (Mile End’s printed menu is here.) It’s your traditional Chinese meal, made hip, and—with that crucial addition of smoked meat—brushed gently with Mile End’s idiosyncrasy.

But it’s not a twee hipster affect or a one-chuckle joke; it’s a stark claim—almost a polemic. You will not go to Mile End on Christmas because you happened to feel like fried rice. You will go to proudly proclaim your Jewish-American identity. And yet even as the meal is mining this phenomenon, it also recognizes that, more than ever before, Jews are just another brand of white person, and so, especially, for young Jews, simply going to the local lo mein joint may not be enough.

***

The Hebrew year is 5771 and the Chinese year is 4707. That must mean, the joke goes, that against all odds the Jews went without Chinese food for 1,064 years. In fact, Jewish love for Chinese food is neither hallucinated nor arbitrary. It is very real and very determined, and it originates roughly a century ago, in a place about four miles away from Mile End: the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The predominant groups in the area were Eastern European Jews, Italians, and Chinese. According to Matthew Goodman, author of Jewish Food: The World at Table, Italian cuisine and especially Italian restaurants, with their Christian iconography, held little appeal for Jews. But the Chinese restaurants had no Virgin Marys. And they prepared their food in the Cantonese culinary style, which utilized a sweet-and-sour flavor profile, overcooked vegetables, and heaps of garlic and onions. Sound familiar?

Additionally, argued Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine in a 1992 academic paper titled “Safe Treyf,” Chinese food featured the sort of unkosher dishes you could take home to your mother, or at least eat in front of her. For one thing, there is no mixing of dairy and meat, for the simple reason that there is no dairy. (Think about it!) Of course, there is trayf aplenty, chiefly pork and shellfish. But it is always either chopped and minced and served in the middle of innocuous vegetables all covered in a common sauce, or it is wrapped up in wontons and egg rolls—where you can’t see it. Goodman notes that the purveyors of Chinese restaurants eventually picked up on this: “They would advertise wonton soup as chicken soup with kreplach,” he told me.

Beyond the trappings and the cuisine, Chinese restaurants offered poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants the opportunity to feel cosmopolitan and sophisticated (food of the Orient!). It also let them feel superior, a truism that has achieved the most definitive canonization available: its own Philip Roth quotation. “Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese,” Alexander Portnoy tells us. “Because one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but white and maybe even Anglo Saxon. No wonder they can’t intimidate us. To them we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP.”

The final part of this story is the one you already know: Most Chinese people are not Christian. Therefore, on Christmas, Chinese restaurants are open.

***

OK, you say, but since the Lower East Side’s glory years, and even since the Baby Boomers’ halcyon suburbia, many more options have cropped up—Indian, Korean, Thai. But, still, as Rabbi Joshua Plaut, who is putting the finishing touches on a book about Jews and Christmas (it has a chapter on Chinese food), says: “For Jews, the decision to go to a Chinese restaurant on Christmas is conscious and intended.”

“It’s a love affair and a sacred tradition to partake of Peking duck,” Plaut quips. He argues that to eat Chinese on Christmas is a ritual, not unlike the rituals that traditional Judaism—which has always valued observance where Christianity has valued faith—requires. For some, the Chinese-on-Christmas experience is a replacement for traditional rituals: A prayer you can eat.

But more than standing in for religion, going to Chinese restaurants on Christmas as a Jewish person is an elective assertion of your culture. “As ridiculous as it is, there’s something kind of wonderful about it, that you’re paying homage to what has come before you,” said Goodman, the Jewish Food author. Bermanoff, of Mile End, has a nearly identical take: “If there is a culture that revolves around eating pork wontons on Sunday evenings,” he insisted, “then fine, that’s a legitimate culture, and therefore I’m allowed to recreate it.”

(The only time I can remember not eating Chinese on Christmas was several years ago, when my family was vacationing in Rome. No doubt we could have gone to the place that stays open for the American tourists, which surely exists, or stocked up on sandwiches the day before. But instead, we traveled to a kosher place located where the ghetto used to be. The restaurant was the only lighted thing on the street, and it was crowded and cozy. It served Italian food, not Chinese, but the night felt just like Christmas.)

Whether they have fully thought it through or not, Jews who eat Chinese food on Christmas are proclaiming that, for them, Jewishness is what philosophers call a second-order value. In contrast to valuing Judaism on the first order—enjoying the rituals themselves, sincerely adhering to the tenets themselves—they value the fact of their Jewishness. They go out of their way to do it. They may or may not enjoy General Tso’s Chicken, but if they are eating it on Christmas, their prime motivation is not the general’s sweet, spicy deliciousness, but rather the knowledge that they are doing something that in some adapted way reinforces their Jewishness. They are moved by their hearts, not their tastebuds.

***

Which brings us back to Mile End. Despite Bermanoff’s partaking in a well-worn tradition, he represents something markedly different: Jews are making their own Chinese food now. Bermanoff—who is, perfectly, a law school drop-out—encapsulates a younger Jewish culture. It is more aimless, less rooted—Boerum Hill, not Borough Park—and it sees its tradition less as a comfortable inheritance and more as a starting point. Perhaps it is the fact that Bermanoff is not American and therefore somewhat alienated to begin with that enabled him to more clearly perceive that assimilation and co-optation had ground what it meant to be a “New York Jew” down to little more than a nub with Woody Allen glasses.

Because let’s face it: Jews are not outsiders anymore. It’s not only to Chinese people that we can seem, at times, like “just some big-nosed variety of WASP.” Only among ourselves, on a special day that comes only once a year, can our commonalities and our distinctiveness become apparent.

Marc Tracy edits Tablet Magazine’s daily blog, The Scroll. He tweets @marcatracy.
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  • Marian

    Not being “a big-nosed variety of wasp”, maybe this explains why I prefer to eat Middle-Eastern food on Christmas. The restaurants of my Arab-American neighbors are also open on Christmas and long into the night.

    Lately, I’ve made more friends among the local Jewish crowd, so I do end up at Chinese restaurants. But I wish that I could drag them over to the places that make a mean lentil soup and falalel. Sigh!

  • chloe

    timing is everything.

    Erev Shabbat is the 24th. Santa, etc. better not ring the doorbell.

    The 25th is Shabbat & we expect to have HAMIN>

    AMEN. Selah

  • Gilbert Brodsky

    Regarding why Jews are drawn to Chinese food in general: I’ve heard it promoted in several places (including a weekly Dvar Torah several years ago from Aish haTorah) that formerly observant people who were exploring non-kosher food for the first time preferred it because it wasn’t obvious what you were eating. Finely chopped vegetable mixed with rice and — what kind of meat is that? — well, it’s pork, or shellfish, or treyf beef, but who knows? — it could be chicken, or fish, right? Not so in-your-face as eating a lobster, or shrimp cocktail, or a pork chop.

    Interesting hypothesis…

    I’ve also heard it said that if you superimpose the maps of high Jewish population concentration and Chinese restaurant locations for both Montgomery Count Md and Westchester County NY, you’ll see a very clean overlap. Unverified (couldn’t find a reference on Snopes).

  • Dave Henig

    I will be in shul both Erev Shabat and Shabat morning then off to the chinese restaurant for Dim Sum. much more fun that the regular Kidush!

  • Lindsay

    “The final part of this story is the one you already know: Most Chinese people are not Christian. Therefore, on Christmas, Chinese restaurants are open.”

    I wish this held true for those of us living in Oklahoma.

  • http://irenesharonhodes.wordpress.com/ Irene Sharon Hodes

    I live in Israel these days, and I still make an effort to eat Chinese on Christmas. It is alluded to in the article, but it must be said again that this is solely an American Jewish tradition. Being such a dominant minority group in a more Christian country, the fact that you don’t celebrate this huge holiday makes you stand up in cultural solidarity. In Israel, Christmas is just another day. Practicing cultural Judaism isn’t important because that’s just your everyday life. And as my luck would have it, perhaps as a result, our Chinese food here is terrible!

  • http://njjewishnews.com/kaplanskorner Ron Kaplan

    And as the late Allan Sherman said about the difference in the Hebrew and Chinese calendars, “Jewish people had to do their own laundry.”

  • Chi Halevi

    Too bad so few Korean eateries are open that night and day, probably b/c so many Korean Americans are Christian.

    It would be nice for us Chosen people to better know the Chosan people.

  • http://www.edwardhershey.com Edward Hershey

    We have brought the tradition clear across the country to Portland and expanded it to include Thai and/or Vietnamese food as well.

  • Akiba

    I’m an African American Jew who goes to an Orthodox synagogue, lives a Conservadox lifestyle and teaches at two Reform congregations where its starting to be less uncommon to see kids like me, or Asian American Jews or Latino Jews, so please can we can it with the “just another white person” narishkeit? If Jews today are just another white person its probably because half the mothers of the kids I teach are Irish…

  • Jon

    I’d say the Orthodox are still outsiders.

  • Josh

    I’m intrigued by the fact that Tracy doesn’t make mention of the fact – perhaps he takes it for granted – that Mile End is not a kosher deli. That’s not a criticism of Mile End(they should be whatever they want to be), but it does say something that in a discussion of a return to traditional Jewish food, “kosher” isn’t even on the radar.

  • Yaffah

    I’ve always heard that there were so many Chinese restaurants in Jewish and African-American neighborhoods because they served both of us when many “Christian” restaurants owners wouldn’t (‘no Jews or Blacks allowed’).

  • Jeff Forman

    During my years as a teacher one episode sticks out that always makes me laugh. It was no secret to my students that I am Jewish. A few days before Yom Kippur a Chinese student told me that it is the greatest of all holidays. His father owned a very large Chinese restaurant and hundreds of Jews came in to break the fast. The also tipped well. We love chinese food, even the glatt kosher Chinese that I eat.

  • http://www.lefcourt.com Al Lefcourt

    I have to agree with Akiba. If Tracy really believes “Jews are not outsiders anymore” he is either not paying attention (see the Weisenthal Center’s recent report on rising anti-semitism) or he has never ventured beyond the confines of New York City.

  • WIlliam

    As Irene alluded to above, it’s really a deliberate reaction against the holiday, a counter-cultural signal.

    Some of us non-Jews have our own ways of doing similar. I don’t eat turkey or ham at Thanksgiving or Christmas either. And I eat a lot of meat around Lent too, and never fish on Fridays, being Protestant.

    On Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur I eat pork or ham, and plenty of raised bread on Passover. And I wouldn’t mind telling Elena Kagan that either, since that is what this article appears to allude to by its title, for her famous quip to Lindsay Graham. (If this article was written by a Christian it would be called “stereo-typing” and “anti-semitic”. Kind of like the Chinese “laundry” statement above, which was funny). People are just way too easily offended, aren’t they?

  • http://onbeingboth.com Susan Katz Miller

    It’s interesting to think about how the Chinese food connection plays out in interfaith families. This season, I have written about an intermarried Jew nostalgic for Chinese on Christmas, and an intermarried Christian who has gladly adopted the Chinese food custom in order to get out of spending the day cooking turkey. My son is a patrilineal quarter-Jew, but he has requested Chinese food for his Bar Mitzvah luncheon this spring. What could be bad?

  • Eli

    Akiba and Al: I’m sure Mr Tracy realizes that Jews come in many different ethnicities. The fact of the matter is that there are 6 Million Ashkenazic Jews in America. The majority of us pass as white. Indeed, there was a book written recently called “How Jews Became White Folks”.

  • Isabel

    In regards to Yaffah’s comment: “I’ve always heard that there were so many Chinese restaurants in Jewish and African-American neighborhoods because they served both of us when many “Christian” restaurants owners wouldn’t (‘no Jews or Blacks allowed’)”
    Really? I think it’s because the Chinese are generally hard-working and will set up shop in a lot of areas other’s won’t. I’ve been to many desolate, poor areas in NYC, but lo and behold…that’s a Chinese takeout place behind bullet proof glass, across from the projects! I live in Chinatown, NYC and my family is from the area. I think nowadays the Chinese accept anyone who is going to spend a lot @ their restaurants and leave a decent tip. Quite honestly, the idea of Chinese people in my neighborhood serving Blacks and Jews before other places, back in the day, would probably only be financially motived if it’s true. I still get elbowed aside and waited on last in many Chinese businesses that are not restaurants. And trust me, I know ALL the words for ‘non-Chinese person,’ slang and standard, as they are thrown around by shop owners all the time.
    Interestingly, many non-Chinese “white” look the same to the Chinese, and it’s doubtful they are putting any thought at all into labeling Jews as “big nosed WASPS.” They just have dollar signs in their eyes from Jewish patronage over X-Mas. There are still very few Black people shopping in Chinatown, patronizing restaurants, living in the area. Black people were always on the bottom of their list, unfortunately. I experienced this second hand through my African roommate who lived in the area some years ago.

  • Georg von Starkermann

    As a German Jew I remember going to the “Chinks” right after Neila Service ended on Yom Kippur. This of course was in Brooklyn NY which held at least one million Jews within its County. Ironically, my mother kept a strictly kosher home and I had a Bar Mitzvah, but Chinese food always was a staple right after Yom Kippur.

  • Raymond in DC

    Eli writes, “The fact of the matter is that there are 6 Million Ashkenazic Jews in America.” According to the most recent demographic studies, there aren’t even 6 million Jews in America! The figures I’ve seen suggest closer to 5.2 million – this despite the influx of Jews from Latin America and Israel (mainly Sephardic) and Iran (almost all Sephardic) who have slowly shifted the ethnic balance. The decline in numbers can be traced to intermarriage, low birthrates among the least Jewishly-observant, and general disaffiliation. The country with the most Jews is now Israel.

  • Eli

    The numbers are debatable. The Census said America had 6.5 Million Jews in 2008.
    There are more Ashkenazim in America than in Israel–they’re still the majority by far in the US. That was my point.

  • Eli

    Actually, some sources say there are more Jews in the US than Israel: http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-population-jews-israel.html

  • http://www.lindagrant.co.uk Linda Grant

    I believe there are around 13 million Jews in the world, and around five million live in the US. For us remaining eight million (five million in Israel) – we don’t eat Chinese on Christmas Eve. And I grew up in a city with the largest and first Chinatown in Europe. Still we didn’t go to Chinatown on Christmas Eve.

    Jewish-Americans: a subset of Jews, not ‘Jews’.

  • http://sovev.com Daniel

    Since I started keeping kosher, getting great Chinese food becomes a real treat. Cho Sen Garden in Forest Hills is expensive but probably better than any trayf Chinese I ever had! I think it’s the quality of the meat maybe less grease?

  • cj

    FYI: The Chinese think its barbaric to cut meat at the table – it’s all done in the kitchen.

  • Lynn

    I already have my reservations (12/25, 7:00 PM) at Bamboo Garden, Seattle’s certified kosher vegetarian Chinese restaurant. I believe it is owned by Buddhists so there are no members of the lotus family (onions, garlic) in the food. It’s in a great location and the food is tasty.
    Bamboo Garden is mobbed on Christmas night (except when it falls on a Friday, and then everyone goes on Christmas Eve). I’ve learned to make reservations, or order take-out, otherwise I can spend at least an hour waiting for a table.

  • Pamela

    Here in Atlanta the Chinese restaurant of choice for Jews who observe Kashrut is Harmony. It’s Vegan and run by Buddhists, and the patrons on any given night are 50% Chinese and 50% Jewish. The food is excellent and inexpensive, and I especially enjoy ordering the Moo Shu Pork. Just saying it aloud to the server is delicious! I hope the part 2 of this article will be about going to the movies on Christmas.

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1uZ_W7atDE Nakiah Burnes

    Brandon Harris Walker has a music video on youtube that I love!!
    It is called “Chinese Food for Xmas”

  • JCarpenter

    @ Irene: “Christmas is just another day in Israel” ? Have you been to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day? or have you ceded the West Bank?

  • Jeffrey W.

    I am Jewish, I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 60s, and we did enjoy eating Chinese now and then. But this is the first I ever even heard of a custom of going out to eat Chinese on Christmas Eve. We always paid as little attention to Xmas as possible.

  • Daphne B

    Jeffrey, Growing up in a Jewish home on LongIsland in the 50s and 60s we always ate Chinese Food on Christmas Eve and went to the movies on Christmas Day. Maybe because you lived in Brooklyn, which is really a Country of its own. Hapy Holidays everyone…..

  • Bill

    Yes, Chinese food & a movie on Christmas day – long a tradition growing up as a Brooklyn/LI Jew in the 60s. The Chinese restaurants & movies were open & mostly empty, as the “goyim” were either in church or with their families.

    Not so much any more – at least in metro NYC – less church-going, more family time at the movies – so December 25th not so much of a “Jewish holiday.”

    One thing to add: my mother kept a kosher home for most of my childhood. but we did have take-out Chinese food. She bought a separate set of inexpensive dishes just for the trayf! When she died, we donated the set to a Jewish thrift shop – maybe someone recognized what they’re for!

  • Daniel

    The sub title reads inaccuretly, better: “Why Assimilated Ashkenzi Jews Eat chinese…”

  • Joseph Hayes

    Thank you, Marc, you made me laugh with glee. I made the decision to have a “traditional Jewish Christmas” last year, and that’s what we’re doing on Saturday. Doesn’t seem to be a tradition here in Orlando, which is surprising considering how many other New York Jews live here, so we’ll probably be surrounded by our Chinese lantsmen. Oh, and by the way, that restaurant in Rome’s ghetto was serving very Jewish food indeed; the centuries of food coming out of the cucina ebraica influenced many dishes that we now consider Italian.

  • Charles Vernoff

    The simplest explanation I’ve heard is from a professor at the U. of Chicago. When Jewish immigrants arrived and wanted or needed to assimilate, it would have been too blatant to go into a “goyish” restaurant and order a ham sandwich. But the Chinese weren’t goyim. They were some unknown, uncategorizable species. So Jews could pollute themselves with Chinese “safe treyf” and pretend for awhie they didn’t even realize……

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    As an Ashkenazi biracial (aka not “just another version of white”) torah-observant Reform Jew (yes, i’m all kinds of “non-traditional” I guess) who grew up eating Chinese food on xmas, I wanted to love this article and relate to it. You were cognizant enough to explicitly state Eastern European a few times, but many of the African American, Asian, and Latin American Jews I know, which include people who follow Ashkenazi traditions and many Sephardic Jews, as well as a few other minhagim, also love the Chinese food on Xmas tradition. Jews aren’t just another kind of White person. Some White Ashkenazi Jews are… some Ashkenazi Jews (like myself) are not fully White, or (especially, but not only, in the case of conversions and/or adoptions) aren’t White at all.

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  • David B.

    Marian,
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  • Floyd

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    The rest are imitations.

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Jewish Christmas

Why Jews eat Chinese on December 25, and how a hip Brooklyn deli is modernizing that tradition