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.

(New Yorkers: Mile End is serving its “Traditional Jewish Christmas” again this year.)

Additionally, Nextbook Press author David Mamet drew a cartoon for us about this phenomenon that has since been plagiarized widely.

What will you be eating this Christmas?

Related: Jewish Christmas [Tablet Magazine]

While other precincts of New York City take on a tranquil, almost ghost-green glow on Christmas, Borough Park, the Hasidic enclave, teems with commerce and activity on this holy day. Its main drag, 13th Avenue, has the feel of an Asian city: Shanghai or Hong Kong minus the rickshaws and the pedicabs. Cars and pedestrians compete for room and air in narrow straits, and the street has the ambience of an urban bazaar, with chains and banks nestled next to mom-and-pop stores selling clothing, housewares, and just about everything else. The primary objective on our annual shopping trips was to buy a hat for my father, but the outing came with a number of blandishments and outright gifts for me: usually an article or two of clothing, and a post-shopping meal in a neighborhood restaurant.

My father is gimp-legged after he was hit by a car 30 years ago, but he lives a surprisingly nomadic existence in the greater New York area, often reaching all of the city’s five boroughs and many of its suburbs in a single day of rabbinical work. He drives a sporty, silver, late-model Cadillac, and frequently, at day’s end and too far afield to eat at home, he winds up in a kosher restaurant. One might think him to be a kosher-restaurant connoisseur, but he tends not to pay them any mind. In fact, my father’s dining preferences range from deli to dairy, and not much beyond that. My earliest memories of eating with him were in his haunts on the Lower East Side—Sam’s 999 on Essex Street, where he’d order pastrami and a Heineken, and Steinberg’s upstairs dairy restaurant, where he’d have smoked whitefish, coffee, and cheesecake for dessert.

On Christmas Day four years ago, after we had chosen the hat, we then had to choose a restaurant. Did we want milchig or fleishig, dairy or meat? We chose an upscale dairy restaurant. The restaurant was packed with late lunchers like us. There were mothers with strollers and finger-fed babies. Toddlers ate baked ziti, indolent children ate white rolls with butter, and businessmen nattered on at corner tables over lox and sable. My father and I stood for 20 minutes until a table opened near the swinging-door entrance to the kitchen. Then we sat there for another 20 minutes until service arrived. The waiter, who looked like an apparatchik for Josef Stalin, took our order.

My father took out his reading glasses to study the menu, even though he knew what he wanted. “Smoked whitefish,” he told the waiter.

“What else?” the waiter asked.

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?” the waiter said, incredulously.

“You have decaf?” my father asked.

“No. No decaf,” said the waiter.

“Mushroom barley soup?”

“No. Split pea only.”

“Potato salad?”

“No.”

“Tuna salad?”  I asked.

“We’re out.”

“Egg salad?”

“Blintzes only, with sour cream,” he said. “I have to get to other tables. Make up your mind.”

“OK,” I finally said. “Split pea soup and a vegetable omelet. Can you bring my father a seltzer?”

“No seltzer,” the waiter said.

A restaurant with no seltzer? I began to consider the idea that our waiter had traces of sadism. He was short and stout and had the air of someone who had been humiliated often, probably in a faraway land. I thought of him as one of those nondescript soldiers you see in newsreels from a forgotten conflict, like the Russo-Finnish war, perhaps a private in charge of the horses or the latrine. And to deprive my father of seltzer, if indeed he were doing so, was cruel. My father’s love for seltzer cannot be understood in purely physical or even gastronomic terms. It is simply part of him, long fetishized by his digestive track. Still, what was there to do?

We sat for another 20 minutes waiting for our food. It wasn’t a big deal: The restaurant was busy. My father and I passed the time in small talk. We made calculations on our napkins, refinancing our mortgage payments and family budgets. When our portions arrived, we ate silently and, in my father’s case, industriously—storing up glucose for whatever intellectual, physical, and monetary challenges lay ahead.

Then it was time for dessert. It would be cheesecake. Because we were sitting near the kitchen, I had a glimpse of a platter of store-bought cheesecake slices. There were regular, marbled chocolate, and blueberry cheesecakes. While I was in the restroom, my father ordered plain cheesecake. Upon my return, I urged him to reconsider, telling him the marbled chocolate cheesecake was much better, and he agreed. I called to the waiter. “My father changed his mind,” I said. “Instead of the New York plain cheesecake, he wants the marble chocolate cheesecake.” The waiter looked at us in disgust and said, “Once I put in the order, I cannot change it.”

He then spun away and returned shortly with a plate of the plain cheesecake. My father, who had spent his childhood in the Bronx, knew how to be grateful for food and to those who made it. His grandmother kept a carp in the bathtub to make gefilte fish for the Sabbath, and live turkeys occasionally appeared in their apartment to be slaughtered. But here, my father was surprised and annoyed that he was not permitted to have what he wanted for such a niggling and inadequate reason. Never one to make waves, though, he picked up the fork and ate the cheesecake like a boy fearful of offending his mother. “It was good cheesecake,” he said. “But not as good as the marble cheesecake would have been.”

The waiter brought the check, and my father again put on his reading glasses to study it. He took out his credit card. “Are you going to tip this monster?” I asked him. “Well,” my father said sheepishly, “not that he deserves any, but something I suppose.” I said that I wouldn’t tip him at all. My father considered this for a moment and then shook his head slowly. “Ich kenne nichts,” he said. “I don’t know. I can’t do it. I can’t take away his parnassah,” his livelihood.

Centuries of pious passivity had become the gravity that kept my father connected to his loved ones and to his work. His attachments were carefully sewn and cherished, sometimes overly so. To ask my father to withhold the tip was in effect to ask him to depart from a worldview that had kept him going for years. My father’s father was an immigrant house-painter who was both sustained and oppressed by slum lords, painting closets and hanging wallpaper for $20 a room. The fact that my father had ascended the economic ladder enough to drive a Cadillac would only intensify and amplify an indictment of his soul should he withhold the pay of a working man to teach him a lesson about courtesy and civility.

“But Dad,” I said. “This man mistreated us. He was abusive.”

“What should I tell you?” he said with the air of a man who had been asked to do something soul-damaging, like slaughter a calf or put a horse to sleep. “You’re right, but I can’t do it.”

In the face of mistreatment, my father could do nothing, as his father before him could do nothing when his clients decided cavalierly to pay him less than the agreed-upon fee. And standing there in front of my father, with a 150-year potpourri of Jewish piety and passivity—and of honor and dignity—between us, I too could do nothing but, in effect, turn the other cheek on Christmas Day.

Fans of Zorn’s work, which includes an exploration of new Jewish music known as the “Radical Jewish Culture,” must have at least been scratching their heads at the news. A Dreamers Christmas is now airing on NPR, not merely its songs but also a live interview, during which Zorn spins a few tracks from the album and other holiday songs that have inspired him over the years. The composer has a reputation for shunning the press—at times, abrasively. But in this segment with NPR’s David Garland, he’s warm, perfectly charming, and really accessible—quite like the album itself.

Indeed, the album’s accessibility is perhaps more surprising than the fact of its existence. As Zorn puts it in the interview, this is one of his most user-friendly projects ever. “My message is joy to the world,” he says. “This is a record to play while you’re trimming the tree.” A subversive thinker and composer, Zorn has often gravitated toward subversive sounds—of screeching free jazz, punk, hardcore, and noise. This project is nothing like that: Playing at the supermarket before and after other traditional carols, it might not raise any flags to an average shopper. A connoisseur, however, will discern the difference, since the date includes, among others, art-rock and avant-jazz giant Marc Ribot, who was instrumental in the establishment of the Jewish Radical Culture phenomenon, along with Kenny Wollesen on vibes and glockenspiel, and the Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, a frequent Zorn collaborator. Everyone in the band is a tremendously accomplished musician who at some point or another gravitated toward aggressive, thrashing music—of which, on this project, there’s hardly a trace.

So, what’s going on here?

Before I even listened to the tracks and the interview, Lenny Bruce’s classic routine came to mind: “Count Basie’s Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor’s goyish. B’nai Brith is goyish. Hadassah, Jewish. Marine corps—heavy goyim, dangerous.” And so then, Christmas may be goyish, but writing Christmas carols is very Jewish. Based on Zorn’s chat on NPR, however, this project appears a much deeper and more intriguing affair. In the interview, Zorn talks about growing up in a largely Jewish neighborhood but being the only Jewish family there to not observe Hanukkah and hoist a tree instead. Zorn’s grandparents had been down the route of assimilation, and they’d passed this attitude on to his parents, who understandably thought their son crazy when he began to not only rediscover his Jewish roots but also grow into the face of the New York Jewish avant-garde in the early 1990s.

Needless to say that Zorn is no Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae musician, nor Danny Zamir, the religious soprano sax player who got his start on Zorn’s Tzadik label. He did not “return” to institutionalized Judaism, or publicly commit himself to a prescribed praxis. Instead he forged a new identity, informed by the encounter with a number of things Judaism had to offer him—particularly, what he referred to as the “radical” side of it.

“Radical,” a good Latin word, means something pertaining to the roots, something originary. And our roots always grow—usually, in opposite directions to the way we grow. A few decades ago, Zorn engaged his mythic Jewish roots: mysticism, protest, social justice, and above all, ideas about Jewish otherness, which resonated with his own eccentric approach to art. Perhaps, then, with this Christmas album, the composer is addressing his actual roots: his family traditions, including the manner in which they observed the December holidays. Who is to say that this true bit of his family history is any less Jewish than someone else’s memories of celebrating Hanukkah? The content may be different, but both are actual, lived experiences of equal value.

Zorn’s experience speaks of a complex reality of the Jewish identity in this place and time. His Jewishness is informed by his family’s customs, and these customs aren’t merely a form of rebellion but a component as vital as a body part. The album contains no religious tunes but lots of classics: “Winter Wonderland,” for example, and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” which, in the great jazz tradition of transforming simple pop tunes into complex explorations, roam far and wide—be it in Ribot’s spectacular guitar work or in Jamie Saft’s endlessly exciting piano solos. There are also two Zorn originals, “Santa’s Workshop” and “Magical Sleigh Ride,” which both feature rhythms and textures that will be familiar to a Zorn listener, and a mellow feel reminiscent of some of Miles Davis’ fusion albums as well. But there’s also an unmistakable hint of caroling, especially in Wollesen’s festive chimes and vibes and Baptista’s percussion work.

Whether or not these originals will become part of the American carol canon remains to be seen, because music as complex as Zorn’s is a highly personal, subjective experience. When I first listened to these songs, I found myself getting defensive, then tried hard to like it, then tried hard to dislike it, then got lost in the music because it was very good, and perpetually came back to a feeling of pleasure laced with dismay. And then I realized that I was really thinking about my own memory of a decorated tree in my parents’ home.

When Zorn says, discussing his Christmas music, that he misses “the tree,” I know what he means: When I pass by a street vendor in New York with rows of evergreens the smell immediately brings back a recollection: growing up in a Russian Jewish family in the still-Soviet Ukraine, where a tree was less of a novelty than it might have been for an American Jewish family in New York. In fact, I didn’t know of any Jewish families who didn’t celebrate the holiday for ethnic reasons. The holiday was for everyone. Celebrations, with gifts, were held on New Year’s. While over the past 16 or so years I made no secret of this in my Jewish circles—even at the time when I was committed to a largely Orthodox milieu—it felt like something of a dirty little secret. Very quickly, my memories of the holiday became marred with disdain, and over the years, when I’ve called my parents on New Year’s Eve, hearing their cheerful voices laced with festivities, I’ve had to squelch a certain disaffection. But listening to Zorn brought back a surge of positive memories: family-time, days spent cooking, gifts, and decorations. As a child, the only night I was allowed to stay up past midnight was also the first time I tasted champagne.

This is not to say that suddenly now I have any desire to run out and get a tree. I live a traditional Jewish life, and a Christmas tree no longer has a place in it. Frankly, I don’t even know if I’ll listen to this album again. The point, really, is that I have a whole lost world inside of me, and Zorn’s engagement with his lost world reminded me of that and brought that world back to me. Buried memories suddenly surfaced against the backdrop of my life’s trajectory. It feels like a catharsis, and only real art is able to engender that.

Zorn’s Christmas album is not a practical joke or a jest. Zorn is a serious composer, and he approached this album with the seriousness he brings to all of his music. As he says in the interview, when working with a specific style, his goal is to make it into “more what it is.” That is, he seeks to summon the style’s essence and spirit. In this case, that’s to avoid celebrating the consumerist hype or drunken stupors of the holiday season, in favor of the national, nearly secular festivity. As Bob Dorough sings on a record with Miles Davis—which Zorn brought for Garland’s listeners—“When you’re blue at Christmas time/ You see through all the waste/ All the sham, all the haste/ And plain old bad taste/ It’s a time when the greedy give a dime to the needy.” Zorn’s album takes its name from his band, the Dreamers, but maybe there’s also a bit of an actual dream in its concept: That of a holiday time for everyone.

To come back to Lenny Bruce: “Celebrate is a goyish word. Observe is a Jewish word.” Christmas most certainly will not be celebrated at the Sixth Street Synagogue this Saturday night. That’s why the event—which, in addition to Zorn’s own Aleph Trio features three other top-notch Jewish bands, two of which include the synagogue’s rabbi, illustrious sax player Greg Wall—is billed as “Nittel Nacht.” That’s how Jews named this day in the Old Country. The evening is not about celebration, but the act of observing—looking around and inside, riffing and transforming, revealing and questioning.

• Mitt Romney won’t commit to moving the embassy to Jerusalem and isn’t sure how he feels about commuting Jonathan Pollard’s sentence, and said so to a group of Jewish leaders, who hopefully were able to recognize a mensch when they saw one. [Washington Jewish Week]

• The lost Jews of … the U.S. Marines! [WSJ]

• You think I’m mushy about Israel? You should see Lanny Davis! [Ben Smith]

• If you don’t remember Tamir Goodman, you won’t click on this no matter what. If you do remember Tamir Goodman, you’ll click on this no matter what. [D.C. Sports Bog]

• There’s a report that Ryan Braun’s positive tests were caused by treating a legitimate, private medical issue. Which would still technically make him guilty of taking banned substances, but would go a long, long way in the court of public opinion. [Kaplan’s Korner]

Bibi wishes Christians a merry Christmas. A correspondent writes: “Netanyahu knows which side his bread is buttered on. … He’s practically got a Santa suit on.”

However, I’ve never felt more like getting a Christmas tree than this past week, thanks to the trend in Jewish media of non-intermarried Jews telling intermarried Jews not to have Christmas trees. Articles like these make me want to put up a Christmas tree just to symbolize my defiance of self-appointed assimilation police. Of course it wouldn’t work, because their very point is that I don’t get to decide what my own Christmas tree would symbolize. These writers assume that what the tree—or even “celebrating Christmas”—symbolizes to them is what it represents universally and objectively, beyond the touch of actual humans who make decisions and appoint significances based on their own needs, interests, and complex familial relationships.

Thankfully, I hear these recriminations about interfaith families less frequently than I used to. I’d be shocked if there is a single Reform rabbi out there who’d admit to an anti-Christmas-tree sermon in the past decade—and that’s not, as some cynics might argue, out of fear of unemployment. It’s because they know that the intermarried families they’d be chastising are within earshot only because they’ve dedicated countless hours and thousands of dollars toward raising Jewish children—often with the non-Jewish partner as the driving force. We should be thanking these folks, rather than pushing them away.

****

My wife is from Japan, a land of 127 million mostly secular Buddhists and Shintoists and almost no Christians. Yet almost all Japanese families put up Christmas trees and teach their kids to believe in Santa Claus. Try explaining the concept of Jesus as messiah to Japanese people and most will look at you politely but baffled. If my wife and I were to have a tree, would that represent “Christianity,” even though there are no Christians in our home?

Believe me, I get the objection. I understand the fears of assimilation. In many cases, it can be confusing for young children being raised Jewish to also celebrate Christmas in their home—which is why, in fact, I don’t feel like such a Grinch denying the tree to my own future children: Even though it was a part of my wife’s childhood experience, it’s not really a part of her true cultural heritage—and our kids will be confused enough being 100 percent American, 100 percent Jewish, and 100 percent Japanese. But after working with literally thousands of interfaith families as a Jewish communal professional over the past decade, I feel that I’m in a much better position to suggest what a Christmas tree actually symbolizes than those critics. The answer is: It depends who you ask.

There are well over a million intermarried Jews in the United States and likely more intermarried than single-faith households. There are more Americans under the age of 20 with one Jewish parent than there are with two. To make blanket statements about anything related to intermarried families is about as helpful as making blanket statements about “The Jews.” Can you imagine how many different responses you’d get if you put 20 Jews in a room and asked what the Hanukkah menorah symbolizes? If the math from the old Jewish joke holds, you’d have 30 opinions. Interfaith families are no different.

For many Jews looking in from the outside, a Christmas tree might represent the threatening, monolithic assertion: “Christian Household.” But for vast swaths of the intermarried population who put up Christmas trees but still successfully raise strongly identified Jews, that’s just not factually correct. And it’s why Tablet’s Marc Tracy drew the wrong red line when he wrote on the Scroll that the flexibility of identity requires some limits “and celebrating Christmas is beyond that limit.”

Really? Why does anyone get to decide that limit for someone else?

The overwhelming majority of Jews pick and choose which Jewish laws they find meaningful and which they reject. Keeping kosher all the time? Rejected by 85 percent of American Jewry. Believing homosexuality is an abomination? Thankfully, rejected by a growing majority. When we start telling each other that our own individual red lines are the universally accepted “Jewish” red lines—and if you cross them, you’re a bad Jew—our community descends into recriminations. Those of us working to actually grow the Jewish community understand that the message of “our way or the highway” more often than not results in the highway. Rather than telling people what they shouldn’t do, why not provide more ways for them to express their Jewish identity?

To me, the message of Hanukkah continues beyond the victorious Maccabees’ oppressive enforcement of Jewish ritual to the following decades, when it turns out that Judaism actually did “assimilate” many aspects of Greco-Roman thought, and that doing so made Judaism stronger. I believe Jewish ideas are strong enough today to survive comparisons to other religions, even within the same household. And that’s why I defend the right of interfaith families to acknowledge the heritage of their non-Jewish relatives’ traditions, including by putting up Christmas trees—even if I don’t endorse celebrating Christmas or exercise that right myself. (Sorry, honey.)

Hanukkah has only grown bigger year after year, even in many interfaith homes, which demonstrates that most American Jews don’t want to assimilate away into the warm embrace of tinsel and eggnog but instead are proclaiming their Jewish identity loudly and proudly. That is a miracle worth celebrating.

• On a less un-serious note, Iran may practice closing the Strait of Hormuz, an act which, if actually done, would do a huge number on the world oil market. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

• Fresh out of government, former White House adviser Dennis Ross insists that while Obama sees force against Iran as a last resort, he does not rule it out if it means preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. [Ynet]

• A heartwarming story about totally ruining Christmas for little Christian boys and girls by telling them there is no Santa Claus. Glad tidings! [Slate]

• The Anti-Defamation League issues its most dishonest press release ever, referring to Roberto Benigni as an “acting great.” [ADL]

• Go see Alvin Rosenfeld discuss his book, which we liked. [Museum of Jewish Heritage]

Everyone forgets about Dave Grohl’s turtleneck.

Recently, however, not long after our seventh wedding anniversary and the birth of our first child, we got some unsolicited marriage advice from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. It arrived in the form of a series of videos produced by the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption as part of a campaign to encourage Israelis living abroad to return to the Jewish state. Each video depicts a different scenario of Israelis in America with their American partners and families, and the threat to their national identity if they remain there. One video shows the young daughter of Israeli parents mistaking Hannukah for Christmas.

It may be hard for the Israeli government to believe, but after 34 years of life as a committed American Jew, Lisa can consistently distinguish between Christmas and Hannukah, and she even knows which holiday we celebrate. Though Liel did exchange his passion for Krembos for a love for Malomars, he commemorates Israel’s Memorial Day each year, reflecting on the friends he’s lost. Lisa understands the importance of Yom Hazikaron and empathizes. But the American spouse in one of the Israeli government videos doesn’t: A pony-tailed American dufus, he mistakes his Israeli girlfriend’s yahrzeit candles for mood-lighting. As the video ends, a voice-over says, “They’ll always remain Israelis, but their spouses won’t always understand what that means. Help them come back home.”

Once upon a time, we used to believe that Israel could be our family’s part-time home. But this advertising campaign is just the most recent indication that Israel has no intention of making us feel welcome. From the Rotem Bill, which seeks to make a small group of ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbis the final arbiters over all Jewish rites, to the recent spate of anti-democratic legislation in the Knesset, over the past few years we’ve felt as if Israel is moving further and further away from the values—tolerance, plurality, and civility—that we believe are integral to Judaism as well as to our own lives. The videos are a painful reminder of this shift.

***

When we first got married, we spent a lot of our time traveling between New York and Tel Aviv. We were frequently met with a less-than-hospitable welcome at Ben-Gurion International Airport. On one occasion, Lisa was detained for nearly an hour, and on another she was subjected to a long and humiliating series of questions about her parents’ religious affiliation and other deeply personal matters. But we didn’t care: This intrusive screening, we rationalized, was the price Israel has to pay for its security.

Hanging out with friends and family on the beach or in cafés, we sometimes tried to talk about our life in New York, where being a part of the Jewish community is important to us. We attend services occasionally, are involved with numerous Jewish organizations, and spend a lot of our leisure time going to Jewish cultural events. To our Israeli friends, our interests sounded laughable. When Lisa wrote a novel about a Jewish-American teenager’s first encounter with, and burgeoning love for, Israel, she was told by several Israelis that no Israeli would ever read it—that Americans are just too naïve to be taken seriously.

Equally ridiculed as the book Lisa had written were the books she’d read: Like many American Jews, she grew up on Leon Uris’ Exodus, a fact that was repeatedly mocked by our Israeli acquaintances. Hearing the book belittled in a Haifa café, we realized how absurd it was for American Jews to idolize Uris’ Israeli protagonists for their dismissive attitude toward the book’s gullible American characters. And now, it was us being belittled by modern-day Ari Ben-Canaans for not being tough enough, real enough, Israeli enough.

It was a recurring theme in our conversations with Israelis: We heard countless times, from even our most fervently secular friends, that if we really cared about being Jewish we’d move back to the Jewish state. We found this logic offensive, but we still believed that we could build a bridge between Israel and the Diaspora, and we dreamed of raising children who would be as at home in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem as they would on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

***

An interesting, and often ignored, element of Israel’s new campaign is that, beyond insulting videos, the government is offering substantial benefits for Israelis who decide to return. Particularly sought-after are former Israelis like Liel: The website associated with the campaign emphasizes the incentives awaiting any Israeli who holds a doctorate from a major American university—part of a plan to fight Israel’s serious brain drain. Yet rather than highlight these attractive offerings, and take other steps to bring people like us closer to Israel, the Israeli government has chosen to tell us that the most fundamental choices of our lives—whom to marry and where to live—are irredeemably flawed and dangerous for the Jewish people. The cure? Make aliyah and abandon other key aspects of our identities—even, possibly, our spouses—save for Israeli nationalism. The campaign, then, is much more than tone-deaf PR. It is an indication of Israel’s troubling mindset, which, as our friend Gal Beckerman noted, is frighteningly similar to that of the old-world Jews that the early Zionists mercilessly mocked: the Jews who see nothing but danger and fear outside of the small and stifling Pale of Settlement.

Often, we feel real remorse for abandoning this struggle we believe is so important, the struggle for Israel’s soul. Often, we feel as if we should brave the hurdles and the insults and jump back into the fray. But time, parenthood, and an Israeli government that seems dedicated to dismissing families like ours and driving American and Israeli Jews apart have all weakened our resolve. We cherish our family’s Jewish identity and our community, as do most American Jews we know. But our Jewish identities, and our sense of peoplehood, are based on inclusion—not exclusion and condescension. As long as Israel refuses to acknowledge this basic premise about the nature of Jewish peoplehood, we can’t call the Jewish state home.

The small crowd included two babies and three older couples—one of whom, sitting at the counter, were pretty clearly sous chef Aaron Israel’s folks. Along with the day’s menu, the chalkboard above the deli’s open kitchen noted that loaves of challah are for sale every Friday for $6. “We should get some and start celebrating Shabbat,” I overheard one diner say to another. “We have candles. Dunno if we have candlesticks.” There were three cooks (including Bermanoff and Israel), two servers (including Cohen), and one prep-chef in the back. That’s it.

All the diners were there for the 4 pm seating, and so everyone received the same courses at roughly the same time. First out (besides delicious, vaguely seaweed-tasting green tea with a few grains of burnt rice) was the eggdrop soup with wontons. This was simple (and richly delicious) chicken broth, stringly scrambled egg, those delicious crispy-fried things bobbing at the top (to be eaten in either crunchy or soggy state, depending on your predilection), and, of course, the wontons, ribbons of dough with a ravioli-like center—filled, as wontons are wont to be, with pork. More on that in a sec.

Next came duck buns: Standard light buns; standard plum sauce; standard thinly sliced cucumbers; but un-standard duck tongue, a nice, salty, and thoroughly deli-inspired alteration.

Then, egg rolls, stuffed with various veggies, shrimp, and, well … . Well I don’t eat pork. I am not kosher: As a proud American, I eat cheeseburgers; as a proud Marylander, I eat crabs (and other shellfish). But I tend not to have made the leap to pork. This has kept me from pork chops, ham, prosciutto, pepperoni, sausage, chorizo, and—I am told, most importantly of all—bacon. And it has of course kept me from wontons and egg rolls. On Christmas Day, I nibbled at the dough of the wontons but kept my distance from their centers. The egg rolls? I broke them open, used my chopsticks to ease some of the unfamiliar meat (pork and Chinese sausage) out, and then, well, took a bite. Who knows what I actually ended up eating? That’s my story, anyway. They were good.

Next came the main courses: Smoked meat fried rice; roast duck; and Chinese broccoli. I was most excited, of everything, for the smoked meat fried rice, but—though my eating companion emphatically disagrees—to me this was the least impressive dish. Not that it wasn’t scrumptious: The fried rice was fine, with the egg and the standard peas, carrots, etcetera; and Mile End’s signature homemade smoked meat—the native-to-Montreal brisket/pastrami mash-up—is always welcome. But together, they were, well, smoked meat and fried rice. Neither ingredient detracted from the other, but nor, to my tastebuds, did either complement the other especially well. You were either tasting (perfectly good) fried rice or (typically fantastic) smoked meat. I would rather eat fried rice with the typical chicken protein, and smoked meat in its traditional sandwich setting (or in Mile End’s phenomenal poutine), is what I’m saying.

The broccoli was superb seasoned by the usual garlic and the inspired ginger (which I ate by itself, getting that kick of a mouth-sting).

And then there was the duck, for me the clear highlight. Duck for two—the chefs must have resisted the temptation to accurately but tritely name the dish “duck three ways”—was one half of a roast duck: Leg confit-ed; breast cured and smoked; and wings roasted and basted. The leg was great, fatty and delicious. The wings were finger-lickingly fun. And the duck breast was the ultimate triumph: You could not eat it and not think of Peking duck, and yet it was different than Peking duck, clearly cooked with superior craftsmanship—different and better. It is the dish I find myself thinking of a day later, and the dish I will continue to crave.

Dessert was fortune and almond cookies and orange slices. When I read this on the menu several weeks ago, I felt disappointed—surely they could be more creative than that? But Saturday, circa 5:30 pm, there was nothing else I would have wished to eat, and probably nothing else I could have eaten.

“You guys’ll have to come back for the Seder tasting menu,” Cohen quipped to departing diners. (I am pretty sure she was joking, although Bermanoff did note that, last Passover, they made their own matzah.) As for the Chinese food, though: I can officially report Cohen’s unofficial guess that, pretty soon, on one Sunday per month, you will be able to line up outside Mile End’s small Boerum Hill storefront for a traditional Jewish Sunday night supper. You will want to do this.

Related: Jewish Christmas [Tablet Magazine]

Crispy Christmas, How one woman spends her holidays, by Vanessa Davis

Unholy Ghost, How I found myself onstage singing in A Christmas Carol, by Rachel Sugar

Jewish Christmas, Why Jews eat Chinese on December 25, and how a hip Brooklyn deli is modernizing that tradition, by Marc Tracy

‘Blade II’ and Fried Rice, Christmas Eve for those who have nowhere else to be, by Janice Erlbaum

Arts and Culture
My Yiddishe Santa, Cartoonist Milt Gross’s 1927 visit from a Yiddish-accented St. Nicholas, by Marissa Brostoff

Have Yourself a Jewish Little Christmas, The top 10 Christmas Songs written by Jews, by Marc Tracy

The Grinch and I, My unnerving identification with the cuddly curmudgeon, by Jerome E. Copulsky

• David Brooks and Gail Collins have a super funny conversation on why keeping Christmas religious is good for the Jews. I do not believe he really dated a girl named Holly Jolly. [NYT]

• This account of Jewish witches torturing inmates at Guantanamo is kind of funny, until you realize that between the lines they’re also describing an entire prison going insane. [Gawker]

• Hall of Famer Larry Brown has resigned from coaching the Charlotte Bobcats. Did I say Hall of Famer? I meant best coach in the history of the sport. [Kaplan Korner]

• Speaking of which, Phil Jackson (the son of two ministers, and whose “unbeatable” Lakers were defeated by Brown’s Pistons for the championship in 2003-04) went on a tirade against the NBA for ‘forcing’ teams to play on Christmas. Ron Kaplan takes issue. [Kaplan Korner]

• Nancy Lieberman, pioneer of the sport, is possibly the first woman coach in the NBA. [NYT]

• President Shimon Peres wishes everyone a merry Christmas, also clearly terrifies children. [Haaretz]

Safe travels!

Related: Jewish Christmas

The last time I was alone for Christmas, I had to be told it was a problem. It was 1979, and I was living in a cold, damp flat in West London, earning a pittance in publishing. When a colleague asked about my plans for Christmas, I said I had none. “Poor dear,” she exclaimed, “alone for Christmas. We won’t have that!” I kept to myself that I had never before celebrated Christmas. Two days later, I hopped aboard the family “dormobile,” a VW microbus with mattresses on the floor instead of seats. The kids—Annabelle, Natasha, Tristram—and I slept in our coats and woke up in Inverness. We stayed in a hunting lodge heated (imperceptibly) by an Aga stove in the kitchen and lit by a whining generator that was powered down at bedtime. Christmas Eve we trekked across the moor to a small cabin—a Scottish shtibl—and sang carols with the local crofters. Christmas day, we baked a Christmas cake full of sultanas, popped Christmas “crackers” (a wrapped tube that snaps open like a cap gun), and took the Guardian’s Christmas Quiz. Christmas night I warmed myself with Glenfiddich, a hot-water bottle, and a novel about sweltering Rhodesians. So this was Christmas: dark by 3 p.m., bone-cold, but otherwise not bad, not bad at all.

Thirty years later, I’m alone for Christmas, and I know it. I ponder a solitary afternoon of chow fun and Meryl Streep, and I decide I won’t have it. Instead, I sign up to work at Elijah’s Promise, a nearby soup kitchen, in a basement in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

When I arrive, I’m hurried off to wash my hands, issued a hairnet and plastic apron, and told to find Felipe, “the guy in the red apron.” He’s a stocky guy with a biker’s swagger and a wide, open smile; among the volunteers, an eminence. His charges are me and Gwendolyn, a lithe, black 20-something with amber eyes. She seems embarrassed by her beauty, like a swan caught becoming a woman.

Felipe explains our task. At noon, when the doors open, the line of people waiting out in the cold will file in. (Pairs of legs, hopping to keep warm, can be seen through the basement windows.) Each client, as the patrons are called, will take a carnival ticket and sit in front of a red or green placemat adorned with snowmen, candy canes, and Bible verses scrawled in a child’s cursive hand. Our job is to serve them dinner. Like school kids on a lunch line, we’re to present our trays to the women of the missionary club of the First Baptist Church of Carteret, who will portion out the turkey dinner—with green beans, sweet potato, gravy, and cranberry sauce—the women spent Christmas Eve preparing.

“If they ask for seconds?” I ask.

“Sometimes they do, but most don’t stick around,” Felipe says. “Some of them eat and run to catch the shuttle to the other soup kitchens in town, they go from one Christmas dinner to another.” He shrugs, amused. “Ya can’t blame them.” The cohort of volunteers has swelled, most of them African-American: a grizzled 75-year-old man, a tall dad with two skinny-jeaned teenage daughters, assorted able-bodied young men, one goateed like a calendar Confucius. The only other white person is a well-heeled petite woman in a chunky cable sweater. She’s Jewish, and I think I know what she’s doing here—repairing the world where it’s caving in. But how many of those here are alone for Christmas, like me, without husbands, wives, parents, children?

Felipe has left us to join a woman with a reporter’s pad at a nearby table. Apparently he’s not just the majordomo; he’s also the press secretary. But Gwendolyn knows the drill. “The hungriest folks will wave their tickets in the air,” she says. “Serve them first. See that everyone at the table is served at the same time. And don’t bus their plates; they have to do that themselves.”

While we wait for the stroke of noon, we place a platter of pie—slices of pumpkin, pecan, and pineapple—on each table, then pour 80 paper cups of V8 juice. One of the skinny-jeaned teens sticks out her tongue in disgust “V8?” “Never mind,” says one of the Carteret ladies. “It’s filling and nutritious. It’s almost soup.”

At noon, the doors open, and the line of people slowly slithers in. I ask myself if, out on the street, I could peg these people as Elijah’s clients. The answer, for nine out of 10, is yes. Many are elderly and move slowly; they walk with difficulty, as though back pain is a fact of daily life, not a cause for steroid shots and acupuncture. Several are missing front teeth, and here and there are cheeks with open sores. The men tend to be unshaven; the women look more kempt, and a few sport silver and green Christmas beads. Some are both hungry and obese, which is perhaps why there are diabetes information posters on the walls, in English and Spanish. And many, more than I want to admit, have a withdrawn, absent look that means—what? That they’re resigned to life on the bottom? Or that fate has consigned them to the limbo of their minds?

A clutch of teens from a nearby Hindu temple appear out of nowhere, giving each client a wrapped, ribboned gift, a pair of gloves, and a scarf. “Let us bow our heads!” bellows an elder of the First Baptist Church, then he mumbles a speedy grace. The Hindu teens, as if on cue, begin to sing “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” reading the lyrics off their Blackberrys. Singing along are four siblings ranging in age from 3 to 8, the only little kids in evidence. Two walked in with winter jackets, two did not; all are clad in Gymboree castoffs of aqua and pepto-bismol pink. Presently trays arrive for them with plates of baked ziti, not turkey; they’re vegetarians. While mom runs off in search of missing napkins, spoons, juice, dad hovers to make sure they finish their food.

It turns out Gwendolyn was wrong. The hungriest are not the ticket-wavers. The hungriest are the ones who sit down and tear into the pie on the table. One woman drains a styrofoam cup of water and begins stuffing it with pumpkin pie; the pie’s to go. I bring a plate of food to a man in a black overcoat whose placemat has verses from scripture but no utensils. I’m starting to feel expansive, and put my hand on his shoulder. “You can’t eat string beans off the words of God,” I say, and offer to fetch utensils. “Fuggetit, darlin’,” he says broadly and plucks a fork from his overcoat pocket. Five minutes before closing, two stragglers arrive: an old man in an army jacket and a large woman lashed in scarves and bundled in three layers of coats. They’re not ticket-wavers; in fact, they keep their eyes on the table and speak to no one, so abject, they make the others look like game-show hosts.

It’s good to be busy, and I’m saying “Merry Christmas” to all comers, happy to be wished one in return. There’s a buzz of purpose and enthusiasm, at the tables, in the kitchen, among the ferrying volunteers. In fact, I’m starting to feel freilach, and not because it’s Christmas. It’s like being at the wedding of a beshert match: a hungry person, a steaming plate of food.

Felipe’s journalist is heading for the door, and Felipe returns to the lunch counter. He’s revved, a little anxious; whatever that interview was about, it didn’t go so well. “She heard that I’m the volunteer of the year, that I’m taking the culinary arts course,” he says. (Elijah’s Promise doesn’t only feed people; they train people to feed others.) “I told her I started coming here every day to give something back, but all she wanted to know about was how I ended up in prison. She smelled a story, but I wasn’t gonna talk about it. Those journalists, they seem interested, but they just wanna sell papers.”

“You have to be careful with journalists,” I tell him. “At least you have to make them read back the quotes.”

“I told her mainly I come here because I love the volunteers,” Felipe continues. “They just love doing what they do, taking care of these people. So what if some are just putting in hours for their community service?” I take a second, harder look, at my fellow volunteers—felons? Misdemeanants?— but all our crimes are expunged by the smell of ammonia. The goateed man stacks the chairs, and a guy with a bandana mops up. Gwendolyn and I wipe down tables. At each, two or three cups of V8 remain, uncouth, unkissed.

When I get home, I look up Elijah’s promise. It is not, as I’d assumed all day, a story about Jesus. It’s a promise to the starving Widow of Zarephath: “The jar of meal shall not be spent, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the Lord sendeth rain upon the land.” (I Kings 17:14) It’s a promise of bread for those with a handful of meal, and oil for those who bear an empty cruse—a promise that, when the heart is cracked and dry, the God of Israel will notice.

Esther Schor, a poet and professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Emma Lazarus.

Every show on children’s television seemed to feature chirpy efforts to rescue Santa or induce some animated sourpuss to feel the spirit of Christmas. Before long Maxine was pouting, “Where is Hanukkah? Why is there no Hanukkah on these shows?”

“Because we live in a country that is mostly Christian,” I told her. “Hanukkah isn’t a major holiday for us, anyway—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot—those are a way bigger deal.” I started to explain that Hanukkah has turned into a whole megillah in the United States because of its proximity to Christmas, but Maxie just wanted to watch Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Friends.

Just as well. It’s not as if my answer was very satisfying.

That night, Maxie had some chicken soup, then she and her older sister Josie and I watched Glee. (I told you not to judge.) Maxie gazed wide-eyed as Britney the dumb cheerleader sat on Santa’s lap and told him that for Christmas, she wanted her wheelchair-using boyfriend Artie to walk. She yelled at the screen, “You can do it, Santa!” Josie and I gulped and looked at each other.

We sat Maxie down and explained that Santa was not real. But the kid insisted. “If you just believe in him,” she said, “he can help you.” I told her that Santa was an idea, a jolly symbol of kindness and harmony for our friends who are Christians, but not a real or powerful figure. She seemed unconvinced, and I went on thinking about the very different ways Jewish parents can address life during Christmastime:

Attitude No.1: The Blackout

Dora and Miss Spider are not invited into the home. Shalom Sesame is on an endless loop. There is no need for Hanukkah to compete with Christmas, because Christmas is not a factor. This attitude is hard to sustain halfway; it generally works better to commit year-round. Kids know when you’re uncomfortable, so suddenly insisting on pop-culture withdrawal the day after Thanksgiving is likely to bring up some thorny questions. In many ways it’s easier to pull the full Borough Park—keep the goyish world at a general remove year-round rather than trying to disengage from secular culture only in December.

Attitude No. 2: The Buy-In

Let’s get a Christmas tree! Christmas is really more about peace on earth and goodwill toward men than about religion! And the Christmas tree is really just a Hanukkah bush! And the kids look so cute on Santa’s lap! And even though he converted/even though she’s an atheist, Christmas is a lovely cultural tradition from my spouse’s childhood, and I don’t really feel right taking it away! It’s not like you can lock the real world out, you know?

Attitude No. 3: The Competitive Condescension

It’s way better to be Jewish because you get eight days of presents instead of one! Your friends are secretly really jealous! Jesus was a Jew! Don’t tell your classmates that Santa isn’t real because it will upset them, but you and I know he’s just a silly myth! (The same, of course, isn’t true of the tooth fairy. She’s legit.)

Attitude No. 4: The Dance of Ambivalence

Sure, we love to go look at the lights in the Dyker Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn and gape at Clopper the Donkey in the enormous Christmas display at the La Salette Shrine in Attleboro, Massachusetts. We’ll even help our friends trim their tree. But over and over we stress that it’s not our holiday. It’s normal to feel a little left out at Christmastime, but pretending it’s a secular holiday or puffing Hanukkah up to Christmas dimensions isn’t a solution. In fact, this is a good opportunity to talk about the commercialization of our culture. You know, Christmas isn’t a celebration of candy canes and thermonuclear reindeer and velvet bows and nebulous warm feelings. It’s the commemoration of the birth of a god. That’s a pretty big deal, and something that too many people forget. Some Christians are upset that Christmas has become this celebration of buying stuff and having parties rather than a serious opportunity to think about their faith, and—hey, wake up; I’m not done moralizing.

Becoming a parent is the impetus for a lot of us to examine some tangled and heretofore left-alone feelings about being a minority (albeit a minority that often doesn’t feel like a minority and often isn’t considered a minority) in a majority culture. Whether we marry Jews or non-Jews, many of us really don’t think through exactly how we’re going to do Judaism and secularism in the great big world. But when you have a kid, you have to make the call. Not deciding isn’t a decision.

As my (non-Jewish) friend Joe pointed out, this holiday is a fascinating opportunity to eat Chinese food and ponder a culture in which Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, and Barry Manilow can have top-selling Christmas albums and in which the biggest musical Christmas hits of all time were written by Jews. It’s the perfect chance to think about our strange middle ground as consummate insiders and consummate outsiders. Sure, government offices are closed on Christmas, but Hollywood’s biggest movies are all open, Hollywood being yet another thing our people run.

And you remember how that episode of Glee ended, right? Artie did walk, with the help of a robotic exoskeleton designed by Israeli scientists.

In most of Israel, December 25 is just another day. Banks and stores are open, people go to work (when it doesn’t fall on Shabbat, as it does this year), and nary a Christmas tree is to be seen.

As for Christmas lights, you’re more likely to see them strung in a sukkah than decorating the streets or one of the scraggly little Arizona cypress trees the Jerusalem municipality hands out at Jaffa Gate before hag hamolad (“holiday of the birth”), which Israelis also refer to as Krreeestmahs.

Outside the predominantly Christian areas and those that feature prominently in the Jesus narrative, like Bethlehem and Nazareth, there lies a pocket of red suits and tinsel that is crowded with Christmas shoppers. But those shoppers aren’t the Christian Arabs you might expect in what is, after all, the cradle of Christianity; they’re the migrant workers who flock to what has become the de facto Filipino section of Tel Aviv’s cavernous and labyrinthine central bus station, which doubles as a down-market mall.

The migrants from the Philippines are generally women working as caregivers for the elderly, and they have become so closely identified with the job that the term Filipiniyot, or Filipinas, has become virtually interchangeable with “caregiver.”

At least some Filipiniyot seem to have made themselves at home in the Jewish kitchen. According to “Ziv,” the screen name of one woman posting on a message board, her own grandmother’s fantastic latkes may actually have been eclipsed by those made by the “Filipinit” who now lives with the grandmother.

Eating comes up more than one might expect in online discussions of Filipinyot. Religious Web surfers posed questions on at least four different “Ask the Rabbi” sites regarding whether they were allowed to eat food cooked by a Filipina or drink wine she had touched, in light of religious restrictions on food prepared (and wine touched) by non-Jews. (The answer: It depends. Of course.)

Sometimes the Filipinit in question isn’t even from the Philippines. In one halakhic query, the questioner specifically states that the caregiver is from Nepal, but the headline refers to a “Filipina maid.”

Taken together, the questions highlight one facet of what it means, at least for some, to be Jewish in a Jewish state. As Jewish American celebrities like Matisyahu, Jon Stewart, and Adam Sandler bring the Hanukkah underdog to the Christmas-celebrating masses, many Israeli Jews have little notion of what exactly “the Christmas spirit” might be and have had limited contact with the goyim—at least until the day comes when grandma needs a Filipinit.

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: On Fire
Cast Lead
Refugees
On Strike
‘Politi’
Abducted
‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

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.

• Around the country, there is a renewed emphasis on strictly observing Jewish burial practices. [NYT]

• Kissinger’s response to the “gas chambers” remark is something less even than a non-apology apology. The quotations “must be viewed in the context of the time,” he said. [JTA]

• Jack Abramoff’s pizza-making days are over. Which is a shame, because he was apparently good at it! [AP]

• You’re not going to believe this, but, according to statistics, pseudo-Jew Amar’e Stoudemire plays better than average during Hanukkah. [Alone in the Green Room]

• Should Jews own Christmas trees? (#slatepitches.) Contributing editor Mark Oppenheimer debates. [Slate]

Leon Wieseltier remembers] Holbrooke, as does Hendrik Hertzberg. Below: Warren Zevon’s “The Envoy.”

• Residents of Ghajar, the disputed town on the Israel-Lebanon border, want the IDF, which is set to vacate, to stay. [Haaretz]

• Breaking: Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America likes to second-guess the behavior of teenage Jewish boys during the Holocaust. [JustASC]

• An interesting quote from Hannah Rosenthal, the Obama administration’s anti-Semitism envoy, on the connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. [Goldblog]

• The fall-out from Wire creator David Simon’s speech at the General Assembly, in which he complained that Jewish institutions are not doing enough to halt the “Holocaust in slow motion” in black urban communities, has been mostly (and predictably) critical. [NY Jewish Week]

• “I’m going to Graceland”? Paul Simon to release an album of Christmas jingles. [Jewcy]

And now, an ostrich and a baby giraffe playing tag.

For thousands of people who convert to Judaism, Christmas is a difficult day of balancing what was once intimately theirs but now represents, in some ways, the essence of what they are giving up.

We are surprised that the Times resisted the temptation to point out a small coincidence in its piece: the paper of record’s lead anecdotal convert, Charlotte Jett, shares a name with maybe the most pop culturally famous convert, Sex and the City’s Charlotte Goldenblatt (née York). But the article is worth your time, and important to read: after all, Christmas is only 362 days away!

Why Is This Christmas Different From All Others? [NYT]

David Lehman’s Top Ten Christmas Songs Written by Jews

10. “The Christmas Waltz,” music and lyrics by Sammy Cahn and Julie Styne. “Listen to Sinatra’s version of this interestingly self-referential lyric.”

9. “Silver Bells,” music by Jay Livingston, lyrics by Ray Evans.

8. “Winter Wonderland,” music and lyrics by Felix Bernard. “Michael Feinstein was my source on this one. And I’m surprised! The lyrics involve an impromptu wedding ceremony performed by a Parson Brown. The most interesting lyrical moment is the rhyme of ‘snow man’ and ‘no, man.’”

7. “Santa Baby,” music and lyrics by Joan Ellen Javits and Philip Springer. “Very enjoyable song. The closest thing to a jazz song here. ‘Santa Baby, hurry down the chimney to me.’ It adapts the conventions of Christmas songs to become a kind of love and seduction song. Eartha Kitt sings a swell version.”

6. “Sleigh Ride,” lyrics by Mitchell Parrish. “Sometimes people encounter it as a musical backdrop. On a personal note, I remember flying between the U.S. and England in the 1970s, and at Heathrow or Gatwick or JFK, you would always hear that. I had never liked it particularly, but because of the association it is very dear to me. Parrish—born Michael Hyman Pashelinsky in Lithuania—wrote the lyrics to one of the most famous of all jazz standards, Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust.’”

5. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” music by Buck Ram, lyrics by Walter Kent. “Like ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Have Yourself,’ this song was popular during World War II, and it appeals to a certain nostalgia and homesickness, not only on the parts of the troops abroad, but the loved ones at home.”

4. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. “This is a great song that is sometimes overlooked when people think of great Christmas songs, in part because of the other major Berlin effort in this category, and in part because it is one of the few songs on this list that can be done come snow or shine, year in and year out.”

3. “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow,” lyrics by Sammy Cahn, music by Julie Styne. “This is my own favorite of the ‘Jingle Bells’-type Christmas song. I love the way it is used as the exit music in Die Hard.”

2. “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”), music and lyrics by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells. “These first two picks are traditional Christmas songs—they mention the holiday explicitly, are full of heartfelt sentiment, and may jerk a few tears.”

1. “White Christmas,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. “Bing Crosby’s version is the best-selling single ever.”

In his cartoons, Gross, born in 1895 to a couple from Russia who’d moved to the Bronx, created a cast of tenement dwellers who spoke a heavily accented English, full of malapropisms and Yiddish grammatical constructions, which Gross rendered in inimitable, and sometimes almost indecipherable, phonetic spelling. His work, which included large helpings of the ethnic caricature and vaudeville-style slapstick popular in the 1920s and ’30s, had a popular following, and he ultimately published several collections of his comics and book-length cartoons. The journalist H.L. Mencken was a fan, and The New York Times ran glowing reviews of his work.

Some Yiddish-speakers who wanted to present their community in a more respectable light—including Gertrude Berg, creator of the radio show The Goldbergs—found Gross’s hapless greenhorns offensive. It’s easy to see why. Here’s a recurring character, Mrs. Feitlebaum, complaining about a quarrelsome couple in her building: “By dem is going on a lengwidge?? I tut wot dey lookin to be sotch a idill copple!” The Feitlebaums aren’t so perfect either; in the next scene, her husband, Mr. Mow-riss Feitlebaum is beating their son Isadore again.

Gross also parodied a number of American classics, including Poe’s poem “The Raven” and Longfellow’s poem “Hiawatha,” in the diction of the Feitelbaums. (The Yiddish-accented Native Americans in his “Hiawatta” predate Mel Brooks’ version of the same joke by almost 50 years.) Much of his work has now been reissued in Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Reader edited by Gross enthusiast Ari Y. Kelman, who wrote the book’s introduction. Here, we present Gross’s take on “The Night Before Christmas”—“De Night in de Front from Chreesmas” (1927)—narrated by the New Yiddish Repertory’s Allen Lewis Rickman.

In this month’s Text/Context—a joint production of The New York Jewish Week and Tablet Magazine parent Nextbook—Moshe Sokolow also offered the Nittel Nacht basics. He traces its origins to 200 C.E., when Jews were barred from trading with Gentiles on Gentile holidays for fear that commercial success would enhance their false celebration. So, instead, you play games:

It may be only a coincidence that card playing is first noted among Jews in 1415, around the time that Nittel is first mentioned, but, once introduced, card playing, like all games of chance, cast an addictive spell over European Jewry. Numerous communal attempts to ban the practice succeeded only in abating it, with exemptions formally granted on minor festive occasions including Rosh Chodesh (new moon), Chanukah, and Purim. It was also specifically sanctioned on Christmas.

So Jews have the Christians to thank for their love of gin and mah-jongg. Merry Christmas, indeed!

A Nittel Debate [Text/Context]
The Little-Known Jewish Holiday of Christmas Eve. Seriously. [Slate]

And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’? No, we didn’t. Christmas is a Christian holiday—if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.

The Baltimore Sun got some angry letters about this, and understandably so. Hating on Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” is, in a way, the same thing as the American Family Association’s boycott of the Gap for its “failure” to use the word Christmas in ads: both actions reject a dilution of Christmas by outsiders, just in slightly different ways. It certainly does not accord with the generous holiday spirit. And anyway: “Dreck?” Really? Who’s co-opting whom?

Nonbelievers, Please Leave Christmas Alone [Baltimore Sun]

Sources:

1. American Resarch Group

2. Penn Current

3. Ynet

4. Slate

5. Interfaith Family Magazine

Bob Dylan [The Big Issue]

With Thanksgiving behind us, the Christmas juggernaut looms with all of its holiday-themed cinematic treacle, unavoidable musical kitsch, and inedible rum-soaked cakes. Joel Waldfogel, professor of economics at the Wharton School of Business, concentrates on one aspect of the seasonal narishkeyt in Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton, November). He argues that purchasing obligatory holiday gifts offends financial logic, as a $100 sweater worth, say, $30 to its recipient represents a colossal waste of resources—especially as that transaction repeats millions of times. Though it could be argued that Hanukkah, with its relatively recent tradition of eight nights of presents, offends in this respect even more than Christmas, Waldfogel notes that wasteful gift-giving was not a part of his childhood: “I’m Jewish,” he remarks, “and I first encountered Christmas through my wife . . . and her very generous family.”

* * *

Lee Eisenberg, former editor of Esquire, would call Waldfogel a “Buy Scold,” a curmudgeonly critic of American consumerism. In Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What (Free Press, November), Eisenberg argues that people spend with reckless abandon because shopping satisfies their fundamental needs—”What we buy confers instant membership in a community or, more fashionably, a ‘tribe,’” he writes, and, by choosing particular brands, we “express our values”—and that’s fine with him. Does it make one a hopeless curmudgeon to suggest, though, that more lasting and satisfying means for building community and expressing values might be located in religion, art, or public service, rather than at the mall?

* * *

Perpetuating a community built upon values is a lot more difficult than building one around a brand of sneakers or handbags, though, because disagreements crop up so frequently among members of the former sort of tribe as to what exactly it is that unites them. As he discusses with Vox Tablet this week, Yale computer scientist David Hillel Gelernter sees this as a Jewish problem: “Unless the essence of Judaism is written down as plainly as can be,” he proclaims, rather dramatically, “the loosening grip most American Jews maintain on the religion of their ancestors will fail completely, and the community will plummet into the anonymous depths of history.” Hoping to prevent this, and speaking from the perspective of Orthodoxy—which he refers to as “normative Judaism”—Gelernter offers up “four theme-images,” each of which “captures all of Judaism from a certain angle,” in Judaism: A Way of Being (Yale, November).

Ask a different Jew, get a different “Jewish essence”: Esther Benbassa, an eminent French scholar of Sephardic Jewish history, proposes in Suffering as Identity: The Jewish Paradigm (Verso, November) that victimhood has perniciously become the thematic core of Jewish personal and communal identity in modernity. That writers and scholars produce such reductions of Jewish diversity to a putative Jewish essence regularly, and in doing so contradict one another, suggests that maybe the sage Shammai got this one right: Jewishness and Judaism just cannot be summarized while standing on one leg.

* * *

Waldfogel notwithstanding, Americans’ irrational holiday spending has some beneficiaries: the young Israelis without work visas, for example, who staff kiosks in middle American malls during the holiday rush, hawking tchotchkes 13 hours at a stretch, six days a week. Hank Stuever’s Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November), which tracks the holiday rituals of Frisco, Texas, includes a brief profile of one such Israeli, Eitan, who admits he’s shocked by the reception a certain bearded gentleman receives at the mall: “I have never seen a Santa Claus,” he remarks. “He is like Paris Hilton here.” As much as the vitality of the contemporary Israeli economy owes to the country’s compulsory military service and a regular influx of Diaspora Jews and their money—as Dan Senor and Saul Singer explain in Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (Twelve, November)—the extraordinary work ethic of guys like Eitan, willing to take awful gigs to save up for their post-military R&R trips through South America and India, explains some of it, too.

* * *

Jews’ dislike for Christmas runs deeper than an objection to the holiday’s cheap sentimentality and lousy aesthetics: at times—for example, in Warsaw in 1881—Christmas has served as a pretext for vicious pogroms against alleged Christ-killers. That such Christian enmity could be stirred up against Jews over the centuries is even more of a shame than we tend to think, or so suggests Adiel Schremer’s Brothers Estranged: Heresy, Christianity and Jewish Identity in Late Antiguity (Oxford, November). Schremer argues that rather than defining themselves in opposition to Christians, as has often been assumed, Jews in the first century CE concentrated more on their enmity for the Romans. Early Jews and Christians, in other words, clashed less than their descendants have.

* * *

For all those Jewish parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles unwilling to follow Waldfogel’s counsel and eschew gifts, publishers provide plenty of children’s books as potential Hanukkah presents. Among the new offerings this year, a few charmingly bring the holiday spirit to the animal kingdom. The teddy bear protagonist of Don Freeman’s 1968 classic, Corduroy, encounters the holiday in a board book, Happy Hanukkah, Corduroy (Viking, October, ages 0-2), while rabbits devour latkes in Hoppy Hanukkah! (Albert Whitman, September, ages 2-5), and, in Menorah Under the Sea (Kar-Ben, September, ages 5-9), a marine biologist constructs a hanukkiya out of sea urchins. These are certainly more child-friendly than the violent, apocryphal Books of the Maccabees.

* * *

Finally, here’s a stocking stuffer for folks who’d love to take the Christ out of Christmas: Greg Epstein, a Humanist rabbi, former rock-and-roller, and director of the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, insists that you don’t need God to enforce morality. In Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe (Morrow, November), Epstein reaches out to progressive people of all faiths as well as to confirmed atheists, insisting that instead of Christopher Hitchens’ and Richard Dawkins’ anti-religious acrimony, atheists can emphasize the values and beliefs that bind them together. And, by the way, he’s all for Hanukkah: “Celebrating holidays is a natural, welcome, necessary part of human life,” he observes, “and a Humanism or atheism worth its salt does not callously or humorlessly dismiss this need.” Who’s up for some oily HumanLight latkes?

Nazis replaced the star atop the Christmas tree with a sun, in part to “break the emotional power of the Church,” but also to ensure there was no resemblance to Jewish or Bolshevik symbols. They also rewrote Christmas carols, changing references to baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary into snowy fields and the like. It’s a good thing we already pretty much boycott the Nazis, because otherwise the American Family Association would be all over this; instead they’ll have to stick with protesting The Gap for daring to use the word “Christmas” in the same breath as Hanukkah and Kwanzaa in ads.

How the Nazis tried to take Christ out of Christmas [Times (London)]

I Dreamed I Saw St. Nicholas [Slate/Browbeat]
Related: A Fine Romance [Nextbook Press]

Sure, bands like Kiss waited ten years before getting a nomination, but Diamond has been making music for 40 years, and his songs have been covered by more than 100 artists. Still, Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner’s selection committee passed over Diamond again in favor of other smooth favorites such as LL Cool J and Donna Summer. Love him or think his lyrics are pure cheese (or both), with 37 hit singles and 16 Top Ten albums, it is difficult to claim that he hasn’t contributed “to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll,” the Hall of Fame’s requirement.

Diamond’s rabid fans will have to comfort themselves this year with the schmaltz on his October 13 album, A Cherry Cherry Christmas. And in defense of his Yiddishkeit, it even contains one Hanukkah song, a “party-time” version of Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song” with DJ Ashba.

Neil Diamond: Are You a Believer? [WNYC]

Hyatt said she plans to canvass churches for support, since she doesn’t have the $2 million it usually costs to collect enough signatures to get a measure on the ballot. But we can’t really see this one making it past the old church-state separation hurdle, even though the “Freedom to Present Christmas Music in Public School Classrooms or Assemblies” measure includes a provision requiring schools to give parents who prefer their Christmases light on the Jesus—not just Jews, of course, but Muslims, and atheists, and all kinds of other folks—an opt-out notice. Because, you know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to take kids out of school in order to put the Jesus back in December.

Taking that Christmas Spirit to the People [Blockbuster Democracy Blog]

“Hang your stockings and say your prayers,” indeed!

Bob Dylan Recording Christmas Album [Bully Pulpit]
Related: A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs by David Lehman, coming soon from Nextbook Press

The members of rock trio Yo La Tengo have long inspired an embarrassingly pretentious-seeming ardor in their devotees; but if you like them, it’s hard to resist using words like “art” to describe them—without air quotes for a change.

Since 2001, almost every year, the band has performed a concert each night of Hanukkah at Maxwell’s in their hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey. In such an intimate space, their sound comes close to replicating the headphone or car stereo experience, via which I would venture to guess a large portion of the band’s fan-base first fell in love with Yo La Tengo’s music. This circumstance, unusual for such a cult act, combined with the special-occasion appeal of the holiday theme, makes these shows momentous events.

According to guitarist/keyboardist Ira Kaplan’s official blog, on the first night of this year’s series, opening band Oneida performed a song called “Hanukkah, Bitch,” comedian Paul F. Tompkins performed Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” with an added verse telling the story of the holiday, and Yo La Tengo themselves performed one of their seasonal staples, “Eight Day Weekend.” Naturally, I assumed that if I went to the Christmas eve performance, I was sure to get even more creative takes on the festival of lights. As it turned out, I mostly heard more uses of the word “Jewy than I ever thought possible. But in a way, it was a perfect tribute to the Jewish holiday, which, on this night of nights for Christians, bubbled along below the radar.

I got to Maxwell’s a little before the show, with a friend who was hoping quixotically to find carrot cake—instead we found take-out menus on every table from Istana Chinese and Japanese Cuisine. We had already eaten our official Asian food for the evening, but we sat down to get a drink. Georgia Hubley, Yo La Tengo’s drummer, turned around from her seat at the next table with the rest of the band to retrieve a box of seaweed salad sitting on one of the chairs at our table, smiling beatifically. Starstruck, I managed to ask if they’d done shows on Christmas in the past, and Kaplan answered that they’d done Christmas day, but that this would be their first Christmas eve show. “This one will probably be more Jewy than usual,” he said.

In fact, opener Jennifer O’Connor, a breathy, soulful folk singer whose set was enjoyable but kind of sounded like one long song, did say the word “Jewy” once, but the closest thing she came to following through was “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” by Carole King. Comedian Jon Benjamin performed routines on the hilarious topics of heartburn medication, abortion, and Orthodox Jews’ prolific birthrates, and read a letter from comedian Jon Glaser, who had also been scheduled to perform but canceled, which ended with “at least I’m not listening to ironic comedians or shitty versions of songs that Jews wrote.”

A guy with a Hebrew phrase tattooed on his arm spent about 20 minutes trying to fix a leak in the roof above the stage while “Lose Yourself” by Eminem played on a continuous loop, prompting Kaplan to remark, “It’s only Night Four and things are already falling apart—it’s a Hanukkah disaster.” When the band began finally began playing, conjuring the first strains of ghostly ambient sound, I felt a surge of relief.

Perhaps what was most “Jewy” about Yo La Tengo’s concert was the fact that their songs are essentially anti-Christmas carols: frenetic, edgy—a little too close for comfort. And yet there is great joy in the chaos: the fidgety arousal of half-triggered memories, the compulsion to move your body; the tortuous pleasure of indulging an addiction, of having your brain scrambled. People tend to think of Yo La Tengo for their cutesy They Might Be Giants-esque gimmick—the fact that Kaplan and Hubley are married and use their relationship as material; their proclivity toward quirky, childlike lullabies such as “Little Eyes” and “The Season of the Shark.” But every one of their songs grapples with darkness, with depression, with the nagging pain of loving someone but realizing again and again that you can’t ever really know them; the feeling of standing just outside of something simple and perfect, forever unable to reach it.

A highlight of the set was “Mr. Tough,” a song I once described as an “insipid pep-talk from a band that traffics in emotional complexity.” Having smacked some sense into myself since then, I now realize that Yo La Tengo doesn’t so much traffic in emotional complexity as sonic intensity—the emotions are a side-effect—and that the song, far from being a parodic novelty, is a gleefully snotty taunt directed toward their, and their fans’, mopier selves: “Hey Mr. Tough, don’t you think you’ve suffered enough?/Pretend everything will be alright.”

In this warmed atmosphere, the next two songs—the rarely-played gems “Tiny Birds,” an intimate whispered secret sung by bassist James McNew, and “Paul is Dead,” an equally personal and miniature meditation on self-awareness—felt like the kind of Hanukkah gifts that, as a child, I particularly treasured: small trinkets, thoughtfully chosen by a favorite teacher or close friend. Perennial crowd-pleaser “Autumn Sweater,” a song about the fetishistic worship of a love-object and the desire to stop time, in its post-punk, Tim Burton-esque, organ-heavy splendor, was more like a longed-for Eighth Night whopper gift—the CD player, the Barbie corvette. The climax of the show was a 30-minute-long, feedback choked, heavily distorted, religious ordeal of a jam.

Normally, I relish a musical experience that runs me through an emotional mill—in fact, I depend on such adventures for a sensation akin to religious fulfillment. But maybe because I expected this show to be something like a secret club meeting (“The Order of the Christmas Non-Celebrants” perhaps?), I found myself more exhausted than usual by Yo La Tengo’s signature roller-coaster of brilliance. Like the story of the Hanukkah oil, at times the moments of catharsis felt like short consolation for the trials that preceded them.

As the show wound down and people began shouting out requests, Kaplan said, “I think we’ll do something a little Jewier.” And then the band played “Dream On,” by Carole King. Their big finish came in the form of “Rock n’ Roll Santa.” Perhaps, as I heard another audience member remark on the way out, “There’s no true Jewiness on Christmas, anyway.”

Like so many others, I moved to New York City to be an actor, which is a lot like jumping off a cliff. Jumping off a cliff is not a particularly sensible thing to do. Still, I made the leap with relatively few illusions: I knew great (and lucrative) High Art would probably have to wait…and wait. “Work begets work,” a college mentor told me. I was here to work.

The audition notice for A Christmas Carol, which I spotted in October on Craigslist, laid out the protocol: be prepared to read from the script and sing 16 bars of any of nine listed Christmas songs. A Greenwich Village theater company I thought I’d heard of was behind the production. I just had to learn my song. Since “Jingle Bells” was not on the list, I Googled the carols one by one, hoping to stumble upon something uptempo and preferably without high notes. Instead, I came to a startling realization–the notes were the least of my problems. Except for the second soprano line of the (distinctly secular) Carol of the Bells, a remnant from my stint in high school choir, I couldn’t produce 16 bars of any carol at all: “The first noel/ the angels did say/ blah blah something about sheep blah blah blah blah blah” wasn’t going to cut it. I settled on “Silent Night.” Though it had high notes I worried I couldn’t hit and lyrics I was sure I didn’t know, it seemed the best of the lot.

I turned to YouTube, and after listening to renditions by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the London Gay Men’s Chorus (it was not a joint concert), I scrawled the lyrics in a notebook to memorize on the subway. I wasn’t after any role in particular—there was Tiny Tim, I knew, and some ghosts, I was pretty sure, and of course Ebenezer Scrooge. There were probably some other characters, too. I’d take anything.

The thing about wanting something too badly—say, a role—is that it leads you to overlook certain warning signs that what you’re about to do is a bad idea. The tiny theater was overflowing with what seemed to be the entire contents of the nearby Salvation Army: broken gumball machine, stuffed cat, and half a dozen mismatched recliners that no longer reclined. The stage seemed to slope precariously. “It’s quirky!” I repeated to myself. “You never know!” I read for the role before a motley panel: a younger guy with Big Bird-like enthusiasm—the director—as well as two village elders, a humorless gentleman and Miss Havisham. They seemed impressed. Too impressed. Impressed verging on desperate. But if you’re alone in New York and in perpetual existential crisis and you’re dramatically declaring to anyone who’ll listen that you’re about to give it all up any day now and go work on a kibbutz in the Galilee, it’s really nice to be impressive.

When, at the audition, I wasn’t actually asked to sing, I was flooded with relief, but also an unexpected sense of disappointment. It was like slogging through the entirety of the Princeton Review only to find admissions tests had become optional. I was cast anyway, as the Ghost of Christmas Past.

By dress rehearsals, I’d seen the play countless times. I could hark the herald angels, adore on bended knee, I could even gather all ye faithful. Our last run before previews was wrapping up. On stage, Tiny Tim—a girl of no more than 9—delivered his famous last line, “God bless us, every one.” I watched from the wings. Throughout childhood, I loved the special Christmas episodes of sitcoms, the Christmas-themed Baby-sitter’s Club books. I wanted to set all games of pretend at Christmas—it is, after all, a wonderful wonderful wonderful time of the year, and definitely the single most exciting day I could think of. Maybe it seemed exotic? Or maybe it’s my weakness for any kind of collective excitement, which makes me tear up at the Olympic opening ceremonies and worry about my potential for collaboration with fascist regimes. Perhaps I’d simply fallen for the masochistic allure of exclusion—if Christmas wouldn’t have me as a member, after all, than it must be a pretty great club. Now, I was about to go on stage to sing about Jesus Our Emmanuel—if that’s not inclusion, I don’t know what is—but I was suddenly unsettled. Certainly, you don’t need to believe anything in particular to belt out those lyrics, and I have no idea where my fellow cast members stood on matters of faith. But as I watched Tiny Tim, now front and center, sing about virgin birth with charming seriousness, his face bathed in warm light, it never seemed clearer: Christmas just isn’t my holiday.

I loved the Christmas spectacle in a way that perhaps only a Jewish child can, my longing inflamed by the certain knowledge that I was not supposed to participate in these festivities. I was, after all, a visitor in this house: an overnight guest on Wednesdays and weekends, with a designated bedroom neatly outfitted with Laura Ashley wallpaper and linens, its coolly perfect surfaces neither reflecting nor consoling my inner chaos. Home was a few miles away with my mother, who still lived in the house where my father had left for work one morning and failed to return. My mother and father had been married 11 years previously in a traditional service conducted by an Orthodox rabbi, my mother angelic in a long-sleeved white gown. Months after the divorce was final, my father married my stepmother in the backyard of their new house, with a Reform rabbi and an Episcopalian minister jointly officiating.

My mother was nobody’s idea of a religious woman—in the style of many nominally secular suburban Jews, we kept Passover but not Shabbat, fasted on Yom Kippur but avoided the synagogue for the rest of the year. Once we put up a prefab sukkah, walls of canvas sheeting hung from metal poles, but I don’t recall actually using it. Yet my father’s interfaith marriage unleashed a hitherto unseen level of fury in her. It was bad enough that he had run off and left her, but with a shiksa? And so my Jewish identity, as yet embryonic, was the major battleground for their custody fight, a bitter dispute with a complicated cast of characters that included lawyers with sinister names and a small battalion of psychiatrists and social workers ready to testify that one parent or the other was a threat to my mental health. My mother’s parents were Holocaust survivors who had lost their parents and almost all of their other relatives in the war, and to sing a Christmas carol or paint icing on a reindeer cookie was granting Hitler a posthumous victory. The only appropriate activities for a Jew on Christmas were serving dinner at a food pantry, going to the movies, or eating Chinese food.

Christmas, for our family, was more than just a Christian festival with pagan trimmings that had served for almost two millennia as an occasion for the persecution of Jews (in my mother’s words). It was an emblem of the gulf that separated my parents, and all the anger and resentments that regularly bubbled up from within it. A furtive glance out of the car window as we drove through an illuminated goyische neighborhood, or a carol softly sung as part of the school holiday celebration, could hardly be helped. But with every ornament hung or Christmas cookie baked together with my stepmother, I declared my allegiance to one side over the other.

Nonetheless, somehow my father’s will usually triumphed, and on Christmas morning we would head off to the home of one of my stepmother’s relatives, where we would open the presents waiting under the tree and invariably eat the same Christmas-morning breakfast dish, a casserole of eggs, cheese, and (naturally) sausage. All the relatives would give me gifts, even distant cousins I hardly knew, and I tried my best to reciprocate. I even participated in the annual “stocking exchange”: At Thanksgiving dinner, we would draw out of a hat the name of the person whose Christmas stocking we were responsible for that year, to fill with treats and gag gifts. (On the years I spent Thanksgiving with my mother, my father would pick an extra name out of the hat as my proxy.)

Perhaps it was the guilt of taking part in something to which my mother so strenuously objected, but despite the intensity of my Christmas longing, I never felt quite comfortable with this ritual. And though my stepmother and her family always made every effort to include me, I suspect they didn’t feel completely comfortable either, because they had one Christmas tradition to which I was never allowed access. An old foil-covered box had been passed from relative to relative for Christmases immemorial. The person who got the box was supposed to hold on to it till the following year and pass it on to someone else. Each year, the family waited eagerly to see whose turn it would be. But no one ever gave me the box. And why should they have? After all, my Christmases were provisional. Next year I might be spending the holiday with my mother, watching the latest blockbuster or eating lo mein, like all the other good Jews.

The Christmas tug-of-war went on, I’m embarrassed to say, well into my adulthood. Then I married a man with a somewhat more traditional Jewish upbringing. We spent our first Christmas together flying home from our honeymoon. My husband, noticing that the pilot’s name was Cohen, joked: “Ah, Christmas, the day the Jews run the world.” I could get used to this, I thought, looking around at the empty plane and peaceful airport.

My husband was willing to make a lot of accommodations for my split family, but Christmas he would not do. And so we started spending the winter holidays as he always had: on vacation with his parents and brothers, dutifully pretending not to notice the Christmas baubles that bedecked the hotel. At dinner on Christmas Eve, we would try to avoid anything smacking too noticeably of foreign traditions—no goose or plum pudding. The first few years, I sent presents for my stepmother and her family, as they did for me. Then, slowly, we stopped. Eventually the Christmas contact dwindled to a phone call. But my “Merry Christmas” always sounded fake, at least to my ears.

And then my family split again. This time it was at the instigation of my stepmother, who abandoned my father during the summer of their 25th year of marriage a few months after reconnecting with her high school sweetheart on Classmates.com. That fall, as we were pushing my baby daughter in her stroller one warm day, my father said casually, “Well, at least we won’t have to do Christmas this year. I never felt right about it.”

I nearly gasped. “You didn’t?” I managed to ask. My father shook his head. “It’s not the way I was brought up” was his only explanation.

And with that something changed for me. With my stepmother gone, the emotional baggage that Christmas had always carried in our family all but disappeared. For the first time, I felt free—not to avoid Christmas, but to celebrate it in my own way. I took my son to all the holiday train shows without wincing at the omnipresent reindeer and Santa. I baked cookies, three different kinds, from the Christmas issue of a food magazine, and gave them away as gifts. It wasn’t Christmas itself that had been the source of so much angst—it was my parents’ divorce. Christmas was a convenient scapegoat: a symbol of betrayal, of loyalties conscious or unconscious, of sides chosen or rejected. All of which has nothing to do with the musky scent of pine, the soft snow of powdered sugar on a Yule log, or the brightness of illuminated tree boughs in the night.

Oh, come off it. Yours isn’t any better: Most likely, you too sat around the Thanksgiving table, gawking at your inane and insane relatives, shuddering as they lassoed every imaginable, potentially interesting topic of conversation into a corral of shouts and murmurs, and secretly entertained elaborate fantasies involving the electric carving knife and Uncle Seymour’s neck.

Luckily for you, the good men and women in Hollywood feel your pain. As is their custom every year, our brethren out west began this week the slow and controlled release of holiday-themed, family-centric films, which is to say films in which actors considerably more attractive than yourself deliver much wittier lines that mock, deride and otherwise torment fictitious relatives far more beastly than your folks back home.

For the past few years, the genre’s brightest star has been Vince Vaughn: In last year’s Fred Clause, Vaughn portrayed Santa’s fast-talking, nervous, intermittently boyish and bloated brother, and helped deliver that film’s message, namely that family may be an awful, oppressive proposition but it’s the only proposition we’ve got. In Four Christmases, which opened last week, Mr. Vaughn portrays Brad, a fast-talking, nervous, intermittently boyish and bloated man who learns that while family may be an awful…

Don’t blame Hollywood, though; for the origins of this deep-seated, anti-family sentiment you mustn’t look any further than the Bible, and this week’s parasha in particular. Here it is, in a nutshell: having systematically betrayed his brother and screwed him out of their father’s inheritance, Jacob, fearing Esau’s murderous wrath, skips town and decides to hang out at Uncle Laban’s in good ol’ Charan. There, Jacob falls in love with the lovely Rachel and toils for her hand in marriage for seven years, only to discover that kindly Uncle Labe pulled off that most ancient of tricks, the switcheroo, marrying Jacob to the older and less-desirable Leah instead. Still into Rachel, Jacob commits to seven more years of labor, during which his now double-daddy-in-law repeatedly tries to swindle him, before having to flee Charan with the furious Laban giving chase and marrying both of his wives’ handmaids for a total of four women and twelve children. And you thought your family was nutty.

But herein lies the tasty bit: these 12 children are the founding fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel. We, then, are left with an uneasy question: What does it say about us that we’ve all emerged from history’s ultimate dysfunctional family?

Simple: It means, I think, that what the rest of the world needs reminding—often, alas, in the form of Christmas-time comedies—we Jews naturally and strongly recall, namely that as heinous and hateful as our enemies may be, it’s our kinsmen we must really watch out for.

Don’t believe me? Just ask Rashi. Interpreting this week’s parasha, the sage comes across a lovely sentiment that seems, amidst the general malarkey of the story, somewhat incredible: When he meets Jacob for the first time, Laban says to his weary nephew “indeed, you are my bone and flesh,” and puts the boy up for a full month. Why would a deceiving louse like Laban say and do such selfless things?

Rashi comes to the rescue: “In view of this,” he writes, explaining Laban’s motives and assuming his voice, “I have no reason to take you into the house, because you have nothing. Because of kinship, however, I will put up with you for a month’s time.” And even that, Rashi hastens to add, was no freebie: Jacob paid for his keep by pasturing Laban’s sheep. He might’ve gotten a better deal trying his luck with any of the Jevusites or Hittites than he did with his mother’s own brother.

But what does Jacob the Genius do? He adapts. He takes not one wife but four. And unlike his father and grandfather, he sires not two children—that, he must’ve realized, was a recipe for disaster, as had been the case with Isaac and Ishmael as well as himself and Esau—but 12. He knows that rivalries and resentments and violence are inevitable, so he creates a clan large enough to contain and sustain all the toxicities of a nuclear family. In other words, two millennia before Stephen Sondheim, Jacob grasped intuitively the same principle the celebrated maestro of musical theater would later express in “Company,” his brilliantly bitter show about relationships: It’s not talk of God and the decade ahead that allows you to get through the worst, but the neighbors you annoy together and the children you destroy together. Abraham may have been righteous, and Isaac holy, but Jacob, Jacob is our true Father, because only Jacob really understood what families are all about. Amen.

Let us not waste any time, then; somebody print out this week’s parasha and fax it over to whoever it is in Hollywood who’s in charge of greenlighting holiday fare. Vaughn, have we got a role for you.

For any self-respecting cynic, it’s de rigueur to despise Christmas music—primarily for its relentlessness, and the forced irony it creates in many, many otherwise joy-free environments (malls, car repair shops, pharmacies). Hanukkah music has been saved from this fate by its obscurity, and as a result, the general public probably doesn’t realize just how limited and infantile the catalog really is. Then again, why shouldn’t it be? Winter holidays are under no obligation to have larger or more adult musical repertoires than other festivals—and Hanukkah is most definitely a children’s holiday. Still, there is certainly no reason why its songs cannot be transformed into more pleasurable fare, or some new ones added to the mix. Along with a cadre of talented collaborators, Erran Baron Cohen (that would be neither Borat, nor the neuroscientist, but a third talented brother), has taken on the task, producing the new album Songs in the Key of Hanukkah.

Baron Cohen seems to be banking on the possibility that at the root of some Jews’ distaste for Christmas music is the fact that, by definition, it’s not ours. We may even envy the celebratory mood that the endless seasonal loop of Christmas music seems to engender in some people. But we don’t have a soundtrack to amplify those emotions in ourselves. Hanukkah music can never compete when it comes to sheer volume, but if it were done well enough, we might actually listen to it. Don’t we deserve the opportunity to bask in our own nostalgia (not to mention a tiny dash of elitist superiority over impeccable production values and the multiculti cachet of Sephardic music)?

Songs in the Key of Hanukkah starts off with the Jewish answer to “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” the play-by-play rundown of the festivities known as “Hanukkah Oh Hanukkah”; while I never thought I would hear the word “sufganiya” in a rap song, I’m not totally surprised—there’s been a bit of a trend toward Jewish novelty rap. But things start to get interesting when, in his klezmer-inflected take on “I Have a Little Dreidel” (the classic ode to DIY toy-making that has confounded generations of children whose dreidels are clearly mass-produced out of plastic), Jules Brookes growls the words “dreidel I shall play” as if he is singing about starting a rumble, not spinning a top. Later in the song, Brookes’ wailing might convince listeners that “Dreidel” is actually the name of his tragically lost love. This drama provides a welcome makeover for a song about a soul-crushingly un-fun game.

“Spin It Up” is, essentially, an instrumental remix of the same song’s Hebrew version, “Sevivon, Sov, Sov, Sov” (the main lyrics translate to “Hanukkah is a good holiday”—they aren’t missed here). The pulsing electronic reggae imbues the ditty with a previously un-mined sonic dignity that’s only slightly compromised by the chanting of the title phrase (possibly excusable as an allusion to DJ-ing).

The sultry Ladino tune “Ocho Kandalikas” has the benefit of not being in English, so its lyrics don’t sound as silly as they might otherwise. In this case, it also benefits from the sensational voice of Yasmin Levy. The New Agey “Relics of Love and Light” includes just enough of Avivit Caspi’s Middle Eastern trilling to exalt it beyond yoga class background noise. It has that certain quality often found in Israeli music (and actually, in a lot of things Israeli): it sounds a little cheesy, but is somehow still tough and sexy enough to be compelling.

Another original, “Look to the Light,” sounds so much like the 1970s hit “Dancing in the Moonlight” that I kept expecting someone to rhyme “light a candle tonight” with “supernatural delight.” With a folkie groove and painfully earnest lyrics—“We struggle for freedom, and tyranny tries to exert itself/But tyranny weakens, and in the end justice will prevail”—the song attempts to infuse Hanukkah with a spirit typical of other modern Jewish festivities: the call to use our own history of oppression to inspire a fight for the greater good of all mankind. This sentiment is generally reserved for Passover, but there’s room for it here. (Ironists beware: in this song, when they say the word “echoes,” voices echo.)

“Rock of Ages” continues in this vein. Although it has a Top 40-ish intro that could suggest R&B or retro hip-hop, it is, in fact, another soaring ballad that wouldn’t sound out of place on a telethon; I could practically see the camera panning to each member of the chorus as they croon “All men free/Tyrants disappearing.” And though there are hints of gospel (especially in the repetition of “sheltering tower”), unexpectedly fresh backbeats keep this from sounding like one of those Christian rock songs that’s ostensibly about God, but sounds suspiciously like it’s about a hot lover.

The final track, “Ma’oz Tzur,” is the Hanukkah song that most reminds me of Christmas carols, whether because of its ubiquity or some legitimate melodic symmetry. This rendition is no exception. If listeners have paid attention up to this point, they might already be feeling a bit uncomfortable after the previous track, a rap called “My Hanukkah (Keep the Fire Alive)”—which, via lines like “A nation awakened against assimilation,” “Down with Antiochus, up with all the priestly zealots,” and “How you gonna make a child of God become what he isn’t?” underscores some of the religious fundamentals of a holiday seen by many primarily as an occasion for latkes and candles. But either way, the sentimental finale can’t help but send a message—Joy to the World!—that leaves us carol-haters a bit uneasy.

The teenage girls at a homeless shelter in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen call Janice Erlbaum “bead lady” because she always shows up armed with jewelry-making supplies.

For Janice, though, the craft lessons are just a pretext. She’s got other reasons for being there, especially on Christmas Eve.