![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a secular way to celebrate Christmas, but it’s also a time to shut out Christmas and announce your Jewish identity in a safe environment. In the last 35 years, Chinese restaurants on Christmas have really become this sort of temporary community where Jews in the United States can gather to be with friends and family. I like to say that, within a hundred years of arriving in New York, the average Jew was more familiar with sushi than gefilte fish. It was a gradual transition from the traditional diet of Eastern Europe, to eating American Chinese food, to eating other pan-Asian cuisines, like Indian food. Jews would go out for Chinese food on Sundays, when they felt left out of church lunch. All of these were within close walking distance of Ratner’s, which was then the most famous Jewish dairy restaurant in Manhattan. By 1936, a publication called the East Side Chamber News reported at least 18 Chinese tea gardens and chop suey eateries in heavily-populated Jewish neighborhoods. The very first mention of American Jews eating in a Chinese restaurant dates to 1899, when the American Hebrew journal criticized Jews for eating at non-kosher restaurants. It begins at the end of the 19th century, on the Lower East Side, where Jewish and Chinese immigrants lived in close proximity. Okay, so tell me when eating Chinese food on Christmas first comes into the picture. Then again, what do I care what he thinks?” After the Chief Rabbi of Vienna came to visit, he wrote something in his diary like, ”I hope the Rabbi doesn’t think less of me because of this. There, they had more freedom to wonder, “Do I bring a Christmas tree into my home? Do I have a holiday meal? Do I give out gifts?” The early Zionist Theodor Herzl was a secular Jew, and he had a Christmas tree in his salon. In Western Europe, after the French Revolution, Jews were more assimilated. ![]() If they did anything, they might play cards or chess. They stayed at home for physical safety reasons. Jews did not go to the synagogue to study. Christmas was a night of possible pogroms and violence, with so many celebrants, often drunk, going from house to house. In Eastern Europe, for instance, Jews were not very assimilated. But how they felt specifically was really a function of their status in society. It has been a question for as long as Christmas has existed, because Jews have always felt like outsiders. When did Jews first ask, “What should we do on Christmas?” Both Jews and Christmas have existed for a while. ![]()
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