(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
By Curtis Brodner
While Christians are opening presents, drinking eggnog and basking in the warmth of their loved ones, Jews eat Chinese food. This seemingly innocuous tradition has a long history rooted in the origin stories of two American immigrant communities.
Now, as the country faces a bleak and socially-distant Christmas, perhaps Christians can try their own take on this tradition.
Jewish and Chinese people were the two largest non-Christian immigrant groups in New York around the early 1900s, according to journalist and documentarian Jennifer Lee in The Atlantic.
Members of the two diasporic communities, found themselves pressured to assimilate in a country where Christmas, a religious holiday, had morphed into a civic duty. Can one even be American if they do not take part?
By forming a new, uniquely-American Christmas tradition, the two outsider groups both moved closer to the American mainstream. While this push toward assimilation probably wasn’t a conscious effort, the tradition has certainly become a part of America’s lore.
In 2010, during then-Supreme-Court-Nominee Elena Kagan’s senate Judiciary hearing, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham asked Kagan where she was on Christmas. She laughed and responded, “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” When Kagan’s otherness was conjured to attack her credibility as a judge, she turned to a Chinese-Jewish-American tradition to prove her in-group status.
The fact that Chinese restaurants were open on Christian holidays was certainly convenient for Jews, but they also never mixed milk and meat which led to a menu that was more hospitable to kosher diets.
Other common New York cuisines were tougher to navigate for turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants. Italian and hispanic restaurants, for example, were full of Catholic iconography and trafficked heavily in cheese covered meat, says Lee.
Today, the Jewish tradition of eating Chinese food on Christmas has turned Christmas into the busiest day of the year for many Chinese restaurants.
As millions of Christians face a quarantined Christmas, takeout will become a piece of the gentile holiday experience as well.
It couldn’t come a moment too soon either. An influx of business for chinese restaurants is sorely needed.
Over 110,000 restaurants in the U.S. have closed permanently or long-term during the pandemic, according to a survey released on Dec. 7 by the National Restaurant Association.
Chinese restaurants have been hit particularly hard, as fear mongers and xenophobes tied coronavirus to Asian people and especially Chinese people.
“Racism and physical attacks on Asians and people of Asian descent have spread with the Covid-19 pandemic, and government leaders need to act decisively to address the trend,” said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.
Chinese restaurant owners now find themselves at the intersection of an unprecedented economic collapse, pandemic paranoia around food preparation and a wave of hateful sinophobia.
So for the Jews who have indulged in Christmas Chinese food feasts their whole lives and for Christians who could use some comfort food while they’re stranded in lockdown on a day better spent with loved ones, Chinese restaurants are there to meet your needs.
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