While on Christmas Eve and Christmas day, streets go empty with many Catholic households munching on their festive dinner, Chinese restaurants are as busy as ever. You’ve probably heard about a Jewish custom of eating Chinese food on Christmas. But do you really know where this tradition comes from?
Thanks to Twitter user Megan, who introduces herself as “Jewish, feminist, and plant mom,” we now have this Jewish holiday ritual explained in a viral thread. “If I could choose any words to describe the phenomenon of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas, I think they would be escapism, proximity, commonality, and unity,” she said and went on explaining how it actually works.
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Megan’s thread amassed 87.5K likes and 13.2K retweets, showing that there are some incredible historical reasons behind the fact that Chinese food places open their doors to Jews on Christmas.
For years, Jews have been having Chinese food on Christmas as part of a tradition
Image credits: TheRaDR
And this Twitter user explained why in a viral thread
Image credits: kehillahjewess
Image credits: kehillahjewess
Image credits: kehillahjewess
The Twitter thread seems to be drawing similar arguments to those published in the scientific article “New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern” by Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine. The 1992 article has been printed in the “Contemporary Ethnography” magazine.
According to the authors, over the years, New York Jews have found in Chinese restaurants a food-flexible open symbol, “a kind of blank screen on which they have projected a series of themes relating to their identity as modern Jews and as New Yorkers.”
The themes weren’t inherent in Chinese food itself, but “rather, Jewish New Yorkers linked these cultural themes with eating in Chinese restaurants,” Tuchman and Levine explained.
Image credits: kehillahjewess
Image credits: kehillahjewess
Image credits: kehillahjewess
Even though Chinese food “is unkosher and therefore non-Jewish,” because of the way it’s prepared and served, “immigrant Jews and their children found Chinese food to be more attractive and less threatening than other non-Jewish or ‘treyf food.’”
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The second important point, Tuchman and Levine state, is that for Jews, eating in Chinese restaurants signified that one was not provincial, and cosmopolitan.
And the third dominating theme is that “Jews identified eating Chinese restaurant food as something that modern American Jews, and especially New York Jews, did together.”
Image credits: kehillahjewess
Image credits: kehillahjewess
Image credits: kehillahjewess
Image credits: kehillahjewess
Image credits: kehillahjewess
Image credits: kehillahjewess
Over the years, eating Chinese became one important Jewish holiday custom that became a part of self-identity and daily life for millions of Jews, especially the ones of New York.
More people joined the thread to comment and share what they know of this Jewish holiday custom
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And this is what others had to say
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Source: boredpanda.com