Judaism
Christmas
Food/Chow
Tradition
Responses: 1
1
1
0
LTC Eugene Chu
..."While it’s not prescribed in Jewish texts that we do anything on Christmas, let alone eat our weight in baby corn and water chestnuts, American Jews have a long history of breaking out the chopsticks in late December while Christians are slicing into honey-glazed ham.
Jews either do takeout, filling their wreathless homes with white cardboard containers and smiley-faced plastic bags, or hit the town for some pre-movie chow fun. Plaut said the latter practice is known in Yiddish as oysessen — eating out — and was coined in this very publication in 1903, to describe the trend of Jews coming down from their tenement coops to enjoy the fine cooking of their Chinese neighbors on the Lower East Side. But the trend goes back even further than that, beginning at the tail end of the 19th century with an early wave of Eastern European immigrants.
“The Jews and Chinese were the two largest non-Christian immigrant communities in America,” said Jennifer 8. Lee, author of “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food,” producer of the documentary “The Search for General Tso” and co-founder and president of the literary studio Plympton. “They didn’t keep a Christian calendar so their restaurants were open on Christmas.”
According to Plaut, the first documented instance of what we now know as a “Jewish Christmas” in English dates back to a 1935 New York Times article that mentioned a restaurant owner named Eng Shee Chuck who brought lo mein to the Jewish Children’s Home in Newark, N.J., an example of what Plaut calls a “Christmas mitzvah.”
But as we know, Chinese food is an evergreen staple of many a Jewish home. Alongside the Ha-Motzi, moo shoo is among the first non-English words learned by American Jewish babies. The Forverts of the early 1920 and ‘30s didn’t lack ad space for many popular Chinese-American restaurants year round, and even around Jewish holidays."...
..."While it’s not prescribed in Jewish texts that we do anything on Christmas, let alone eat our weight in baby corn and water chestnuts, American Jews have a long history of breaking out the chopsticks in late December while Christians are slicing into honey-glazed ham.
Jews either do takeout, filling their wreathless homes with white cardboard containers and smiley-faced plastic bags, or hit the town for some pre-movie chow fun. Plaut said the latter practice is known in Yiddish as oysessen — eating out — and was coined in this very publication in 1903, to describe the trend of Jews coming down from their tenement coops to enjoy the fine cooking of their Chinese neighbors on the Lower East Side. But the trend goes back even further than that, beginning at the tail end of the 19th century with an early wave of Eastern European immigrants.
“The Jews and Chinese were the two largest non-Christian immigrant communities in America,” said Jennifer 8. Lee, author of “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food,” producer of the documentary “The Search for General Tso” and co-founder and president of the literary studio Plympton. “They didn’t keep a Christian calendar so their restaurants were open on Christmas.”
According to Plaut, the first documented instance of what we now know as a “Jewish Christmas” in English dates back to a 1935 New York Times article that mentioned a restaurant owner named Eng Shee Chuck who brought lo mein to the Jewish Children’s Home in Newark, N.J., an example of what Plaut calls a “Christmas mitzvah.”
But as we know, Chinese food is an evergreen staple of many a Jewish home. Alongside the Ha-Motzi, moo shoo is among the first non-English words learned by American Jewish babies. The Forverts of the early 1920 and ‘30s didn’t lack ad space for many popular Chinese-American restaurants year round, and even around Jewish holidays."...
(1)
(0)
Read This Next
Continue with Facebook 
Continue with Google