Thanks for posting this. I am reminded of my (now ex) in-laws, who would say they kept kosher but would happily eat shellfish out in a Chinese restaurant...but wouldn' t take the leftovers home...

And of course a Chinese restaurant will always be open on Christmas day, which makes it (along with sleeping in late and going to a movie) an integral part of the Jewish experience on December 25. I transplanted this back to the Old Country when I lived in Bucharest, knowing instinctively that such a restaurant would be the only place open on Christmas. Lo, I was correct. The fact that its version of sweet and sour sauce included unidentifiable chunks (carrots?) was wholly irrelevant.

The happiest Christmas I ever had involved eating at a Chinese restaurant. The Jewish Christmas customs Dorothy describes have definitely spread into the secular/agnostic population.

When I was pregnant with Heidi and we were doing a year's camping tour of Europe and the MidEast, all I wanted was Chinese food. Found some in Florence and was stunned that the Chinese cook spoke Italian. My God, what innocence!

There once was a man who kept six refrigerators in his kitchen. A visitor, seeing them, asked him why.

"We keep kosher," the man explained. "So one refrigerator is for meat and the next for dairy. The next two are the same, but for Pesach. And I am a photographer, and this refrigerator is where I keep perishable photography chemicals."

"But that accounts for only five of the six refrigerators," said the visitor. "What is the sixth for?"

"The sixth refrigerator is for treyf, of course!"

I'm surprised that Italian restaurants were excluded. Growing up Jewish in Westchester in the 50s, I always heard that Jews had a cuisine of sorts, but what we really liked was Chinese food and pizza.

I've had certified-kosher chinese food, while doing freelance tech writing for a company in Spring Valley, NY. (A caterer in the town supplies NY area airports with kosher meals.)

It was probably made under very strict supervision; it was eaten without compunction by my Observant and Orthodox co-workers.

It was also very, very good. As was the kosher pizza the boss brought in occasionally.

I've eaten kosher chinese too--in London!
It's really funny, but I'm a hispanic christian, and the first restaurant I remember was chinese. The little town I grew up in had a fonda (a Mom and Pop operation) and a chinese restaurant. Fried rice and egg rolls have been part of my culinary vocabulary since I was seven.

Interesting that Ms. Yolen should mention that. My mother is fond of telling the story of how she craved chinese food constantly throughout the first two trimesters for all three of us, couldn't bear to eat it during the third, but got a sudden craving towards the end, and went into labor within hours of eating it.

Chinese food is now a jewish, especially NY jewish, ESPECIALLY Manhattan jewish, fact of life. I learned chopsticks before Kiddush, sesame noodles evoke fond memories of childhood far more than, say, chicken soup, and I will always think of kreplach as a bland sort of fried dumpling.

There are several glatt kosher Chinese restaurants in Brookline, MA (would you believe Shalom Hunan?), and I've also seen them (predictably) in Jerusalem.

For the last 8 or 9 nine years, I've organized (loosely) an annual expedition of Jews, pagans, and unaffiliated folk on Xmas Eve or Xmas to Boston's Chinatown for a feast (or fress, as you prefer).

Jane

Hmmm--my entire comment seems to have disappeared.

What I said was--I don't see my Nam as Miss or Ms. It was a bit snarky, but in the nicest way. I wonder if Teresa removed it for some mysterious Other Reason. She could have removed my vowels, I suppose.

Jane

A long time ago, I remember reading a similar article in The Brandeis Review which came to similar conclusions (down to the free refills on tea)

I wonder if it was by the same people or just others coming to the same conclusions...

I wouldn't dare. Your message must have been eaten by a glitch.

I can't imagine you being offensive enough to have a comment pulled, or uncivil enough to lose your vowels. Which is not to say that you couldn't crisp the ears of someone you thought deserved it; I'm sure you could. You just wouldn't lose control of your tone while you were doing it.

It's not quite true that you can say anything in my weblog as long as you say it well enough; but you can come close.

In fact for many years there was a place near me (Bernstein's on Essex) that served kosher Chinese food. They closed, but I understand the same cuisine, possibly by the same chef, is available in a place on Grand St. near near Clinton St.

I'm surprised by the statement that New York Jews "don't go in for Italian [food] in quite the same way" as they go in for Chinese food. I interpret that to mean that somehow Italian food is not as integral as Chinese food is for the New York Jewish cultural experience. That certainly wasn't true of me and the New York Jews *I* grew up with; indeed, for all of my childhood, the neighborhoods I grew up with had large Jewish and Italian populations intermingled, and we Jews grew up eating pizza and lasagna and ravioli and spaghetti right alongside our cashew chicken, egg rolls, spare ribs, knishes, pastrami sandwiches, chicken soup with kneidlach and matzoh brei.

And now I've read the article. Excellent piece. Thanks for pointing to it, Teresa.

I have a suspicion where the author gets his belief that Jews didn't go in for Italian food as much as Chinese: he seems to be talking predominantly about the poorer neighborhoods of New York City itself. I grew up on Long Island in a middle-class neighborhood, the Italians and Jews got along fine there, and we ate each other's food quite a bit. Or, at least, the Jews ate Italian food -- Jewish food just isn't as good as Italian food.

Until age 8, I lived in Canarsie, a blue-collar neighborhood in Brooklyn, which was also a mix of Jews and Italians, and I don't remember any particular ethnic strife there. The neighborhood was so overwhelmingly Jewish and Italian that, when we children asked each other about religion, the standard question was, "Are you Jewish or Catholic?" We thought those were the only two religions there were. I remember being pretty skeptical a few years later when I was informed that Jews and Catholics were actually a minority in the U.S., and there was this third religious group, called "Protestants," that were the majority.

I could be persuaded that Chinese food has a deep cultural meaning to New York Jews which Italian food doesn't share. But Italian food IS popular among New York Jews. On the other hand, it's popular among lots of other ethnic groups in the U.S. too -- does it occupy a special place in New York Jewish culture? That's the question.

Datapoint: I was watching the Daily Show With John Stewart a few months ago. John Stewart is a New York Jew of my generation, despite his name (he changed it). He was interviewing Italian-American actress Lorraine Bracco, who plays the psychoanalyst Jennifer Melfi on "The Sopranos." She described how she likes to eat pasta plain, with olive oil and a little garlic. John Stewart said he likes his "with a meat sauce. B-- bol-- ," he said, and she snapped back, "Bolognese. That's how Jews eat it." He feigned shock. It was pretty funny, although the kind of funny that doesn't carry over into print.

I remember reading a while back that a Chinese-American sf writer was going to do a book traveling across the United States interviewing Chinese-Americans about their local communities. When non-Chinese Americans think about Chinese-American cultures, we think about Chinatown in New York and San Francisco and that's it, but Chinese have settled in just about every state of the United States. Sounds like a fascinating book. Can't remember the author or title though. Ted Chiang is the only Asian-American sf writer I can think of.

In terms of Asian-American sf writers, how about William F. Wu and Laurence Yep?

With Italian, if you want "safe treyf" you can always go for fish and dairy--all those nice pastas with cheese and tomato may not actually be kosher, but they don't startle. And of course kosher pizza is easy enough, and kosher pizzerias draw a significant non-Jewish vegetarian clientele, people who like being sure there's no meat on their mushroom and garlic pizzas because there's none anywhere in the kitchen.

And it's a lot easier than steering my stepfather, who keeps kosher, through the shoals of a French restaurant.

David Goldfarb - After reading your post, I checked William Wu's and Lawrence Yep's web sites for something like the book I described. Nothin' doin'. Thanks anyway.

This article certainly awakened a lot of memories for me. When we were growing up, my parents kept kosher in the house -- mostly -- in the fashion of most of the Jews I know. We had four sets of dishes and silverware, one for meat, one for dairy, and one each for meat and dairy during Passover. We also had four complete sets of pots and pans. The set of pots and pans for meat during the year was most elaborate, because it saw the most use; we didn't do much cooking with dairy products.

We paid no attention to kosher dietary restrictiosn when we ate in restaurants or fast-food places, although we did make an effort to keep kosher for Passover and not eat any bread during that period. As far as I know, my middle brother is the only one in the family who still keeps kosher for Passover, and fasts during Yom Kippur, and goes to synagogue at least occasionally. The rest of us are heathens. I even married a shikse.

We also regularly brought in Chinese food and pizza, and ate it on paper plates with plastic forks. When we were teen-agers, my friends and I came up with an expression to describe this custom, which was common among New York Jews: "pizza on paper plates kosher." Take-out pizza and Chinese food served on regular dishes, with regular silverware, seemed weird to me well into my 20s, even though I stopped keeping kosher pretty much as soon as I was able to make my own food decisions.

Seems like a lot of people think it's valuable to keep a kosher home, or even just a kosher kitchen, but less valuable to actually eat kosher.

Come to think of it, didn't we used to know someone who kept a kosher kitchen solely so that her mother would eat in her house?

Christopher, I grew up keeping kosher both at home and elsewhere, and that meant eating out very rarely. We did sometimes go to IHOP, where we'd eat pancakes and pretend not to know that some of the food being served involved meat (and was therefore making the entire place non-kosher.)

I discovered Chinese food on a visit to Chicago, where my brother took us to a kosher Chinese restaurant. I loved it, and was even willing to eat vegetables (which I never ate at home). I didn't have much Chinese food after that until I went to college and stopped keeping kosher. I would now happily eat Chinese food every day.

Adina, that's interesting, but I was saying "a lot" not "all Jews."

In connection to your family pretenses in IHOP, I once knew a person whose mother made them keep big-heavy-black-quote-mark "kosher" big-heavy-black-quote-mark...in McDonalds! She wouldn't let them have both a shake and a burger; they had to have a fishwich if they wanted a shake.

The laughability of this doesn't stop with the fact that no place is treyfer then Mickey Dee's. (Shaker Ham & Oyster Pie (and yes it also has cream and butter in it) is not widely served in fast-food restaurants.) The McDonald's "Triple Thick Shake" of the time did not actually contain milk (which spoiled too easily); it was soy and carnauba wax and a bunch of texturing chemicals.

I assume that cheeseburgers were Right Out.