There’s no time like Christmas for feeling one’s Jewishness. Even if you’re not actually religiously Jewish, even if you’re only half Jewish, or just a Tottenham Hotspur fan, or just plain live in New York City.
It’s the time when we Jews really, most powerfully feel like strangers in a strange land. Which makes for a sort of celebration in itself. Or perhaps a “wallowing” is a better word. But whatever it is, we enjoy it, we Jews, in our inimitable way, our way of finding joy in misery and misery in joy. Christmas is the best day of the year for devout observance of our otherness.
Traditionally, we do this at a Chinese restaurant. “For Jews, the decision to go to a Chinese restaurant on Christmas is conscious and intended,” says Rabbi Joshua Eli Plaut, author of A Kosher Christmas. “It’s a love affair and a sacred tradition to partake of Peking duck.”
Indeed, the traditional Jewish Christmas feast is imbued with history and symbolism matched only by “real” Jewish holidays like Passover and Chanukah and Purim. Each dish on the table represents an important element of Judaism, or at least what I like to call, “the Jewish condition.” So if you are Jewish, even just a little bit, I highly recommend going to your local Chinese restaurant today. It will likely be the only place open!
Here’s what you should order, and why.
Sesame noodles
This is, in my opinion, the best barometer dish for any Chinese restaurant. If a place is a making good sesame noodles – whether leaning in the clean, creamy, peanut-buttery direction, or full of firey Sichuan peppercorns that leave that your tongue with that wonderful cocaine-like numbing sensation known as “ma la” – chances are they’re making lots of other good food, too. On Christmas Day, we like to eat them to remind us of the ropes with which Pharaonic overlords held our ancestors in bondage in ancient Egypt.
Hot and sour soup
It’s not cold this time of year anymore – thanks to global warming? – but it used to be. Christmas season used to be a good time for a good hot soup to make a proper Jew schvitz like he or she were sitting in a steam room at a Russian bath house. So the “hot” of this soup, with its healthy dose of white pepper, is a reminder of simpler, more natural times. And the “sour”, from its vinegar base, is a reminder of the tears our people have shed over two thousand years of exile, inquisition, pogroms and holocaust.
Spare ribs
Oh man, delicious! And on a Jewish family’s Christmas table, symbolic of Adam’s rib, out of which God created Eve, and so then all women, including our own mother, whom we need to call as soon as we’re done with dinner, because we haven’t talked to her since this morning, and she’s probably worried about our digestive system.
Twice-cooked pork
Obviously, this list is for the less-religious, secular Jews who don’t mind enjoying a little “safe treyf” when God’s not looking. (God’s busy calibrating the GPS system on Santa’s magical flying sleigh today, right?) Most importantly, the bright verdant leeks in this always fantastic dish speak to the fact that the grass is always greener on the other side, especially for Jews, and that the children of luckier, Christian families are opening presents right now.
Cumin lamb
This is my favorite Chinese dish. And not just because my Jewish ancestors have the blood of the Jesus, the Lamb of God, on their hands. (Just kidding. They don’t. That story’s made up.) Also, it’s fun to change the lyrics to the Human League’s 1986 hit Human and sing a new version softly at the table while eating. “I’m only cumin/Of flesh and blood I’m made…” As great as it still sounds, though, it’s important to remember that 1980s synth rock had a vague antisemitic vibe to it. Joy Division, New Order, Bauhaus ... tell me all those bands weren’t just fronts for Hitler Youth revivalists!
Fortune cookies
A distinctly American Chinese restaurant tradition, the end-of-the-meal fortune cookie is much like the mezuzah that hangs outside the door of every Jewish household: a scrolled parchment, encased in a protective container, printed with the words to the holiest of Jewish prayers, the Shema: “Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God,” it goes, “the Lord is One.” And as when everyone reads the fortune encased in their cookie aloud to the table at the end of the meal, it’s funny to add the phrase “in bed” at the end.
Orange slices
The perfect palate cleanser at the end of the meal, and a good opportunity to reflect on the meaning of Aleksander Gierymskis’s masterpiece, Jewess With Oranges, which was stolen by the Nazis during the second world war but has since been returned to the National Museum in Warsaw.
Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant
Rating: 4 stars
Rating system: from best to worst
5 stars: Joy Division (despite everything, God they were a great band).
4 stars: Acknowledgment of good things that came before you
3 stars: Assimilation
2 stars: Religious tradition
1 star: 65-degree weather on 25 December
