American Jews, Chinese food and Christmas: The first connection was a 1935 gift of chow mein to a New Jersey orphanage

There is a meme that circulates every holiday season , an image of a sign in a restaurant window. “The Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States would like to extend our thanks to the Jewish people,” it says. “We do not completely understand your dietary customs ... but we are proud and grateful that your GOD insists you eat our food on Christmas.” Is the sign real? Perhaps not; the fact-checking site Snopes found no evidence of the association even existing. But the joke’s popularity points to a tradition cherished by many American Jews - Chinese food on Christmas. But why would Jews, who do not celebrate Christmas, have Christmas traditions? Like many minority groups, Jews have always created ways of adapting to the societies in which they live, but whose culture they do not totally share. And one thing that means is a collection of Christmas traditions, varying by time and place. Many of them came up in interviews for my book “ Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States .” Old World festivities Long before Jews came to the United States, some of them celebrated Christmas - participating in many of the cultural traditions, even as they avoided the religious part of the holiday. According to Jordan Chad , author of “ Christmas in Yiddish Tradition ,” Jewish folklore about the holiday appears as early as the late 1300s. Plenty of Jewish communities in Europe spent Christmas Eve dancing and drinking, feasting and gambling - as many of their Christian neighbors did, when those neighbors were not in church. Other scholars have argued that these traditions grew out of attempts to avoid studying Jewish religious texts on a Christian holiday. But Chad demonstrates that, over centuries, those customs came to celebrate the revelry of the season - though not the birth of Jesus. Even in the 20th century, scholars such as Yaniv Feller have found, many middle- and upper-class German Jews embraced a secular Christmas , complete with a tree , a traditional dinner and presents. After all, some of those Christmas traditions stem less from religion than folk traditions and industrialization. Given that long history, Jewish Christmas traditions are not necessarily a sign of Americanization. That said, in the United States, Christmas is so culturally powerful - a day that almost everyone has off, and that the majority of Americans spend with their kith and kin - that many non-Christian immigrants celebrate it in a secular way , with family visits, Santa and a tree. They do not necessarily do the religious parts of the holiday, but they may well deck the halls. Certainly, my own Hindu relatives do. And many Jews celebrate Christmas in some way because they are part of interfaith families - whether their own immediate family or extended relatives with whom they spend the day. Today, estimates place the American Jewish interfaith marriage rate as high as 50%. Kosher-style Chinese For plenty of contemporary Jews, however, it is profoundly...

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