12-22-2022, 08:20 PM
This Christmas, as hundreds of millions of normal Americans gather around the dinner table to savor their festive baked turkeys and delightful honeyed hams, a stubborn minority of spiteful Semites will dishonor this sacred annual tradition by eating at restaurants owned and operated by godless Chinamen.
This shameful practice is a slap in the face not only to the Baby Jesus but to all of those, believers or not, who celebrate Christmas every year. I don’t feel it is the least bit unfair or hyperbolic to describe this malicious custom as a collective hate crime against those who enjoy Christmas.
With all the kvetching one hears about “anti-Semitism” — and I’ve heard so much that I’ve almost lost my hearing — no mention is ever made of the fact that “Semitism” itself is based on an innately supremacist ideology that implies God didn’t choose anyone besides Jews. Claiming that you’re “God’s chosen people” is about as supremacist and “othering” as an ideology can manage to be. I can’t think of anything more innately supremacist than to say that your superiority comes not from an evolutionary accident but from a deliberate cosmic decision.
“Goyim” is a hateful term that Jews use to defame anyone who’s not a Jew. They’ll say you hate Jews merely if you note that Jews have a hateful term for non-Jews. Sometimes, they make it really difficult to like them. But only a fool or a liar would deny that American culture these days is far more inherently anti-goyimic than it is anti-Semitic.
Apparently some people feel that if you’ve suffered — justifiably or not — justice consists of making everyone within earshot suffer from your endless complaining until their ears start to bleed.
To claim from behind your gated community using your media monopoly as a megaphone that you’ve suffered more than anyone else in history is to be one vain and self-absorbed bastard.
To try to claim a monopoly on human suffering is to be a jerk. It also may lead people to start feeling that you haven’t suffered nearly enough.
The bratty custom of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas received national attention during the 2010 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan. When Lindsey Graham asked Kagan where she’d been on the previous Christmas Day, she said, “You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant,” causing the room to break into laughter. After the knowing guffaws had died down, the cartoonishly Jewish Senator Chuck Schumer explained that “No other restaurants are open” on Christmas.
In her essay “Identity Takeout: How American Jews Made Chinese Food Their Ethnic Cuisine,” Hannah Miller writes:
Eating Chinese [food] has become a meaningful symbol of American Judaism. . . . For in eating Chinese, the Jews found a modern means of expressing their traditional cultural values. The savoring of Chinese food is now a ritualized celebration of immigration, education, family, community, and continuity.
The most extensive treatment of the phenomenon of Jews noshing on Chinese food on December 25 is the book A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to Be Jewish by Rabbi Joshua Eli Plaut, Ph.D. According to its third chapter, “We Eat Chinese Food on Christmas”:
Over the years, Jewish families and friends gather on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at Chinese restaurants across the United States to socialize and to banter, to reinforce social and familiar bonds, and to engage in a favorite activity for Jews during the Christmas holiday. The Chinese restaurant has become a place where Jewish identity is made, remade and announced.
Good for Jews that they’re allowed to convene and celebrate their communal identity. It must be nice.
Plaut says that the first mention of American Jews eating Chinese food was in an 1899 issue of The American Hebrew that scolded Jews for eating at non-kosher restaurants, specifically Chinese ones. He says that the first purported mention of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas “dates at least as early as 1935 when The New York Times reported a certain restaurant owner named Eng Shee Chuck who brought chow mein on Christmas Day to the Jewish Children’s Home in Newark.”
You can buy Jim Goad’s Answer Me! here.
As luck would have it, New York’s teeming Jewish ghettos happened to be in close proximity to its teeming Chinese ghettos.
There were plenty of Italian and German restaurants in New York City back then, but both kinds of establishments were likely to feature pictures of Christian icons. And both Italians and Germans, especially beginning in the 1920s, were viewed as aggressively Jew-hostile. Having had almost no historical experience with Jews, Chinese restaurateurs were not saddled with any prejudices — nor postjudices — toward them. And since they were largely not Christian, Chinese immigrants had no reason to celebrate Christmas, either.
Chinese cooking is largely dairy-averse, so there was little risk of mixing meat and dairy, a practice which is said to sorely vex the God of Israel. Jews who ate Chinese food were able to rationalize the fact that they were often eating non-kosher items such as pork and shellfish by the fact that it was chopped up and hidden inside wontons.
But eating egg rolls on December 25 is hardly the first time, or the only way, in which Jews have dishonored Christmas. Hanukkah, traditionally a minor Jewish holiday, was elevated in importance by Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, who argued in an 1897 essay called “The Menorah” that to properly respect themselves, Jews should reject Christmas and celebrate Hanukkah. So Hanukkah, at least as it’s celebrated in America, is basically a Zionist “fuck you” to Christmas.
For at least a thousand years prior to the emergence of Chinese restaurants in lower Manhattan, one Jewish custom on Christmas Eve was the reading of the blasphemous Toledot Yeshu, which claims that Jesus was an illegitimate child who was conceived when Mary was raped while menstruating. The segment describing Christ’s conception is said to be so graphic that for years it became a primer on forbidden sexual acts. The Toledot Yeshu says that Jesus grew up to be a philandering practitioner of black magic who was bested by Judas Iscariot in aerial combat and died by being hung on a carob tree.
And let’s not overlook the fact that the Talmud has Jesus boiling in excrement in the afterlife.
In the sake of historical fairness, I’ll note that an essay by Rabbi Yonah Bookstein lists a litany of reasons for Jews to be unfavorably disposed toward Christmas. First off, there’s the insinuation that Christ’s birth renders Judaism obsolete. I can see why they’d resent that. Bookstein alleges that December 25 was chosen as Christ’s birthday because it dovetails with the traditional end of the weeklong pagan holiday of Saturnalia. He says that at the end of Saturnalia in 1466, “Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city.” He says that on Christmas Day in 1881, “Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Anti-Semitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw, 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped.” Bookstein alleges that old Jewish texts from Europe claim that on Christmas Eve, it was customary for European Christians to assault any Jews who dared to venture outside.
But as any student of Logic 101 understands, two wrongs don’t make a right. And things such as blasphemy and hate crimes never happen in a vacuum. They’re all intrinsic parts of age-old historical struggles over land, resources, women, and political power.
The sly genius of terms such as “anti-Semitism,” “misogyny,” and “homophobia” is that they imply there’s absolutely nothing that Jews, women, and homos could possibly do to make people dislike them. The fact that Jews have been mistreated in the past in no way implies they did nothing that would make people want to mistreat them. Likewise, it in no way justifies the fact that their entire ideology is predicated on the same sort of supremacist conceits for which they’re always — and usually without any factual basis — accusing the pale goys of the European diaspora.
C’mon, Jews. It does neither you nor us any good for you to keep tediously proclaiming your “otherness.” Pretend, at least on Christmas Day, that we’re all part of the same team. Leave the egg foo yung in Chinatown where it belongs, and buy yourself a turkey like every other goddamned red-blooded American. I even promise not to force a honeyed ham on you, because that would be anti-Semitic.
Jim Goad
This shameful practice is a slap in the face not only to the Baby Jesus but to all of those, believers or not, who celebrate Christmas every year. I don’t feel it is the least bit unfair or hyperbolic to describe this malicious custom as a collective hate crime against those who enjoy Christmas.
With all the kvetching one hears about “anti-Semitism” — and I’ve heard so much that I’ve almost lost my hearing — no mention is ever made of the fact that “Semitism” itself is based on an innately supremacist ideology that implies God didn’t choose anyone besides Jews. Claiming that you’re “God’s chosen people” is about as supremacist and “othering” as an ideology can manage to be. I can’t think of anything more innately supremacist than to say that your superiority comes not from an evolutionary accident but from a deliberate cosmic decision.
“Goyim” is a hateful term that Jews use to defame anyone who’s not a Jew. They’ll say you hate Jews merely if you note that Jews have a hateful term for non-Jews. Sometimes, they make it really difficult to like them. But only a fool or a liar would deny that American culture these days is far more inherently anti-goyimic than it is anti-Semitic.
Apparently some people feel that if you’ve suffered — justifiably or not — justice consists of making everyone within earshot suffer from your endless complaining until their ears start to bleed.
To claim from behind your gated community using your media monopoly as a megaphone that you’ve suffered more than anyone else in history is to be one vain and self-absorbed bastard.
To try to claim a monopoly on human suffering is to be a jerk. It also may lead people to start feeling that you haven’t suffered nearly enough.
The bratty custom of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas received national attention during the 2010 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan. When Lindsey Graham asked Kagan where she’d been on the previous Christmas Day, she said, “You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant,” causing the room to break into laughter. After the knowing guffaws had died down, the cartoonishly Jewish Senator Chuck Schumer explained that “No other restaurants are open” on Christmas.
In her essay “Identity Takeout: How American Jews Made Chinese Food Their Ethnic Cuisine,” Hannah Miller writes:
Eating Chinese [food] has become a meaningful symbol of American Judaism. . . . For in eating Chinese, the Jews found a modern means of expressing their traditional cultural values. The savoring of Chinese food is now a ritualized celebration of immigration, education, family, community, and continuity.
The most extensive treatment of the phenomenon of Jews noshing on Chinese food on December 25 is the book A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to Be Jewish by Rabbi Joshua Eli Plaut, Ph.D. According to its third chapter, “We Eat Chinese Food on Christmas”:
Over the years, Jewish families and friends gather on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at Chinese restaurants across the United States to socialize and to banter, to reinforce social and familiar bonds, and to engage in a favorite activity for Jews during the Christmas holiday. The Chinese restaurant has become a place where Jewish identity is made, remade and announced.
Good for Jews that they’re allowed to convene and celebrate their communal identity. It must be nice.
Plaut says that the first mention of American Jews eating Chinese food was in an 1899 issue of The American Hebrew that scolded Jews for eating at non-kosher restaurants, specifically Chinese ones. He says that the first purported mention of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas “dates at least as early as 1935 when The New York Times reported a certain restaurant owner named Eng Shee Chuck who brought chow mein on Christmas Day to the Jewish Children’s Home in Newark.”
You can buy Jim Goad’s Answer Me! here.
As luck would have it, New York’s teeming Jewish ghettos happened to be in close proximity to its teeming Chinese ghettos.
There were plenty of Italian and German restaurants in New York City back then, but both kinds of establishments were likely to feature pictures of Christian icons. And both Italians and Germans, especially beginning in the 1920s, were viewed as aggressively Jew-hostile. Having had almost no historical experience with Jews, Chinese restaurateurs were not saddled with any prejudices — nor postjudices — toward them. And since they were largely not Christian, Chinese immigrants had no reason to celebrate Christmas, either.
Chinese cooking is largely dairy-averse, so there was little risk of mixing meat and dairy, a practice which is said to sorely vex the God of Israel. Jews who ate Chinese food were able to rationalize the fact that they were often eating non-kosher items such as pork and shellfish by the fact that it was chopped up and hidden inside wontons.
But eating egg rolls on December 25 is hardly the first time, or the only way, in which Jews have dishonored Christmas. Hanukkah, traditionally a minor Jewish holiday, was elevated in importance by Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, who argued in an 1897 essay called “The Menorah” that to properly respect themselves, Jews should reject Christmas and celebrate Hanukkah. So Hanukkah, at least as it’s celebrated in America, is basically a Zionist “fuck you” to Christmas.
For at least a thousand years prior to the emergence of Chinese restaurants in lower Manhattan, one Jewish custom on Christmas Eve was the reading of the blasphemous Toledot Yeshu, which claims that Jesus was an illegitimate child who was conceived when Mary was raped while menstruating. The segment describing Christ’s conception is said to be so graphic that for years it became a primer on forbidden sexual acts. The Toledot Yeshu says that Jesus grew up to be a philandering practitioner of black magic who was bested by Judas Iscariot in aerial combat and died by being hung on a carob tree.
And let’s not overlook the fact that the Talmud has Jesus boiling in excrement in the afterlife.
In the sake of historical fairness, I’ll note that an essay by Rabbi Yonah Bookstein lists a litany of reasons for Jews to be unfavorably disposed toward Christmas. First off, there’s the insinuation that Christ’s birth renders Judaism obsolete. I can see why they’d resent that. Bookstein alleges that December 25 was chosen as Christ’s birthday because it dovetails with the traditional end of the weeklong pagan holiday of Saturnalia. He says that at the end of Saturnalia in 1466, “Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city.” He says that on Christmas Day in 1881, “Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Anti-Semitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw, 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped.” Bookstein alleges that old Jewish texts from Europe claim that on Christmas Eve, it was customary for European Christians to assault any Jews who dared to venture outside.
But as any student of Logic 101 understands, two wrongs don’t make a right. And things such as blasphemy and hate crimes never happen in a vacuum. They’re all intrinsic parts of age-old historical struggles over land, resources, women, and political power.
The sly genius of terms such as “anti-Semitism,” “misogyny,” and “homophobia” is that they imply there’s absolutely nothing that Jews, women, and homos could possibly do to make people dislike them. The fact that Jews have been mistreated in the past in no way implies they did nothing that would make people want to mistreat them. Likewise, it in no way justifies the fact that their entire ideology is predicated on the same sort of supremacist conceits for which they’re always — and usually without any factual basis — accusing the pale goys of the European diaspora.
C’mon, Jews. It does neither you nor us any good for you to keep tediously proclaiming your “otherness.” Pretend, at least on Christmas Day, that we’re all part of the same team. Leave the egg foo yung in Chinatown where it belongs, and buy yourself a turkey like every other goddamned red-blooded American. I even promise not to force a honeyed ham on you, because that would be anti-Semitic.
Jim Goad