User:Landman18/sandbox

This is my regular sentence. This sentence may be bolded and this part of it might also be italicized. Here's a link to the Cold War for no reason whatsoever. Also I just saw the movie Don Jon tonight and it was pretty good. I talked about Bourdieu in my Chinese Food essay so I'll reference him here.

Jews and Chinese Cuisine in New York City
While on the surface, one might believe it to just be a stereotype related to Christmas but the relationship with Jews and Chinese cuisine is well documented. The origin dates to the end of the 19th century on the Lower East Side because Jews and the Chinese lived in close proximity to each other. There were around a million Eastern European Jews living in New York around 1910 and the Jews constituted over “one quarter of the city’s population”. The majority of the Chinese immigrated to the Lower East Side from California after the 1880s and many of them went into the restaurant business.

The first mention of the Jewish population eating Chinese food was in 1899 in the American Hebrew Weekly journal. They criticized Jews for eating at non-kosher restaurants, particularly singling out Chinese food. Yet, Jews continued to eat at these establishments. In 1936, it was reported that there were eighteen Chinese restaurants open in heavily populated Jewish areas in the Lower East Side. Jews felt more comfortable at these restaurants then they did at the Italian or German eateries that were prevalent during this time period.

The reason for feeling comfortable in the Chinese restaurants largely had to do with the lack of prejudice that came from the Chinese people. The Chinese “accepted Jews and other immigrant and ethnic groups as customers without precondition”. In lower Manhattan, immigrant Jews would open delis for other Jews, the Italians ran restaurants primarily for other Italians, and the Germans had many places that would serve only Germans. The Chinese were so welcoming that more of the Jews and Italians would want to eat at their restaurants than they would want to eat at their own restaurants. .

Stimulating a Cosmopolitan Lifestyle
While the Jews felt secure in the restaurants with how welcoming the Chinese people were, they were also drawn to the restaurants for reasons that did not relate to the food whatsoever. “Of all the peoples whom immigrant Jews and their children met, of all the foods they encountered in America, the Chinese were the most foreign, the most ‘un-Jewish’”. Yet, this was appealing to the Jewish people and they viewed the food as exotic, which enticed them to go to the restaurants even more. A large majority of the Jews saw “eating in Chinese restaurants as an antidote for Jewish parochialism, for the exclusive and overweening emphasis on the culture of the Jews as it had been”. Many of the people that Tuchman and Levine spoke to felt that eating in a place that was “un-Jewish” showed that they could be “somewhat sophisticated, urbane New Yorkers”. The restaurants had unusual wallpaper, eccentric decorations, chopsticks, and the names of the food even sounded intriguingly unique. The generations of Jews that grew up in New York after the initial Eastern European Jews immigrated wanted their identity to be based on cosmopolitan ideals and the second/third generation Jews felt that possessing sophistication would put them above others.

Kashrut: Bending the Rules
“Chinese food eased the transition from kosher to acceptable non-kosher eating”. This is an interesting notion, considering that the “Jewish preoccupation with food is at least partially rooted in kashrut, the intricate set of dietary restrictions codified in the Torah”. While first generation Jews living in America practiced kashrut, the “second- and third-generation Jews precipitated an ethnic eating revolution by rejecting kashrut as impractical and anachronistic”. Chinese food put on a façade that allowed Jewish people to turn the other way when thinking about the fact that Chinese food wasn’t particularly kosher. The food was “disguised through a process of cutting, chopping and mincing. Pork, shrimp, lobster, and other so-called dietary abominations are no longer viewed in their more natural states”. The pork was hidden and wrapped in a wanton that disguised it as a Jewish dumpling. This process of cutting, chopping, and mincing was referred to as “ko p’eng—‘to cut and cook’” in Ancient Chinese texts.

Chinese cuisine was “unusually well suited to Jewish tastes because, unlike virtually any other cuisine available in America, traditional Chinese cooking does not use any milk products whatsoever”. These small loopholes and ways of tricking oneself into believing that they weren’t breaking the rules of kashrut became prevalent in the younger generation. Breaking the rules of kashrut by eating Chinese food allowed the younger generation to assert their independence and it further established a “cosmopolitan spirit”.

Chinese Food, Jews, and Christmas: Breaking Down the Stereotype
The stereotype of Jews going to eat Chinese food on Christmas does have an origin. In 1935, The New York Times reported that a restaurant owner named Eng Shee Chuck had brought chow mein to a Jewish children’s home in Newark on Christmas day. This article is considered to be one of the earliest publications of the stereotype that relates Jews to Chinese food on Christmas.

The relationship that Jews have to Chinese food certainly goes deeper than this stereotype. “Eating Chinese 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”. Chinese food is considered a staple in the Jewish culture, with kosher Chinese food becoming more and more prominent around the country.