Reprinted with permission from the West Side Rag.

Christmas Day is famously the busiest day of the year for Chinese restaurants on the Upper West Side. These eateries are popular because, unlike most other restaurants, they are open on the holiday. Chinese restaurants are traditionally packed that day with Jews and other diners who do not celebrate Christmas.

It’s not breaking news that Jews enjoy Chinese food. As the old joke goes, “The Jewish people are 5,000 years old, and the Chinese people are 3,000 years old. So, what did the Jews eat for 2,000 years?”  If you need documentation, there’s even a heavily footnoted Wiki page named Jewish-American patronage of Chinese restaurants.

For many Jewish Upper West Siders, like bestselling food and music author Fred Plotkin, memories of Chinese food on Christmas Day go back decades. In a phone interview, Plotkin told West Side Rag that every year he and his companions would head to a neighborhood theater to see what he describes as “those Oscar-bait films that opened on December 25th. We would see the movie and then discuss it around the table of an UWS Chinese restaurant.”

Those were the days, recalled Plotkin, “of column A and column B menus, with a Lazy Susan in the middle of a round table to spin to pick from all sorts of delicacies and guilty pleasures. This was more of a comfortable ritual than a gastronomic event.”

Many people in the moo-shu mood on Christmas have no idea that they are part of a rich historical tradition that goes back to the nineteenth century. Why is this night different from all other nights? For the answer to that question, let’s turn to Metropolitan Synagogue Rabbi Joshua Eli Plaut, the big macher (important person) in this scholarly field. His 2012 book, A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to Be Jewish, is the definitive work about all things Chrismukkah. With Talmudic rigor, Plaut tackles the subject of why so many Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas:

“The origin of this venerable Jewish Christmas tradition dates to the end of the nineteenth century on the Lower East Side of New York City. Jews found Chinese restaurants readily available in urban and suburban areas in America where both Jews and Chinese lived in close proximity. Moreover, the Chinese accepted Jews and other immigrant and ethnic groups without prejudice. There was no inherent anti-Semitism when eating at the restaurant, because Chinese owners and waiters had no history of prejudice towards Jews.”

For some Jews, says Plaut, eating Chinese food in restaurants was also a naughty departure from the strictures of keeping kosher at home. So was born the practice of “safe treyf [non-kosher food].” In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth, the ultimate authority on Yiddishkeit (Jewishness), described this departure from the rules:

“Even in the Chinese restaurant, where the Lord has lifted the ban on pork dishes for the obedient children of Israel, the eating of lobster Cantonese is considered by God (Whose mouthpiece on earth, in matters pertaining to food, is my Mom) to be totally out of the question. Why we can eat pig on Pell Street and not at home is because . . . frankly I still haven’t got the whole thing figured out…”

To complicate matters further, Christmas and Hanukkah share the same night this year, begging the question, What’ll it be, latkes or lo mein?