It’s well known that Jews have long had a love affair with Chinese food. In fact, for many Jewish families, the tradition of eating Chinese food on Christmas is almost as sacrosanct as avoiding leavened bread on Passover or eating latkes during Hanukkah.
As Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan famously responded to Senator Lindsay Graham when asked where she was on Christmas, “You know like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”
Is there a more deeply rooted historical and cultural connection for this tradition or does the Christmas ritual simply come from the fact that Chinese restaurants are open during Christian holidays?
Join MOFAD and Gefilteria co-founder Jeffrey Yoskowitz, journalist Hanna Raskin, cookbook author Grace Young, writer and producer Jennifer 8 Lee, and filmmaker Cheuk Kwan for a conversation that traces the origins of this cross-cultural Christmas love story.
Photo by Cedric Sam
CHEUK KWAN
Cheuk Kwan was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. After studying and working in engineering in the United States, he immigrated to Canada in 1976 where he embarked upon a successful career in information technology.
His international and diasporic upbringing gave him an early start in world travel and opportunities to meet people from numerous countries—he speaks English, Japanese, French, as well as Cantonese and Mandarin. His engineering career later brought him to Europe and Saudi Arabia.
Kwan studied film production at New York University. His five films from the Chinese Restaurants series—Song of the Exile, On the Islands, Three Continents, Latin Passions, and Beyond Frontiers—bring together his personal experiences, love of food and travel, and appreciation of the Chinese diaspora culture worldwide.
Kwan’s forthcoming book Have You Eaten Yet?, based on his Chinese Restaurants television series, draws out a global narrative of the Chinese diaspora by linking together personal stories of chefs, entrepreneurs, laborers and dreamers who populate Chinese kitchens world-wide.
JENNIFER 8 LEE
Jennifer 8. Lee is an entrepreneur, documentary producer, journalist, seed investor and emoji activist.
She is co-founder and CEO of Plympton, a San Francisco-based literary studio that innovates in digital publishing. Among their projects is Recovering the Classics, and a VR film based on George Saunders' Man Booker Prize winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.
A former New York Times reporter, Jenny is a producer of The Search for General Tso and Picture Character, both which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festivals,
She is also the author of the New York Times-bestselling book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Twelve, 2008), which established fortune cookies are originally Japanese.
She is the founder of Emojination, a grassroots group whose motto is "Emoji by the people, for the people." As part of that organization, she successfully lobbied for a dumpling, hijab and interracial couple emojis among others. She cofounded Emojicon and is a vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee.
HANNA RASKIN
Hanna Raskin is The Post and Courier’s food editor and chief critic. Her work has been recognized by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia; the International Association of Culinary Professionals and The James Beard Foundation, which in 2017 awarded her its first Local Impact Journalism prize.
Raskin previously served as restaurant critic for the Seattle Weekly and the Dallas Observer, earning recognition from the James Beard Foundation and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. In 2013, she published “Yelp Help: How to Write Great Online Restaurant Reviews,” which received an M.F.K. Fisher Award from Les Dames Escoffier International.
A food historian by training, Raskin wrote her master’s thesis at the State University of New York’s Cooperstown Graduate Program on the relationship between Jews and Chinese food; she’s since written about immigrant food culture and regional food history for publications including American Heritage, Garden & Gun, Imbibe, Punch, Modern Farmer, Belt, Cooking Light and Tasting Table.
Raskin is a founding member of Foodways Texas, and active in the Southern Foodways Alliance. She is the president of the Association of Food Journalists, and Southeastern representative on The James Beard Foundation’s restaurant and chef awards committee.
Photo by Nomi Ellenson
JEFFREY YOSKOWITZ
A food entrepreneur and Jewish food expert, Jeffrey Yoskowitz travels the globe (now digitally) speaking, cooking and teaching. He is co-author of the award-winning cookbook The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods (Flatiron Books) and co-owner of The Gefilteria—a company that reimagines eastern European Jewish cuisine. His writings on food and culture have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Gastronomica, among others. He serves as the chef-and-scholar-in-residence for Taube Food Heritage Tours with whom he leads culinary tours to Eastern Europe, and he created the first Jewish Food Anthropology course at The City University of New York. He has been invited on multiple occasions as a guest chef at the esteemed James Beard House kitchen.
Photo by Christine Han/The Kitchn
GRACE YOUNG
Named the “poet laureate of the wok” by food historian Betty Fussell, Grace Young has devoted her career to demystifying the ancient cooking utensil for use in contemporary kitchens. An award-winning cookbook author, culinary historian, and filmmaker, Grace has been a fierce advocate for Chinatown, never more so than in her recent video series Coronavirus: Chinatown Stories, —produced in collaboration with videographer Dan Ahn and Poster House—which documents the toll of the pandemic on NYC’s Chinese community. She is also partnering with the James Beard Foundation on an Instagram campaign to #savechineserestaurants all across the country.
Grace is the recipient of James Beard Awards for her Wok Therapist comedy video and her cookbook Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge. Her popular online Craftsy class, The Art of Stir-Frying, has introduced over 12,000 students worldwide to the versatility of the wok.