This is how Jews celebrate Christmas.

A holiday that isn’t ours still reveals plenty about Jews and Jewish life, then and now.

Every year in Jaffa (Tel Aviv’s sister city), they erect a massive Christmas tree at the city’s entrance. (photo: זאב שטיין/Wikipedia)

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Christmas, for Jews, has always been less about nativity scenes and more about survival scenes.

Whether it was surviving our first awkward encounter with Santa at the mall, or the existential dread of explaining to our kids why the biggest holiday of the year isn’t ours, Jewish Christmas has become a tradition of subversion and humor.

In the wake of October 7th, the stakes feel higher. The world is intense.

But even as Jewish identity feels heavier, Christmas remains a light-hearted reminder that we can take a break from doom-scrolling and focus on the important things — like wondering whether kugel could win in a cooking contest against eggnog.

Historically, Jews and Christmas have been engaged in a strange, long-running game of cultural tag. In the medieval period, Jews were often forced to remain indoors on Christmas Eve, a restriction that gave rise to Nittel Nacht: a mystical counter-holiday marked by abstaining from Torah study and, instead, playing cards and other games. Because if you’re going to resist religious coercion, you might as well do it with a competitive game of gin rummy.

Fast forward a few centuries, and Jews somehow reemerged not as celebrants of Christmas, but as its unofficial composers. Irving Berlin, a Jew, gave the world “White Christmas.” Johnny Marks, also Jewish, wrote “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” It’s as if Jews collectively decided: “Fine, if we can’t celebrate it, let’s at least monetize it.”

In more recent years, with the rise of the internet and social media, the same meme resurfaces every holiday season. It’s a photograph of a restaurant window sign that says:

“The Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States would like to extend our thanks to the Jewish people. We do not completely understand your dietary customs … but we are proud and grateful that your GOD insists you eat our food on Christmas.”

The trope has even entered American political folklore. During Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s 2010 confirmation hearings, Senator Lindsey Graham asked her where she had been on Christmas Day. She replied, deadpan: “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

As it turns out, Chinese restaurants were more than happy to accommodate. New research by a New York University graduate student found that restaurant owners quickly learned that many Jewish customers avoided pork, prompting some establishments to offer traditional dishes made with chicken instead. This allowed more observant Jews to eat “kosher style” on Christmas.

Many Jews also mark Christmas in some way because they are part of interfaith families, whether through immediate relatives or extended family gatherings. Estimates now place the American Jewish interfaith marriage rate as high as 50 percent, further blurring the boundaries between participation and abstention.

Long before Jews arrived in the United States, some Jewish communities in Europe engaged with Christmas culturally, if not religiously. According to Jordan Chad, author of “Christmas in Yiddish Tradition,” Jewish folklore surrounding the holiday appears as early as the late 1300s. Jewish communities in many European towns spent Christmas Eve dancing, drinking, feasting, and gambling — unlike many of their Christian neighbors, who were in church.

For many contemporary Jews, however, it is deeply important not to celebrate even a secularized version of Christmas. Beginning in the 1970s, amid growing anxiety about interfaith marriage, many rabbis willing to officiate Jewish-Christian weddings required couples to promise they would not have a Christmas tree, despite the fact that, at the time, plenty of American Jewish households did.

This tension was nothing new. As early as the 1700s, Viennese socialite Fanny Arnstein (a co-founder of the Music Society of Austria, a renowned salonnière, and patron of both Mozart and Beethoven) was among the first Jews to introduce a Christmas tree into her home. The practice was later adopted by none other than Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism.

Indeed, after Herzl completed his seminal work on Zionism in 1895, Vienna’s chief rabbi visited him at home during the month of December. That historically significant meeting took place with a Christmas tree clearly in view.

But perhaps the most widely appropriated Christmas custom among Jews was gift-giving. The 1931 how-to classic “What Every Jewish Woman Should Know,” offered the following advice:

“It is a time hallowed Jewish custom to distribute gifts in honor of the Hanukkah festival. If ever lavishness in gifts is appropriate, it is on Hanukkah. Jewish children should be showered with gifts, Hanukkah gifts, as a perhaps primitive but most effective means of making them immune against envy of the Christian children and their Christmas.”

Translated into modern parenting terms: If you can’t compete with Christmas, you can at least try to outspend it. Hence why, long before marketing departments existed, many Jewish parents had already perfected the art of gift distribution across eight nights.

In Israel, Christmas is, of course, complicated — like most things here.

Christians make up roughly 2 percent of Israel’s 10-million-strong population, a figure that has been slowly but steadily growing according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. The vast majority are Arab Christians, concentrated in cities like Nazareth, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Shfaram. Some 84 percent of Israeli Christians say they are satisfied with life in the Jewish state.

Education has a central place in Israeli Christian society, a fact reflected clearly in the data. Graduates of Christian schools consistently achieve the highest scores on Israel’s state matriculation exams. In 2022, 84 percent of Christian 12th-grade students qualified for university admission, surpassing the national average. Israeli Christians also attain bachelor’s and advanced academic degrees at higher rates than Jews, Druze, or Muslims. And Israeli Christian women in particular rank among the most highly educated groups in the country.

In terms of religious practice, Israeli Christians fall somewhere between Israel’s Muslim and Jewish populations. They tend to be less religious than Israeli Muslims, but more observant than Israeli Jews on key indicators of religious commitment. More than one-third pray daily and attend religious services at least weekly. Israel’s confessional system officially recognizes ten Christian denominations, granting them authority over personal-status matters such as marriage and divorce. These include the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church (especially the Greek Orthodox Church), the Syriac Orthodox Church, and the Anglican Church, among others.

And, of course, Christianity’s connection to the land itself is foundational. Jesus was Jewish and lived in the Land of Israel; according to Christian tradition, he was crucified, buried, and resurrected at the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, cementing the country’s status as a Holy Land for Christianity.

Nowadays, in Nazareth (where Jesus spent his childhood) there is an annual Christmas market that feels distinctly Middle Eastern: less “Silent Night” and more spiced wine, street food, and crowded alleys humming with life. Every year in Jaffa (Tel Aviv’s sister city), they erect a massive Christmas tree at the city’s entrance, standing proudly between the palm trees and the Mediterranean Sea.

For many Jewish Israelis, Christmas is something to marvel at from a distance. It’s discussed with a mix of curiosity and mild envy, usually followed by the same sentence: “I love Christmas … just not in Israel.” Israelis will gleefully tell you how magical it is to be in New York, London, or Europe in December — to see the lights, the trees, the stores, and the general aesthetic of a holiday that requires zero obligations and comes with excellent branding.

After all, it’s hard to fully lean into the Christmas spirit when you’re wearing a light jacket, drinking an iced coffee, and arguing about politics before noon.

There’s a joke about Christmas in Israel: An EL AL Airlines plane lands at Ben Gurion Airport — Israel’s main international airport — on the morning of December 25th. Upon landing, the pilot makes the following announcement:

“Please remain seated with your seatbelts securely fastened while we taxi to the terminal. To those of you still seated with your seatbelts fastened, Merry Christmas. To those of you already in the aisles getting your suitcases from the overhead bins, welcome home.”

But this year, for Jews across the world, the mood is different.

We’re all still reeling from the terror attack at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration near Sydney less than three weeks ago. Traditionally, while most Australians are celebrating Christmas, the country’s Jews go to the beach.

Yet, as one of our guest writers, Nachum Kaplan, an Australian Jew living abroad, wrote:

“No one is going to pack the picnic hamper and head gaily to Sydney’s Bondi Beach, now forever a site of mass murder of Jews. Jews in other Australian cities will be thinking about Christmas beach picnics differently, too. … Given how appearing visibly Jewish makes you a target these days, many Jews are wondering if there is space in Australia for communal Jewish life any longer.”¹

Nachum is not wrong. Just a few hours ago in Melbourne, a rabbi’s car decorated for Hanukkah was firebombed. Thankfully no one was injured.

Across the Jewish diaspora, Christmas feels like a strange mirror: a world enveloped in lights and cheer while many of us are grappling with heavier questions about safety, community, and the complexity of Jewish life.

Christmas is a holiday of beautiful optics. It is public, illuminated, unselfconscious. Its joy is designed to be seen anywhere and everywhere, from sophisticated decorations to cute sweaters to immense warmth emanating from church doors and windows.

By contrast, Jewish life feels different. It is quieter, more guarded, more inward. We (both Jews and Israelis) measure where we go, what we wear, how visible we allow ourselves to be. While the world glows, many Jews are calculating — not joylessly, but carefully.

And yet, this has always been our posture. Christmas gets a season of lights and a soundtrack that starts in November; Jews get something less flashy, but still plenty durable. Like kugel, we survive by being passed down, reheated, argued over, and stubbornly present year after year.

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1. Kaplan, Nachum. “A strange Jewish Christmas.” Moral Clarity.