"Safe Treyf": New York Jews and Chinese Food
by Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine

APPENDIX: Research Methods

Social scientists' discussions of methods usually focus exclusively on techniques used to identify and test hypotheses. We are including as well certain shared characteristics of our individual backgrounds and sociological orientations that helped turn our lifelong delight in Chinese food into a research problem that informed our approach. As Krieger suggested, we have found in conducting research in general, and especially in this project, that our visceral reactions to questions and data are often empirically relevant and theoretically revelatory. We believe, therefore, that briefly mentioning key biographical factors is both appropriate and useful in understanding the development of this project.

We were both first schooled in the sociology of culture by European émigré intellectuals and American-born ethnographers when we were undergraduates at Brandeis University in the mid-1960s. Our teachers and the intellectual spirit of Brandeis at the time immersed us in a broad, critical, anthropological, historical, and theoretical understanding of society and culture. Brandeis had been established in 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust, primarily by American Jews, as a modern, secular, nondenominational university. It was also a place where students and professors talked openly and frequently about the meaning and experience of being Jewish in a modern secular world.

More than twenty years later, as colleagues at the City University of New York, we found ourselves exchanging jokes and anecdotes about the Jewish attachment to Chinese food. Our first conversations drew on our different New York Jewish backgrounds: one of us was reared in a religious family, the other in a secular home. The more we talked, alone and with our colleagues, the more we realized that our shared delight in humor and gossip could not account for our fascination with the topic. Some chats, we insist, are not idle.

Although we had individually researched very different empirical topics, the embrace of Chinese restaurant food by New York Jews raised a central sociological (theoretical and methodological) issue for us both: the importance of meanings, interpretations and symbols in culture and lived experience. We had inadvertently come upon a subtle but concrete example of the social construction of ethnic culture and identity - and we had lived in the middle of that phenomenon for most of our lives.

In previous writings, we had each combined historical and ethnographic research. Therefore, we marked the formal beginning of our joint project by researching the intersecting histories of Jewish, Chinese, and American cultures and foods. Much of this detailed historical research was edited out of this article many drafts ago, but it provided most of our major hypotheses and hunches as well as the frame we used to organize and make sense of our data.

For over a year we interviewed friends, relatives, and acquaintances about their experiences eating in restaurants and particularly their experiences with Chinese restaurants and food. Our selection of informants was often opportunistic. For instance, at social events we turned conversations to Chinese food and interviewed people about their experiences and backgrounds. After hearing what people had to say about Chinese food, we would ask them their backgrounds. When we felt that some groups whose experiences we believed relevant to our project were underrepresented, we consciously sought informants from that group. All told, counting informal chats, over a hundred people told us about their experiences with Chinese food.

We sought to interview different categories of Jews and non-Jews who might have had different sorts of experiences with Chinese restaurants. Our Jewish informants included men and women reared in families with different sorts of attachments to Jewish identity (religious, ethnic, or political); people whose ancestors had migrated from all areas of Europe and from other continents; and people who grew up in the 1920s, '30s, '40s, and '50s in different areas of the country and who, as children, had belonged to different social classes. Our oldest Jewish informant was eight-two, our youngest, six. Because outsiders and newcomers to a culture might see more than would insiders, we interviewed non-Jews, especially those who had married Jews or those with many Jewish friends. We spoke with a number of Chinese Americans, Italian Americans, and Irish Americans. We interviewed Jews and non-Jews from many parts of the United States. Nearly all of our informants are middle or upper-middle class now. We stopped recording people's stories when our past experience with ethnographic research indicated that we had reached the saturation point. That is, we stopped taking informal notes when people relayed experiences comparable to ones we had already heard.

What we wanted to know also determined who we interviewed and when. For instance, when German Jews explained that fondness for Chinese food was specific to the descendants of Eastern Europeans and convinced us that the German and Austrian Jewish experience was simply different, we concentrated on speaking with people of Western European descent. When colleagues raised questions about the restaurant habits of Italian Americans, we interviewed members of that ethnic group. At one point, we hypothesized that Jews who had lived or passed through China might have introduced other Jews to Chinese food. We rejected this possibility after interviewing Jews who had lived in China, or whose parents had.

When we conducted interviews, we also explored New York metropolitan area neighborhoods, counted Chinese restaurants in neighborhoods that New Yorkers defined as being different in terms of class and ethnicity, and ate at Chinese restaurants in neighborhoods outside of our daily rounds, including glatt kosher Chinese restaurants in Queens and Manhattan and restaurants in the new Queens Little Asia, Afro-American neighborhoods, and working-class Hispanic neighborhoods. Wherever we went, we collected menus.

We focused primarily on New York Jews, particularly those from families whose members immigrated from Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century and in the first two decades of the 20th century. Jews living away from the East Coast have not usually developed the same degree of attachment to Chinese food, often because it is not so readily available. But what we have found holds for at least some Jews in such large cities as Chicago and especially for those who moved away after a generation or two in New York.

NOTES

1. The examples are legion: People from Sicily, Naples, Rome, Milan and Tuscany became Italian Americans; Navaho, Iroquois, and Cherokee became Native Americans; the descendants of Africans brought as slaves became African Americans; Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Fukienese became Chinese Americans; and Egyptians, Saudis, and Lebanese became Arab Americans. People have forged ethnic identities and cultures for many reasons: in response to discrimination and racism; because language, religion, or similar experiences enabled them to establish bonds of community and culture; and because, in America, shared economic and political interests dwarfed past differences.

2. Glazer and Moynihan's (1963) Beyond the Melting Pot has been property criticized for its lack of attention to enduring and institutional racism, and to the structural character of contemporary urban poverty (see Valentine 1968). However, among the book's clear strengths is its unblinking acceptance of the inescapable cultural pluralism of American cities. From its title onward, Beyond the Melting Pot straightforwardly promotes what in today's terms would be called a multicultural understanding of American society.

3. Even the strictly kosher can eat Chinese food. For the past few years, Chinese restaurants have constituted about a third of the strictly kosher restaurants serving meat that advertised in "The Dining Guide" of New York's The Jewish Press.

4. We believe that an analysis of webs of significance requires both ethnographic and historical research. For a classic discussion of the relationship between history and sociology see Park and Burgess (1921). For a more contemporary analysis of the relationship between the two perspectives see Giddens (1984).

5. For a structural analysis of European Jews as the "classical example" of the stranger, see Simmel (1950, 402-8).

6. We do not wish to give the impression that in the early 20th century most Jewish immigrants ate in Chinese restaurants. To reiterate, most immigrants were quite poor, rarely ate out, and when they did they were more likely to go to a Jewish eatery (Rischin 1962). However, based on our interviews and historical research, we are confident that some Jews frequented Chinese restaurants before the 1930s, were more likely to go to Chinese restaurants than to the eateries of other non-Jewish ethnic groups, and were more likely to go to Chinese restaurants than were other immigrants at the time.

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Gaye Tuchman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, has been president of the Eastern Sociological Society. She writes about culture and gender. Her books include Making News and Edging Women Out: Victorian Authors, Publishers, and Social Change.

Harry G. Levine is Professor of Sociology at Queens College, City University of New York. He has published widely on the sociology and social history of alcohol and drugs; with Craig Reinarman he has edited Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice.

Author's note in original publication:

We dedicate this article to the Brandeis University Sociology Department of the 1960s. Its faculty and students taught us to think big about everything, including seemingly small things.

Our colleagues at Queens College, Steven M. Cohen and Samuel Heilman, outstanding sociologists of American Jewry, offered us continuing advice and encouragement. We also presented an early draft of our findings to colleagues and students in sociology and history; their comments were invaluable.

We also acknowledge the pizzeria across the street from our Queens College offices. We worked out many of our ideas at La Pineta and author's name order was determined by a coin tossed there.

 Note: October 2001:

This article was originally published as: "New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern" by Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine. Contemporary Ethnography. 1992: Vol 22 No 3. pp. 382-407. It was reprinted in: The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods edited by Barbara G. Shortridge & James R. Shortridge. Roman & Littlefield, Publisher, 1997 pp.163-184. It was also reprinted in a substantially shortened form in the Brandeis University alumni magazine. This version for hereinstead.com has been edited slightly and the social science journal style in-the-text references have been dropped -- you can find them in the book or original article.

It was more difficult to get this article published than anything I have ever written. One reviewer for The American Sociological Review actually said that it might be too well written. I finally put the quote from Clifford Geertz at the beginning just to let academics know this was a serious piece -- and that worked.

Once the piece was published, however, it caught on big. Jewish people that I know personally made their children read it. Some New York high school students read it and had me come to talk them outside of school. It has been mentioned or quoted several times in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In 1997 it made it to the cover of Time Out New York. Neither of us has done anything to promote it. We didn't even know it was reprinted in The Taste of American Place until the New York Times had an article about a class at NYU that was having a lively discussion about our chapter.

I am please that this article is now regarded as an early example of the growing field that studies "Food and Culture." For years I have been promising myself to contribute another such work to the field -- this one would be titled: 'How the Chicken became Kosher." It seems the chicken is not actually included in forbidden items in the Torah. It appears that the chicken only first became Kosher in the late middle-age -- maybe even later than that. But that's a whole different story.... This one is about Chinese food.

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