Three days before Christmas, 2009, and just under three years before I married Ross, I found myself chauffeuring his grandmother up the Atlantic City Expressway. For the first time since moving to the Northeast, I had decided not to spend the December holidays back home in El Paso, Texas.
“But Jilli, it’s Christmas!” my sister, Lindsay, had said.
“But Lindsay, we’re Jewish!” I’d responded. Sure, we’d grown up lighting our menorah while our Christmas tree glistened in the background, but our Christmas celebrations had always been of the secular variety. No Jesus, no manger, no mass.
And so, having opted out of the two thousand-mile flight, I ended up driving my future husband’s Catholic grandmother, Kay, from the bus depot at Caesar’s to Washington Township, New Jersey, where her daughter, Cait—my future mother-in-law—lived. Kay, who passed away in 2014, was a wonderful person, but she could sometimes be “old person racist,” always pointing out or attributing characteristics to a person’s ethnicity, more out of ignorance than hate but jarring all the same. Two miles into the drive, she mentioned that she’d had dinner a few evenings before at her neighbors’ home. “It was a big party. Huge! They served goat. Have you ever had goat? I think it’s a Mexican thing. Do you know any Mexicans?” I changed the subject and asked Kay where she’d like to go for lunch.
An hour later, when we met up with Cait at a diner, Kay mentioned a friend who had gone with her to a Christmas luncheon. “She’s Jewish, you know,” Kay confided. “But she doesn’t act Jewish.”
“Ma, what does that mean?” asked Cait, looking at me apologetically. Kay knew I am Jewish; she sent me a Chanukah card every year.
“Oh, you know,” Kay said without hesitation. “She’s not cold. She’s very friendly. Welcoming. Like my neighbors.”
She meant the Mexican family she told me about earlier. Cait glared at her mother; I kept my mouth shut. It was easier than explaining that I grew up at the crossroads of Mexican and Jewish culture. Easier than explaining why my Spanish is better than my Hebrew. Easier than explaining that not only did I know Mexicans, I knew Mexican Jews—and that there were plenty of other Jews, like me, whose families had been living alongside Mexicans so long that their cultural identities were inextricably tangled. Easier, even, than explaining why my great-grandmother’s recipe for varza—a traditional Romanian side dish of sauerkraut braised in tomato sauce—comes with a note scribbled on the bottom encouraging the cook to add canned chopped green chilies to the dish.
American Jews were never the type to move to a new place and conquer it—the Jews of the diaspora are worlds apart from the warrior-Jews of Biblical times, the Judah Maccabees and King Davids—but rather we arrive, see what we like, and we make it our own. That’s certainly how it happened in El Paso. Our creation story, our Genesis 1:1, begins with our food. In the beginning, there was the jalapeño. And then the Jews of El Paso sensed that the jalapeño might complement gefilte fish, and they made it part of the Passover meal. And the Jews of El Paso saw that it was good, and a new tradition was born.
***
My Nani’s chili-infused varza is often served with a side of confusion to dinner guests expecting a more traditional side dish. Jewish food isn’t known for its heat. But then there is no such thing, really, as “Jewish” food. Not the way that there’s Italian food or Chinese food or French food. Those labels gloss over regional and cultural boundaries and group dozens of cuisines into one menu, but they are at least accurate in that they describe the cuisine of a people unified by a national identity.
What we think of as Jewish food, on the other hand, is food of a diaspora. It is a few core items mandated by religious ritual—challah for the Sabbath, latkes for Chanukah, wine for just about everything—set in the larger context of wherever the Jews found themselves. In Russia and Eastern Europe, we acquired our bialys and our blintzes; in the Middle East, we discovered hummus and falafel; in New York, we perfected pastrami. The only thing that ties “Jewish” food together is that it’s kosher—prepared and served according to the laws of kashrut, which were established by the Jews as a way to keep themselves separate from the Philistines who had recently invaded the Holy Land. These are the rules, laid out first in Leviticus and Deuteronomy but codified in the Talmud, that mandated that Jews refrain from pork or shellfish; that meat and dairy be served hours apart, at separate meals and on separate sets of dishes so that they did not even meet in the stomach; that even our wine be certified by a rabbinical organization.
But then there are New England Jews who love their lobster (just not, quips rabbi-comedian Bob Alper, with butter), and New Orleans Jews whose Yom Kippur hams and congregation-sponsored crawfish boils have been documented in books by Jewish southerners like Melissa Fay Greene and Marcie Cohen Ferris. And there are Jews like me, from El Paso—a mid-size city in far-west Texas where over three-quarters of the population is of Hispanic or Mexican descent—who boil jalapeños with their matzoh balls and serve tacos instead of bagels at a bris.
To keep kosher in El Paso would be nearly impossible. Combination platters at popular local restaurants like Avila’s feature tightly rolled beef or chicken enchiladas smothered in either a smoky red chili sauce or a bright, spicy green one, topped with a layer of melted cheese. Even if you forgo the cheese, you’re not safe: the refried beans on your plate and freshly fried tostada chips in the basket in front of you were both likely cooked with lard.
I knew the list of forbidden, treyf foods from a young age, but it never occurred to me to pay them much mind outside of the occasional youth group gathering, when pizzas were ordered with mushrooms and bell peppers but never pepperoni, or the synagogue-hosted meals featuring sorbet instead of ice cream for dessert if chicken or brisket had been on the menu. The distinction between the synagogue, where we kept kosher, and everywhere else, where we did not, was not mine alone, but seemed to be an understanding amongst all the Jews I grew up with in El Paso. During confirmation classes my sophomore year of high school, the rabbi from El Paso’s Conservative congregation weighed in on the famous mandate from Exodus 34:26: “You must not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.”
“Look,” he told us, “if you can prove to me that the cheese I’ve got on top of my burger was made from the milk of the cow’s mother, I’ll put it down. Otherwise, shut up and let me enjoy my Whopper.”
We also studied classical and contemporary Jewish scholars in confirmation class, learned some carried the opinion that one may be a good Jew without even believing in God. And if you can be a good Jew without believing in such a fundamental idea as God, then that occasional cheeseburger couldn’t be that bad, could it?
***
Though the Jewish community in El Paso is not large, it’s larger than one would expect—as of 2005, there were almost five thousand of us in a city whose population barely topped half a million. However we got to El Paso, we stayed because of the ease with which we were able to make it our home. El Pasoans are historically tolerant; how could they not be, when for decades the city’s ownership transferred back and forth between Mexico and the United States? And they welcomed the Jews like they did everyone else, with open arms and a promise to let them be. Jews, in turn, have become so comfortable with defining our Judaism in the context of the more visible El Paso culture that we identify ourselves more with our region than our religion. We’re just practicing what all our families did in other parts of the world, before they arrived in West Texas: cultural assimilation.
Even the most traditionally “Jewish” food gets a makeover in El Paso. A childhood friend recounts that her mother will allow only one type of bullion to go into the base for her jalapeño-laced matzoh ball soup: Telma, a brand that can only be found in the Mexican/Hispanic food section of the grocery store. When we were younger, her mother also assisted on many bar and bat mitzvah baking projects, turning out tray after tray of buttery “pecan sand tarts”—Mexican wedding cookies re-shaped from their traditional circles into crescent moons—for post-service, kosher dairy brunches.
The fusion of Mexican and Jewish culture and cuisine, the “never mind whether it’s kosher unless we’re at synagogue” attitude, never seemed strange to me. It’s not that I assumed that all Jews served enchiladas at their wedding receptions. I just didn’t give it much thought one way or another. I was nineteen years old and two thousand miles from home before I realized that keeping kosher was something many Jews actually did. At the University of Pennsylvania, I was introduced to the Hillel dining hall, where meat and milk were not just kept apart in separate kitchens, but on separate floors. On the rare occasion that I would dine at Hillel with my friends, we would decide before entering the cafeteria whether to stay downstairs with the dairy or head upstairs to the meat. Those of us who just wanted a salad would be swayed by the others who were really craving a hamburger or by those who really wanted frozen yogurt for dessert. In my laid-back El Paso way, I just went with the flow. I could commingle my meat and dairy later.
My Jewish friends at Penn didn’t know what to make of me. I attended services (the important ones, anyway) and chanted along in Hebrew, but I would happily dig into a bacon cheeseburger to break my Yom Kippur fast. I had never been to Israel, was not active in Hillel life, and, although Judaism is matrilineal and so it shouldn’t have mattered that my father was a lapsed Catholic, was generally perceived as not-quite-Jewish-enough. And if you define Judaism strictly by your last name and your observation of holidays and your loyalty to the laws of kashrut, I suppose I wasn’t.
Before long weekends and school holidays, when these friends would discuss the tender brisket or rasin-laden sweet noodle kugel or buckwheat-and-bowtie pasta kasha varnishkas that awaited them at home on Long Island or in Westchester County or Northern New Jersey, I’d dream of my mother’s chile verde and the fresh steamed pork tamales she bought to serve with it. I brought a dozen frozen tamales back to the dorms after my first furlough in El Paso and ate them late at night with my door closed, aware that the scent of microwaved pork would drift down the hall toward my Orthodox hallmate. But I was too happy to have a taste of home to care.
***
Whether the Jews of El Paso embraced Mexican food before or after we began abandoning traditional dietary restrictions, I’m not sure. Maybe it happened simultaneously: some of the first Jews to arrive in El Paso came from Mexico, where they were driven from Spain during the Inquisition, long enough ago that the food had time to become part of the rituals. On Friday nights—Shabbat—when my friends from Penn might be passing a challah around the table, ripping off pieces to share, many El Paso Jews can be found at Avila’s, dipping those lard-fried tostada chips into spicy jalapeño salsa. And as sunset falls the next evening to mark the end of the Sabbath and other Jews are extinguishing Havdalah candles in glasses of kosher wine, you might find the Jews of El Paso mixing margaritas and toasting another beautiful desert sunset. This is not irreverence; it is adaptation.
Even our most sacred rituals receive the El Paso treatment. On August 31, 1996, just over a month before my thirteenth birthday, I became a woman. On that day, I was called to the pulpit, then led the congregation through several Hebrew prayers, said my aliyah, read from the Torah, and was, officially, a bat mitzvah.
After the service, I sat with my friends in the room adjoining the sanctuary and ate the same kosher meal served at almost every b’nai mitzvah brunch—dairy, not meat: salad, bread, two pasta offerings (one with red sauce and cheese for the kids, the other, picked by my mother, full of vegetables), fresh fruit, cookies for dessert—and offered sincere wardrobe consults for the festivities still to come. My denim skort jumper already hung, pressed, in my closet.
That night we danced. We did not do the hora; there was no klezmer recording of “Hava Nagilah.” Instead, we extended our arms and shook our hips to Los Del Rios’ “Macarena” and swayed to the beat to “Crossroads” and “Gangsta’s Paradise.” We were in the backyard at my paternal grandparents’ house, a vast expanse of concrete nestled high up in the mountains, the desert cascading downhill behind us. Later that night, while the DJ packed up his records, we found find a hairy, black tarantula trying to get back to this home from wherever he had been hiding all night, then trapped the arachnid in a jar and chased my six-year-old baby sister around the yard with it, before letting it go somewhere we thought it would be safe from trampling.
This was Judaism, El Paso style. My grandparents’ garage, emptied out and draped for the occasion, housed two catering tables piled with Mexican classics. If there was any effort on the caterers’ part to separate meat from milk, it went ignored by the rest of us. Between the good dance songs, my friends and family piled their plates with rolled tacos, gorditas, refried beans, Mexican rice, tostada chips, two kinds of salsa, chile con queso. Vegetarians were not considered in our menu plan. At that point, I’m not sure I even knew any. Just like I didn’t know anybody who kept kosher.
***
I usually make varza to accompany another recipe handed down from my great grandmother: Romanian meatballs. Their proper name, written phonetically on the recipe card in Yiddish or Romanian (the card does not specify which), is ar-day-em-plutz. The correct spelling is lost to the ages; Google yields nothing when I try to recover it, and a search for “Romanian meatballs” always yields results for chiftele, which are not prepared the same way.
This recipe is simple, especially compared to the savory, herb-laced, Italian-style meatballs my half-Italian mother-in-law makes. Ground meat, egg, rice, bread, salt, pepper—that’s it. As I roll the mixture into balls, the raw meat squishes between my fingers and finds its way, always, under my fingernails. And then when I coat the balls in flour, the white powder sticks to the meaty remnants on my palms and in the creases of my knuckles, ultimately resulting in several minutes of thorough hand washing under too-hot water, just to make sure my hands are clean. In college, during one of the many kosher meals I was invited to, I learned that hand washing is an essential part of any traditionally Jewish meal. It must have been lodged somewhere in my psyche all along.
After the meatballs spend hours braising in tomato sauce—which, like the varza, contains green chilies—the mess is forgotten, and the results are delicious. I never learned how to make matzoh balls, and my last attempts at making challah all resulted in a chewy, doughy, mess of a loaf; so my great-grandmother’s recipes are the only “Jewish” food I really know how to make.
***
Two days after Christmas, when Kay and Cait came over for dinner, I made ar-day-em-plutz and varza, hot peppers and all. Kay cleaned her plate, asked for a second serving. “This is Jewish food, you said?” she asked me, pushing her last half-meatball around her plate, coating it with the remaining sauce, and scooping up the last shreds of cabbage. Then, without waiting for an answer: “I didn’t know they used peppers in Jewish food.” I opened my mouth to respond, but thought better of it. “Can you send me the recipe?” Kay continued, putting fork to mouth. I hid my smile with my napkin.
As certain as I am that Kay enjoyed the meal, I’m sure that she did not pick up on why this was the menu of choice for her visit. A Mexican, Jewish meal: my silent response to her innocent but ignorant comments about both cultures. My way of telling her about me.
