I'm Jewish. I invite you all to celebrate any Jewish holiday. But they're all stupid religious bullshit other than the food part, so I wouldn't bother.
I have the best Jewish friends. They're not strict Jewish, they adapt a lot of the traditions to suit themselves. For example any of the food heavy holiday's they invite their non-Jewish friends over but do most of the religious stuff before we show up. So for me, I get to visit with friends, eat pretty good food (I've learned what to avoid like the unleavened bread), and help them celebrate something that's important to them. They make no expectation for us to actually participate, just respect that they are. It's a good time.
I feel for their kids though, they have to do the 10 hour thing.
Yep. Half my family is Jewish, half is Catholic. My dad (Jewish atheist) made me sit through a really long seder once and afterward said he forgot how boring they are. And also didn't warn me about the bitter herbs lol. Next time we went to a seder it was wayyy more streamlined.
You can use parsley as 'bitter herbs,' which is what we did. Not the most pleasant thing to eat, but not exactly unpalatable. I've heard of some people using celery. That feels like cheating.
I think that may be what the idea was, but they definitely meant just regular celery because the conversation, which had happened a couple of times with guests when I was a kid, was along the lines of "why are you using parsley? Celery is so much nicer!"
I dated a girl who is Jewish many years ago. Her parents would just throw dishes at each other while arguing in Hebrew. To hear you say that it can’t be entertaining slightly offends me.
Hebrew or Yiddish? If she wasn't Israeli, it was probably Yiddish. Yiddish is also better for yelling people in. My grandmother was very good at it. It's like if German had a bastard child with Polish.
Oh maybe that’s what it was. On a related note the girl I dated has a sister that was a substitute teacher at our high school at the time. She was 21 and would buy us booze and she also played strip poker with my friends and me. Took my buddy’s virginity. Fun times!
Not very much. There are very few Ladino speakers alive today. Like exponentially fewer than Yiddish, which already doesn't have very many speakers left.
Ladino is very close to Medieval Spanish, but written using Hebrew letters.
Well the problem is that Passover has the best food, but it's also celebrating a genocide, so I don't really have a good recommendation.
Purim maybe? It's mildly less stupid than the others since it's actually based on something that really happened? But it's still based on an arranged marriage, so even that's kind of fucked up. I don't know. The Bible is ridiculous.
Every year my mother buys jelly donuts for us when we come to visit for Hanukkah and every year, we all tell her that we don't like jelly donuts.
At least she doesn't try to cook them. She's an awful cook. And she doesn't understand food. She makes latkes in the oven (not fried) the day before we come, freezes them, then defrosts them when we come over. And we eat two and pretend we like them and cover them with enough sour cream so that we can't taste them.
We used to go home and make our own another day, but they're also kind of a pain in the ass to make, so we just deal with shitty latkes once a year now.
Her matzoh ball soup is fine, but it's very hard to fuck that up.
Oh, the homemade donuts, all 122 of them were well received! As well as the hamantaschen. But when you're making a gross of them, it just takes a long time.
I like latkes, but it was one of them few holiday cooking things that I did not get pushed into doing as a kid (and now several decades later still do for the family)
Challah, hamantaschen, donuts...mostly all the dessert things, I guess. And the charoset! There's more, but I forget until I get the call and start baking for her.
I'm good with most Jewish food, but I draw the line at gefilte fish. I don't know who decided ground up fish balls in soup was a good idea, but it wasn't.
She was (is) a great cook, they were always light and fluffy. Usually we'd have them with applesauce but sometimes she'd make them with a lot of onion and we'd eat them with ketchup.
It does not. She's a much better cook than when I was a kid while still being a terrible cook. But at least her idea of offering me dinner is no longer a defrosted turkey burger every night.
There were also the dreaded dinnertime words of my childhood: "This was an experiment."
Because the "experiment" was usually something like, "the recipe called for two cups of sugar and that's too much sugar, so I substituted cottage cheese."