A YouTuber, a theater consultant and an accordionist walk into a kosher Chinese restaurant.
It’s not the setup to a Borscht Belt joke — it’s half of the party that grabbed a table recently at Buddha Bodai in New York City’s Chinatown for a lively debate over dim sum and tea.
The men were part of Mazel Tofu, a collective of Jewish Mandarin speakers that formed two years ago through an only-in-New York tale of serendipity and Jewish geography.
A Chabad Purim party in 2024 brought together three men with mutual friends and the vague knowledge that the other shared their affinity for Chinese: Jacob Scheer, a media relations associate at Chabad; Ben Weinstein, a teacher at SAR High School, an Orthodox day school; and Mr. Shlumpadink, the stage name of an accordion player who performs folk songs in Yiddish, Chinese and Japanese. Soon, they were speaking in Chinese.
After encountering each other at a Shabbat dinner together a few weeks later, Weinstein and Mr. Shlumpadink decided to form a WhatsApp group for Chinese-speaking Jews. Soon, they were scheduling their first outing.
“I was surprised that it snowballed this quickly,” said Mr. Shlumpadink, whose name is derived from the Yiddish word for “unkempt” and who does not use his real name in association with his act. “The feeling I got when we finally got all these people together was this moment of validation for a lot of us, when it’s like, ‘Yeah, we knew this was a thing.’ We all knew it, and now we actually have a group, this little institution, to justify it.”
Two years later, the WhatsApp group has 53 members, all brought in through mutual friends or word of mouth. (Almost all are men, which group members say they hope to see change.)
There are only two criteria to be added to the chat. You have to be Jewish, and you have to speak Chinese. It’s a relatively unusual combination: Despite a long history of Jewish settlement that includes a historic, now-assimilated community in the city of Kaifeng formed during the Song Dynasty (960-1127 CE) and an influx of European Jewish refugees to Shanghai before World War II, there are relatively few Jews in China today.
But Jews regularly study and work abroad in Chinese-speaking environments. Weinstein, for example, learned Chinese while studying abroad in Taiwan, then taught English as a second language to seventh-graders there after graduating from the University of Chicago.
Owen Roubeni, 21, is a college student from the Mashadi Persian community in Great Neck, New York. The Buddha Bodai Mazel Tofu event was his first time meeting the group in person, because he had been living in Shanghai for the past several years while attending NYU Shanghai.
Roubeni made a name for himself among the Jewish Chinese-speakers in recent months after starting a fundraiser to get mezuzahs for Shanghai’s small Jewish student community. In Shanghai, he is actively involved with Chabad, where he attends Shabbat services every week.
“I’m way more active in Shanghai than when I’m home,” Roubeni said of his involvement in the Jewish community. “They need me to make a minyan.”
Roubeni was brought into the group through an acquaintance at the Shanghai Chabad.
Then there’s Scheer, who perfected his Chinese while enrolled in the intensive Princeton in Beijing program in 2012.
At one point during the program, Scheer auditioned for “The Chinese Bridge,” a talent show operated by the Chinese government in which foreign students demonstrate their Chinese language skills through the talents of their choice.
“And I was like, ‘I’ll do Chinese rap,’” Scheer said. He made it to the main stage in China, where he wore a New York Yankees hat and rapped about sports in front of backup dancers. The production, he said, “was literally a propaganda tool” for the government — and yet it solidified his passion for speaking Chinese.
Over WhatsApp and at their regular gatherings, the group seamlessly switches back and forth between Mandarin and English while seeking to stick to Mandarin as much as possible. They take pleasure in surprising the Chinese wait staff with their language skills, talking over each other and cracking jokes.
The group discusses topics like the merits and drawbacks of simplified and traditional Chinese; how to faithfully translate a concept or word into Chinese; current events; the state of real estate in China; the controversial satirical musical “Slam Frank,” whose creator is also a member of the group; and shares tales from their travels to Asia, including how to keep kosher in mainland China (answer: very difficult).
Judaism is not one of China’s five officially recognized religions. After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel, antisemitism and anti-Israel content spiked online in China. But there is also a long tradition of Chinese philosemitism.
“I think that being Jewish, we have the common experience of those similar stereotypes in China: having money, being good at business, being smart, controlling the world,” Mr. Shlumpadink said during the meal. “So when you tell a Chinese person you’re Jewish, it’s like: you’re smart or rich.”
The group’s celebrity member, Arieh Smith, better known by his social media handle XiaomaNYC, chimed in.
“I saw on Chinese TikTok that ‘Jews control the American government,’” Smith said. “Like [they think] it’s cool that Jews control the American government.”
As XiaomaNYC — Chinese for “Little Pony in NYC” — Smith’s videos capture him speaking dozens of different languages, often surprising the people for whom that is their native tongue. His videos frequently earn millions of views.
Smith began learning Chinese in 2008, the summer after he graduated high school. An ad for a class listed in the New York Times was all it took for him to get the bug. In college, he got a scholarship to study abroad in China, where he seriously began his journey as a professional polyglot.
“And then I met a Chinese girl here who converted to Judaism and we have two kids who speak Chinese and some Hebrew too,” Smith said.
The cultural exchange moves both ways.
Liangda Hu, 38, moved to New York in 2021 from Tianjin, China, a city outside of Beijing. He joined the group after meeting a member on Simchat Torah at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.
Hu, who goes by the name Leo in English, moved to the United States to pursue a graduate education at the Manhattan School of Music. In addition to finding a Chinese-speaking Jewish community through the Mazel Tofu group, he’s found a new religious community for himself, too. He is in the process of converting to Judaism, and finding ways to make these two identities work together, even adapting Chinese recipes with kosher substitutes and using ChatGPT to translate his daily Talmud study into Mandarin.
“This culture constantly wants to accept, to experience new things,” Hu said about Judaism. “I feel very lucky.”
