How cheesy holiday movies - and latkes - can bring Americans together

The oft-quoted adage "you are what you eat" takes on new meaning at the holidays. Families across the country recognize gingerbread houses, fruitcake and eggnog as classic Christmas food customs. And now, a new slate of made-for-TV movies is introducing viewers to ways of eating for Hanukkah, including the frying of latkes and the partaking of sufganiyot.

By highlighting holiday-eating rituals, these new films from Lifetime and the Hallmark Channel signal a shift in American holiday observance. The inclusion of movies that engage with Hanukkah food practices reveals a larger cultural trend toward celebrating religious diversity. Holiday foods provide a shorthand for the intersections of religion, memory and culture.

These films, therefore, have both great promise and serious risk. Food offers an opportunity for unity across American religions and cultures, given its intimate role in most religions' holiday celebrations. The presence of these films, if done right, can affirm Jews' inclusion in American society and articulate the need for more diversity on screen.

But, if done wrong, by depicting Jewish holiday traditions and foods as foreign or alien, these films can unintentionally signal that Judaism and the celebration of Hanukkah are anathema to American religious history - further isolating Jews and painting them outside the mainstream.

Across religions, eating and imbibing - or refraining from certain foods during Lent or fasting during Yom Kippur and Ramadan when the body becomes a vehicle for self reflection, atoning for one's past behavior or for seeking forgiveness - carry religious significance and symbolism. Within Christianity, bread and wine are used to receive the body of Christ through the rite of Holy Communion. The Jewish holiday of Passover uses foods including matzoh (unleavened bread) to retell the story of the Israelite exodus from ancient Egypt.

This tradition extends into secular approaches to holidays as well. Activities like baking Christmas cookies not only serve as a form of holiday celebration, but also enable individuals to recall and recreate past moments of happiness, often from their childhood.

Holiday foods therefore are about much more, including one's religious identity.

The history of Jewish food practices in the United States reveals that food has long been a vehicle for negotiating Jewish identity. Kosher dietary laws had long complicated social encounters for Jews living in a country in which they have always been a minority. This has meant a constant mediation over what they could and could not consume, with whom they could break bread and where. The decision to either abide by or disregard these dietary restrictions has held consequences for American Jewish communities.

Consider, for example, a dinner in July 1883, when rabbis and lay leaders from more than 70 Jewish congregations across the United States convened in Cincinnati to celebrate the ordination of Hebrew Union College's first class of rabbis. The celebratory meal that followed the ceremony meant to underscore the religious unity among American Jews, regardless of their disparate ideological identities. Yet, what became known as the Trefa Banquet revealed stark divisions. The banquet's menu lacked any pork products, as many Reform Jews of that generation considered the avoidance of pork a marker of their distinct Jewish identity, but it did include non-kosher food including shrimp, clams and crabs. This unintentional disregard for the Jewish attendees who kept kosher led to deep fractures within American Judaism.

American Jews continued to negotiate their religious and food identities throughout the 20th century. Eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived in the United States at the turn of the century having experienced hunger in their countries of origin. Such food insecurity informed the establishment of numerous new foodways in the United States, including an interest in the foods associated with other minority groups. Jewish immigrants and their offspring, for instance, developed an affinity for Chinese cuisine.

American Hanukkah food traditions have changed over time. Jewish cookbooks, especially those in the post-World War II period, offered variations on traditional holiday cuisine. Latkes, previously fried in schmaltz and Crisco before olive oil, are now often made using sweet potatoes or other vegetables as a base. Evolving family traditions and mass-marketed cookbooks helped to establish current Hanukkah food traditions. Christmas food customs likewise reflected the repurposing of family recipes and Americans' overall exposure to new cuisines throughout the 20th century.

The recently aired Lifetime movie, "Mistletoe and Menorahs," however, disparages this history by describing Jewish foods as foreign, rather than as familiar parts of the American holiday tradition. This movie highlights the celebration of both Christmas and Hanukkah. Christy, a toy company executive, recruits a friend of a friend to teach her about Hanukkah to impress a new client. Although she is a self-proclaimed holiday expert, her expertise does not extend beyond Christian holidays or food culture. In exchange for Hanukkah lessons, Christy agrees to teach Jonathan about Christmas to ensure he makes a good impression with his non-Jewish girlfriend's family.

Many of the lessons focus on the creation and consumption of holiday foods. In explaining Hanukkah, a Jewish holiday marking the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, Jonathan introduces latkes (potato pancakes often fried in oil) and sufganiyot (fried jelly doughnuts) as foods central to the holiday's history.

Lifetime's earnestness in educating Christy - and its viewing audience - about Hanukkah is belied by the way its characters describe Jewish food. When Jonathan suggests that latkes are better when eaten with a dollop of sour cream, his girlfriend responds by indicating this pairing is "very random." He responds with a corrective: "it's not random; it's traditional." Although Jonathan encourages his girlfriend to be open-minded when tasting Jewish food, it's Christy's boyfriend who unabashedly views latkes as outside his gastronomic comfort zone. "That doesn't even sound like a real word," he quips when Christy rushes him into her apartment as she is making latkes for the first time. She explains that he will serve as her culinary guinea pig, to which he responds, "it kind of looks like you're making guinea pig."

These statements effectively diminish the significance of Jewish food practices, suggesting that they fall outside of American holiday food traditions.

And so, this holiday season, we need more films that take the American roots of American Jews' holiday food culture more seriously. The Hallmark movie "Holiday Date," is a step in the right direction (despite the silly plot that has a single woman bring home an actor to pretend to be her ex-boyfriend). When the family learns that the actor is not "Mr. Christmas" as presumed, but rather a Jew, they celebrate Hanukkah with him. This celebration includes eating sufganiyot, to which a family member proclaims, "Hanukkah tastes just as good as Christmas!"

Despite the surprise voiced in this statement, such an assertion suggests that there is room to embrace Jewish foodways within American culture. "Double Holiday," a Hallmark movie that aired Dec. 21, goes a step further when a non-Jew assists his Jewish colleague in making latkes, indicating that as a seasoned cook, potato pancakes easily fall within his repertoire.

For several years, viewers have embraced the made-for-television and streaming Christmas movies that appear at this time of year. The recent decision by Hallmark and Lifetime to add Hanukkah to the holiday movie roster marks an important shift. And while some films portray the Jewish holiday as exotic, "random" or foreign, other depictions affirm Jewish inclusion and the diversity of American culture. Such a commitment to diversity will more fully reflect the nuances of contemporary American religion and culture.

Weiss directs the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education at the College of Saint Elizabeth and is writing a book on American Jewish-Protestant relations. She wrote this piece for The Washington Post.