How a Chinese Game Became a Jewish Women’s Ritual — and is Bringing Women Together Again
I was recently looking up local events in Denver and I noticed Wednesday nights at a place I frequent had Mahjong night. A few days later, I saw an advertisement for Mahjong lessons at a local club.
The only time I had heard Mahjong come up in the three decades prior was from my Jewish mother, of blessed memory. She and other older Jewish women would get together and play something called Maj, as they called it for short.
“I won $5 last night!” I recall my mother once frantically calling me in 2019 in unabated excitement. Mom was 72 years-old at the time and thought it couldn’t wait. To tell me in the middle of my workday about her Maj victory. She had just demolished her opponents the night before in a fierce game with close friends. Our family never had a lot of money, so I got a chuckle out of her celebration over five dollars.
Mahjong began as a Chinese tile game, probably in the 19th century. It uses artistically decorated tiles, usually played by four people, and blends strategy, memory, luck, pattern recognition, and social play. Maj sets can be quite beautiful.
The game first came to the United States in the 1920s and became a national craze. American companies sold Mah Jongg (how it got spelled in America) sets, rulebooks, and “Oriental” themed marketing, often with a lot of exoticized and inaccurate Chinese imagery.
But what really preserved the game was when American Jewish women in New York and other urban Jewish communities formed the National Mah Jongg League in 1937 when the game no longer was a fad in the broader population. The League began issuing an annual card with official hands and combinations, which helped keep the game organized, social, and fresh.
It took off like wildfire among Jewish women nationwide. But I often wondered, how did the game become so Jewish?
Life for Jews wasn’t so easy when most first immigrated to America in the early to mid-20th century. Signs in the South often read “NO NEGROES. NO JEWS!” Jewish applicants to prestigious Ivy League schools were often denied based on limited quotas for Jews.
Jews weren’t allowed in white clubs. Or white fraternal organizations. They were excluded from many elite professions, which forced Jews then into textiles, sports, gangs, entertainment and the like. Maj offered Jewish women a way to still enjoy life despite the noise of the outside world.
It was a structured social game women could play at home, in apartments, at Jewish resorts, in synagogues, and later in suburban communities. It fit well into Jewish women’s social networks, especially among mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and friends. It even became associated with Jewish summer culture in places like the Catskills and South Florida.
But there was also a deeper assimilation angle.
By the mid-20th century, many Jews, including Jewish women, were trying hard to build American middle-class lives while still maintaining Jewish social worlds. Like many Jews and other newer immigrants in America, they were afraid at looking and sounding too ethnic because of how society treated them. They wanted desperately to fit in. To pass. To be American.
Mahjong gave them a way to socialize, raise money for charities, connect across generations, and create a space for Jewish women that wasn’t too “Jewy” and had no connection to anything religious or ritual. Yet still remained Jewish culturally. It allowed Jewish women to connect with their kinfolk without coming across to the rest of America as not fitting in. It was just a game after all.
For the next six decades, Maj would go on to be the game Jewish women played with other Jewish women. Whether in Alabama, New York, Montana, Missouri, Texas or California. It gave the next generations of Jewish women an outlet to connect. It would remain that way for the next 70+ years.
I really never saw the game pop up much in American culture outside of Jewish and Chinese communities. I hadn’t heard of people playing the game other than my mom and her circle of Jewish friends with their weekly games, and some friends’ Jewish mothers doing the same.
Fast forward to the 2020s, where division, social-media induced loneliness, and the stress of an increasingly chaotic world seem to have overtaken many.
Enter Maj.
What Jewish women were able to do with this game was disconnect from the stress of the world and instead connect with other women. Sure, to play a fun, competitive game. But more importantly to socialize, to laugh, to talk. To unwind. To cultivate healthy connections.
But what once sustained Jewish women is now becoming universal for many American, and not just Jewish, women. At a time when we all need to take time breaks from the tumultuous world.
I accidentally walked in on a group of women in their 40s playing Maj recently and observed this firsthand. Women got to take a break from jobs. From caring for their children. From their spouses. From the news. From the stressors life throws at us.
And instead, for an hour or two, just be. With other women.
I have no idea how to play Maj and probably won’t ever learn, but I’m grateful women today have this 200-year-old Chinese game to help recharge and reboot.
Jeffrey Kass is a lawyer, award-winning author, law professor, speaker and thought leader on race and ethnicity. He’s also an avid coffee enthusiast and fashion connoisseur. Some of his articles can be found at https://medium.com/@jeffreykass, his website www.jeffreykassglobal.com and on instagram @jeffreykass01.
