A WhatsApp group born at a Chabad Purim party in 2024 has grown into a monthly gathering that bridges two ancient traditions in the world’s most diverse city
An Only-in-New-York Story of Serendipity and Shared Identity
New York City has always been a laboratory for improbable communities — the place where people who would never find each other anywhere else eventually do. The story of Mazel Tofu, a collective of Jewish Mandarin speakers that began as a WhatsApp group and has grown into a monthly gathering that draws participants from across the city and the world, is one of the more vivid recent examples of that phenomenon. The origin story is almost too good to be true. At a Chabad Purim party in 2024, three men happened to find themselves in the same room: Jacob Scheer, a media relations associate at Chabad who had studied Chinese at the intensive Princeton in Beijing program; Ben Weinstein, a teacher at SAR High School, an Orthodox day school, who had learned Chinese while studying abroad in Taiwan before teaching English as a second language to seventh-graders there; and Mr. Shlumpadink — the stage name of an accordion player who performs folk songs in Yiddish, Chinese, and Japanese. They began speaking in Mandarin.
From WhatsApp to Buddha Bodai
After running into each other again at a Shabbat dinner a few weeks later, Weinstein and Mr. Shlumpadink decided to formalize the connection by creating a WhatsApp group for Chinese-speaking Jews. The response surprised them. “I was surprised that it snowballed this quickly,” Mr. Shlumpadink told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Within weeks, they were scheduling their first outing, gathering at Buddha Bodai — a kosher Chinese restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown that has served the city’s Jewish community for decades. The group now meets roughly once a month, drawing a rotating cast of regulars and newcomers who share either Jewish identity, Chinese language fluency, or both, often in unexpected combinations.
A Diverse Community With Global Roots
The members of Mazel Tofu reflect the extraordinary variety of paths that connect Jewish and Chinese identities in 2026. Owen Roubeni, 21, is a college student from the Mashadi Persian Jewish community in Great Neck who spent several years living in Shanghai while attending NYU Shanghai, where he became deeply involved with the local Chabad community. “I’m way more active in Shanghai than when I’m home,” he told the JTA. “They need me to make a minyan.” Then there is the group’s most visible member: Arieh Smith, known online as XiaomaNYC — Chinese for “Little Pony in NYC” — whose viral videos of himself conversing with strangers in their native languages have attracted millions of views. Smith, who speaks dozens of languages, has spoken candidly about the complicated dynamics of Jewish and Chinese cultural perceptions. At the Buddha Bodai gathering, he noted that on Chinese social media, conspiracy theories about Jewish influence over American government circulate — and are sometimes received with admiration rather than hostility. “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.” The observation captures something real about a long tradition of Chinese philosemitism alongside the discomfort of navigating stereotypes, even ostensibly positive ones.
Two Ancient Traditions in Conversation
Perhaps the most quietly powerful story within Mazel Tofu is that of Leo Hu, a musician who moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the Manhattan School of Music. Through the group, he found not only a Chinese-speaking Jewish community but also a path toward his own religious conversion. He is now in the process of converting to Judaism, 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 of Judaism. “I feel very lucky.” It is worth noting that Judaism is not among China’s five officially recognized state religions, and that antisemitism and anti-Israel content surged online in China following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Navigating Jewish identity within a Chinese context — or Chinese identity within a Jewish institutional context — carries real complexity that Mazel Tofu members navigate differently and honestly. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has covered the group’s growth in depth, providing the most comprehensive account of its origins and membership.
Community as an Act of City-Making
Mazel Tofu is, on one level, a social club. On another level, it is an example of what New York’s diversity actually produces when given space to breathe — not a melting pot that erases difference, but a gathering where difference is the point, and where the shared experience of navigating multiple identities simultaneously creates its own form of belonging. In a city where Zohran Mamdani has built a mayoral campaign around the idea of a New York that works for everyone — including its immigrant, multilingual, and multiply-identified communities — groups like Mazel Tofu represent the grassroots version of that vision: self-organized, ungoverned, and entirely authentic. My Jewish Learning provides deep background on Jewish diaspora communities and interfaith cultural exchange for those who want more context on the traditions at play in the group. Chabad.org’s global community finder illustrates just how far the organization’s reach extends into Chinese-speaking Jewish communities worldwide, from Shanghai to New York City.
