The MatzoBall Is the Season’s Hottest Not-Christmas Party

God’s callings are mysterious. Sometimes he asks you to free your people from slavery and walk through a sea. Sometimes he commands you to kill your son. Sometimes he tells you to gather your people in a darkly lit club, pump up the jams, and get them wasted.

“I’m in the business of making Jewish babies,” says Andy Rudnick, founder of the MatzoBall, a series of Christmas Eve parties for Jewish singles. “I’m a key factor in stopping the assimilation effect.” The first MatzoBall was held in 1987 in Boston. This year there will be 18 parties across the country, with a total of about 25,000 people paying $30 to $50 at the door. Rudnick says that once he started throwing parties, he never went home alone on a Christmas Eve. “Never. Never. That would be like owning a restaurant and not eating.” Now 51, he met his wife, Catherine, at a MatzoBall in 1997.