Though mah jongg is played by all different types of people, it is played in large numbers by suburban Jewish women who often learn the game when they have young children. […]

“I always swore that I’d never play mah jongg,” my mother says. “I thought it was so typical. Very cliché – that Jewish women play mah jongg, it seemed so old-fashioned, so much my mother’s generation. When I learned how to play and liked it so much, we hired a baby sitter and shared the baby sitter. It’s a thinking game, intellectual. It’s a way of getting out of the house. When you have a small child, life is wrapped up in an infant; this is a way to have a social life.”

The Hartford Courant looks at the place of Mah Jongg in American-Jewish culture. (Reg. req’d.)