Sitting in yeshiva, I don't exactly meet very many women, so my data set is a bit limited. But from using Frumster, here's what I've determined:

Whenever I write to Modern Orthodox women, specifically ones whose profiles evince some basic compatibility with me in terms of both hashqafa (weltanschauung or ideology) and general intellectuality, the response I usually get is quite negative. That is, if I get a response at all, since about half of the women don't even bother doing that. 

By contrast, when I write to the more yeshivishe or Beit Ya'akov-ish women, I almost always get a very warm response. I don't know how many times the woman has said that if only my hashqafa were further to the right, that she'd be very willing to date me. In fact, several times, I've been told that even with my left-wing hashqafa, she'd love to be platonic friends, if only she were willing to have platonic friendships with the opposite sex. So were it not for my left-wing hashqafa, it would appear that the more right-wing young women would accept me just fine, if not enthusiastically so.

When I asked my rabbi where I ought to go to yeshiva after my three-year stint in Machon Meir (a yeshiva for baalei teshuva in Jerusalem), one of the places I mentioned was Machon Pardes, a non-denominational left-wing-but-traditional coeducational yeshiva. My rabbi responded that he could see why I'd think they were good for me, given their generally left-wing stance. Nevertheless, he said to me, what I needed was a place with the character of a traditional yeshiva (unlike Pardes) but with a left-wing hashqafa (similar to Pardes). In any case, I needed to leave Machon Meir; my rabbi told me that its limited degree of tolerance was due only to its baal teshuva character (with the newly religious, one must perforce tolerate some degree of insubordination), and that if I were to attend a frum-from-birth-type yeshiva with the exact same hashqafa as Machon Meir, such as Merkaz ha-Rav, I'd get eaten up alive for sure, my rabbi told me.

In other words: I'm hashqafically left-wing but behaviorally right-wing.

So it would seem that I need to find a young woman who has the personality of a yeshivishe person but the hashqafa of a left-wing MO. Maybe a Beit Ya'akov graduate who's gone waaaay off the derekh?

Who am I? A shadkhan's nightmare.

High school girls in the Israeli town of Kiryat Gat are being warned not to become romantically involved with Bedouins, via a program run by a social worker named Chaim Shalom. A 10-minute film called Sleeping With the Enemy cautions girls that Bedouins may shower them with gifts and then leave them pregnant and alone, or refuse to allow them to return to their families after ending the relationship. Single Bedouin Men: like kyrptonite for Jewish girls?

Despite a message that smacks of racism, Bedouins seem happy to have the Jewish girls stay away. Bedouin mayor Talal al-Krenawi had this to say:

"It hurts our families just like it hurts the Jews. It causes a lot of difficult problems and internal conflicts which often end in violence…If there are children as a result of these relationships, it becomes a burden on our society. The difference is that we oppose this just like the Jews, but we never used racist expressions...a person is allowed to live with whomever he wants. In any case, one can oppose something without presenting racist opinions."

Classic case of bad spin? The Jews and Bedouins actually seem to agree on the issue, but somehow the Jews haven't been able to present their case in inoffensive terms. Here's an idea: Teach girls about unhealthy relationships in general, and offer them good skills for dealing with men and dating, instead of just saying, “don’t date Bedouins.” Need I remind people that not all Bedouins seduce girls and then leave them alone and pregnant?

Learn more about Bedouins in Israel here. 

This awesome article first appeared on July 1, 2008 and has been republished as part of the series JEWCYEST WEEK EVER.

By now I am sure you have all heard of Shaindy.com, which is a website catering to Orthodox Jews who want to meet other Orthodox Jews for extra-marital affairs. I am also sure you have browsed through - and laughed at - the Chassidic sex ads in the casual encounters section of Craigslist. Many of you may have even seen the Tefillin Date blog or tried to search for frum porn yourselves, either because you are truly interested in finding some hot women wearing nothing but sheitels, or you are a serious porn fan who likes to find new and exciting varieties of smut online.

I personally am fascinated with the whole subject of frum porn, purely from a statistical perspective (girls in long skirts just don't do it for me even if they are showing a little more ankle than normal). You see, I run a popular Orthodox blog that makes fun of Orthodoxy. Due to Google's search engine algorithms, many people who come to my site are searching for frum porn. Not just frum porn, but everything from "naked Lubavitch girls" to "Chassidic gang bangs", and much more. I have wondered for years what exactly they expected to find, who these people were, and what exactly would constitute frum porn.

By definition frum porn would be oxymoronic - that would mean that the porn stars would have to be dressed modestly and this would defeat the entire purpose of porn in the first place. Maybe it would mean that all products used in the video were certified kosher, and before licking any cream products off of each other the porn star would make the required blessing. Maybe all of the male stars had to be circumcised, or the women had to keep their hair covered during the video. 

"Bais Yaakov Girls Gone Wild" has been in my imagination since I was 15. I never thought there were any other sick yeshiva guys like myself, but I have been surprised again and again by the search traffic to my site and the random emails from horny Chassidim in Brooklyn who think that I hold the key to their frum porn adventures.

Several months ago I wrote about the Hot Chani phenomena sweeping through religious neighborhoods in the New York metro area. "Hot Chanis" are religious women who wear wigs but dress very scandalous with tight short skirts, hooker boots and lots of makeup. I posted an example and was flooded with emails from people seeking more pictures. I told them I was not in the porn business - but that they should take s stroll down any street in Flatbush if they wanted some Hot Chani action.

I have been rethinking this whole comedy thing, seems I could make a killing in the frum or Chassidic porn industry.

This awesome article first appeared on April 1, 2009 and has been republished as part of the series JEWCYEST WEEK EVER.

Have you ever found yourself frustrated while swimming in the dating pools overt at Match and eHarmony? Have you ever spend days scouring JDate for your dreamgirl but turning up your nose at all the olive skin and dark hair? Well, it seems your unasked prayers have been answered - April Gaede, the mother of the adorable white pride singing act Prussian Blue, is now launching her very own Aryans-only dating service. Via the white power website Stormfront (Hey guys! It's been like a whole week since you called any of our writers ugly Jews! Are you mad at us?), Gaede announced her services:

I am willing to act as a go between, researcher, matchmaker, older sister and guide for any WNs [white nationalists] who are looking for a WN spouse. Only email me if you are serious about finding a spouse or long term partner.

Since Gaede is new to the matchmaking circuit, how do we know she's any good? She offers her own story of sweet Aryan love up as an example of inspiration:

I was 37 with two children when my husband Mark [Harrington] and I met. In any other circumstances we might have been an unlikely pair, a city boy who plays hockey and a country girl who trained horses. But because of our ideological similarities and our mutual concern about the future of our race we have much more in common than the average couple today.

Sniff. It's all so beautiful. But wait - it turns out that Gaede's life wasn't always so happy before true love redeemed her. Before Mark, she was married to an Icelandic pole vaulter. They had two kids together, the famous twins Lynx and Lamb (who comprise Prussian Blue), but it didn't work out. She has but one regret:

..the many years that I lost in which I could have produced four to six more children with that ideal eugenic quality that [the twins] possess.

You see, all you lonelyhearts, April Gaede has been to heartbreak hotel too. But she lived to see another Aryan day. And you can too! Sign up now!

The first time I tried it, I was in a group.  The second time, it was with a married man.  The last time, I was alone and loved every minute of it.  It had started while I was doing my shift at my local food co-op when the seasoned staffer asked for a volunteer to stock the meat cooler.  I figured I could handle meat, so I jumped right in.  As the burly bearded man told me what we had to put out, he got an excited twinkle in his when he breathed, “oh, and we have duck bacon today.”

Sure, I had heard of turkey bacon, beef bacon, and even lamb bacon but never duck bacon.  “Is it any good?”  I asked my curiosity piqued by his tone while the slim rectangular packages were placed into the cooler.  After my shift was over I did a little shopping and found myself back at the meat cooler.  I thought of a friend who loves duck, so why not try this?

So we arranged a brunch.  A few friends over on a sunny winter weekend to sample a tasty new treat.  We cooked up a batch of the duck bacon and placed tiny pieces on crackers.  I had even bought a duck liver pate (pork-free) that we smeared on tiny wedges of toast.  There were many other delicacies that afternoon, but for the meat eaters of the group all anyone remembers was that taste.  Squares of thin sliced smoked duck meat fried in duck fat – all that salty, smoky soaked in silky tender duck fat.  What flavor!  Bursting from each cracker.  Why aren’t more things cooked in duck fat?

A few days after the brunch, a friend was home sick with a cold.  And what’s that saying? “Feed a cold, starve a fever.”  And what clears a stuffy head better than duck?  There was some left over after the brunch.  I brought a loaf of fresh bread and we soaked up the duck fat and sprinkled the bread with garlic powder.  And to make things even more treyf my friend had some leftover macaroni and cheese.  It was the most decadent meal I think I have ever cooked.

By the end of the week, I was hungry and alone.  My boyfriend was at work and there was little in the house to eat.  A few potatoes, onions and the rest of the duck bacon.  I didn’t know if could top the ecstasy of the last time I had eaten the duck, but I roasted the potatoes and cooked the onions in with the bacon and tossed in the potatoes until they were coasted in the silky duck.  I was glad I was alone, because sometimes it's just better when you are alone with duck juices dribbling down your chin.

I don’t know if there is a food more naughty to kosher keeping Jews than pork – although technically it is no more a sin than any other prohibited food.  Yet, bacon gets many Jews really riled up (read the comments).  So all this talk of bacon feels a little scandalous even if duck bacon can be kosher (okay, not eaten with mac n’ cheese).  But the really naughty here is how amazing duck bacon really is.  To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, “Was that bacon, or did an angel just give birth in my mouth?”

Oh yes, I will be looking for duck bacon again.

You know ratings are bad when it takes gay sex on daytime soaps to grab the attention of muumuu-clad, couch-ridden housewives in Iowa. But in a bid to shake things up and recapture its ever-waning audience, the four-decade old One Life To Live (OLTL) aired the first ever gay sex scene on the collective yawn that is American daytime television.

Lathering up the gays may seem risky, but it's fitting for a show that was designed to eschew the traditional, WASP-y image of the soap opera scene. In fact, OLTL enterprise holds the not-so-coveted title of also featuring the first Jewish family. It must have taken the writers several weeks to figure out what to call them before deciding on a seriously Semitic surname like Siegel. David is a lawyer and he's married to Eileen. (Editor's note: those name choices only make this Eli Valley comic even more brilliant.) With that setup, she'd be well positioned to throw a bitch fit at a B'nai Brith meeting or attempt a coup on her synagogue's Purim party committee. Too bad their son is named Timmy and they live in a fictitious suburb of Philadelphia. Where is little Joshua or Jeremy? And what about New York, New Jersey, or winters in Boca? Fail by current standards, but it was still a valiant effort for the early '70s.

Fast forward 30-something years, and OLTL's attempt at portraying a homo hookup gets a similar grade. Like any other soap love scene, the one between Kyle and Fish (known by their fans as "Kish") was accessorized with Pottery Barn vanilla-scented candles and Bose sound system serenade premiering the specially produced single "My Confession." But the only confession here should have been made by the gaggle of gays writing (or at least doing hair and makeup) on the set. This isn't even close to real life. The OLTL approach to gay sex: endless amounts of caressing, rolling around, long looking-into-each-others'-eyes shots that force you to fill in the blanks, and an after-sex bullshitting session that includes nauseating phrases like "Is it always going to be like this?" Vomit. Surely, there must be a better way of handling fags fucking on television that still plays to the middle for Middle America.

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Good news, ladies: Evan Seinfeld, the Jewish porn star, musician, and actor is back on the market. He and Tera Patrick, also a porn star, have just announced that they are divorcing. The announcement is conveniently timed, as Patrick has a memoir, Sinner Takes All, that comes out at the end of the month. She claims that she and Seinfeld are divorcing because he wouldn't give up his porn career - she retired from the industry and is attempting to go mainstream. (Patrick seems to be trying the Jenna Jameson technique, as Jameson tried to cross over with her book How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. No word on whether Patrick has plans to date a UFC fighter and have twins.)

For his part, Seinfeld says that's not the case. He told Page Six:

While it was great that we were the 'First Couple' of porn, the fact is Tera hates the industry. She's not a sexual person. We barely had sex in our own marriage. She's desperate to break into the mainstream, and just wants to generate press. I didn't choose porn over her. Our marriage had a lot of holes in it, despite what she claims.

For those of you itching to hook up with Seinfeld, here's a little background: he grew up in Canarsie, Brooklyn and went to Camp Lokanda in Glen Spey, New York. He is the former lead singer of the group Biohazard and played Jaz on HBO's prison series Oz. No word on whether he's related to Jerry Seinfeld, though. Can you imagine how entertaining their family seders would be? 

Details, you guys! We’re in Details!

That’s right: a leading men’s magazine, one which sets the standards for mainstream hetero male sexuality, has acknowledged publicly that Jewish Girls Are Hot. According to author Christopher Noxon, we’re no longer the Janeane Garofolo to our best friend’s Uma Therman. We, friends, are the leading ladies.

This is quite the coup for us, who – as Noxon accurately reports – have been deftly maneuvering our way around the Fran Drescher stereotype and the backhanded “but you don’t LOOK Jewish” compliment for decades now.

But before I launch into my analysis formally, I should say that my first reaction to this article was that it’s just Details being Details, looking for an excuse to show pictures of hot women under whatever guise they can. The Jew angle is a little new, sure, but they’ve certainly featured Mila Kunis and Scarlett Johansson enough to make it clear that they’d still be happy to bang a member of the tribe (always a giver, Details).

However, this article examines the love for Jewish women a bit more closely, and subtly (if not accidentally) suggests that there’s something a little…more to us. See if you can figure it out from one of the magazine’s quotes from porn star Joanna Angel:

"I embody a lot of Jewish stereotypes. I have a Jewish nose and Jewish hair," Angel says of her black mane. "I also own my own company and feel guilty all the time."

Notice that? Angel is funny. And smart. And in fact, all of the women that author Christopher Noxon cites are self-made, self-defined hotties; girls who sell the sex that they’re into, rather than the sex that they hope you’ll be into. Angel, for instance, made her name by blazing the trail for a different kind of porn star (link definitely NSFW). Then you have “Claire,” who “runs Kinky Jews, a four-year-old group that mixes piousness with spiked heels and partner-swapping.” And of course, our very own Jamie Sneider, who made her own sexy, Jewish-food-themed calendar.

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Barely before the Thanksgiving leftovers are in the fridge and that last dish is washed, Christmas invades the New York City like the traditional consumerism orgy that it has become.  Stores decorate garishly in glitter, tinsel and twinkly lights, people begging for money on the trains deliberately remind you “it's the season for giving,” and various street corners become miniature pine forests populated by burley Canadians with their fragrant evergreens available for ready money.

If you’ve ever been to New York in December, you’ve probably walked through one of these random street corners lined with trees wrapped in large hair nets and strings of bulbish lights precariously dangling from red wooden stakes.  Tucked within the trees is almost always a shabby little shack cobbled out of bits and pieces with perhaps a bit of heat to protect and provide comfort from the elements to these sentinel street vendors who indefatigably hock their wares.

Walking through these temporary showrooms can be a briefly transformative experience.  The street noise dampens slightly, the scent of pine sap gently assails your nostrils, and for a moment you don’t feel you are in a loud bustling city of eight million people.  Perhaps it was this feeling that sparked the romance.

Several years ago I had an ecologically conscientious roommate.   She cared about the environment so much that she never flushed the toilet.  Purportedly this omission of common courtesy was an effort to save water, but it only really resulted in pissing off her roommate who - with my own standards of sanitation - would flush twice.  That and her other earth-saving tricks made me conclude that she really would be much happier in life living in a cabin in the woods.  This conclusion was reinforced by her December fling – our Christmas Tree Guy.

Our neighborhood Christmas tree stand was only about a hundred yards from our apartment and directly in the path to our closest subway stop.  So it wasn’t uncommon to walk through the trees several times a day.  First it was, “oh, I’m just bringing the Christmas Tree Guy some coffee,” she’d giggle as she ran out the door with a travel mug in hand.  Then there was a dinner date.  Not too long after came the late night moans and the ecstatic rhythmic thuds of Christmas Tree Guy sex.

The next morning my walk to the subway was a vicarious walk of shame.  “Oh hi,” I bashfully managed, “you know, the walls in our apartment are really thin.”  But the Christmas Tree Guy turned out to be very sweet.  He was a forest ranger by trade, but during the winter makes good money by selling Christmas trees.  When we wasn’t on duty, he shared a tiny apartment with about 15 other guys.  He said people were generally friendly and welcoming, bringing him coffee and snacks, but even so I suspected my roommate was the only one providing carnal comforts.  The local street gang had dubbed him “Tree Guy” and helped protect his trees from petty theft.  The only trouble he said that he was having was with the bank at the street corner where his trees were set up.  They would argue about where he could place his wares and hassled the vendors until the Christmas Tree Guy posted a sign that said “***** Bank Hates Christmas.”  Christmas eventually won.

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There are a lot of Hanukkah songs out there, from "I Had a Little Dreidel" to Adam Sandler's "Hanukkah Song." Most of these songs stick with the basics - candles, presents, family, potato pancakes. However, the singer Chevonne has decided to make Hanukkah sexy. Specifically, she makes sex puns about holiday accoutrements. (Sample lyrics include "I'll hot oil you up and dance like a whore-a" and "Just like my menorah/you light me up for eight days at a time." Eight days? Sex is awesome, but that shit just sounds painful.)

If Sheena Easton had been a member of the tribe, she might have recorded this as a single.

 

 

Last year, Los Angeleno Adam Cohen created the Nice Jewish Guys calendar. Now that the 2010 calendar is available, he found time to speak to Jewcy about Jewish stereotypes, international fanmail, and why you shouldn't discount the nice guys.

So, why did you decide to make this calendar?

I've had this idea in my head for ten years. Over beers with friends I'd say "why are there only calendars of, like, hot firemen? I should make a Jewish calendar." My friends said, "You have to do that." Finally last year I did the first one. It was really hard. It wasn't my full time job - I work in TV production in L.A. It was a passion project. I got people from the office to help out - one of our employees was interested in photography, and I said, "Great. You're the photographer."

How did you choose the guys?

A couple of ways. We did outreach through Craigslist - just wrote "Are you Jewish?" and let people click on it. We tapped into friend networks, asked around, "who would be perfect for this?"

This one guy came in for a meeting in my office, and I kept staring at him. He said, "why are you staring at me?" I asked him to be in the calendar. He agreed to be in it as long as I didn't put him on the cover. I did it anyway.

I was looking for guys who wouldn't be invited to be in a calendar - like me. I wanted these guys to be every guy who never gets credit, people don't say "you're hot." But put this guy in a calendar and show how hot he is. There were no players - we interviewed the guys.

Did you put any thought to demographics when you chose the men? What is the Ashkenazi/Sephardic breakdown, for example? Where are these guys from?

About the Ashkenazi/Sephardic thing - I don't know. I didn't ask. All the guys are in L.A., but L.A. is kind of a transient city, so they're from all over. They're mostly Reform. No tattoos.

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I staggered home this morning from my local pub on Bograshov Street red eyed, wheezing and smelling like my seventy year-old chain smoking travel agent, Shoshana. The thing is, I don't even smoke. I am getting tired of having to toss my T-shirts in the wash after having barely worn them because they reek of secondhand smoke. Under normal circumstances I could get at least another 48 hours out of them. The problem is that I think I'm becoming dependent on secondhand smoke. It's gotten to the point that sometimes I start itching in anticipation of someone lighting up.

When the public smoking ban began to be enforced last year by the City Council, I was excited at the prospect of being able to spend a night on the town without having to worry about nicotine poisoning, but that ship sunk pretty much as soon as it sailed and I am unaware of a single smoke-free bar in Tel Aviv. If you know one, please let me know. A cigarette is usually lit post- coitus, but only in Tel Aviv does the smoking precede the sex.

Legislators in Israel passed the smoking ban as a means to reduce health risks and thereby the ever-increasing costs of health care. The success of reducing health risks through public smoking bans in other countries speak for themselves. The number of heart attacks in Ireland has fallen by about 11 percent since the smoking ban was introduced there in 2004, according to Irish researchers at a cardiology congress in Vienna. Similar results have followed in other places too. Scotland, for instance, had a 17 percent decrease in heart attacks. Pueblo, Colorado confirmed that heart attacks fell by almost 27 percent since its public smoking ban.

This got me thinking about why, in spite of the health risks, bar owners are so opposed to upholding the smoking ban. Obviously they must be taking their customers' best interests into account. I don't think it's too much to ask to request that customers smoke outside. I know it's not the harsh Mediterranean winter that's keeping them indoors. Scantily clad female smokers brave the rain, sleet and snow for a quick cigarette all over Europe without affecting the livelihood of bar owners. But having to brave the cold for a smoke doesn't seem to be the reason. There must be something else at work here. In Israel, where the anti-smoking lobby is comparatively weak compared with Western countries, smoking's sexy appeal still trumps its resulting shorter lifespan.

A cigarette on-hand isn't going to transform you into a dashing Humphrey Bogart or a stylish Marilyn Monroe, but its importance in restraining awkward hand gestures when you are in the process of courting a member of the fairer sex should not be overlooked. I usually rectify this problem by downing a couple shots of liquid confidence, putting out the vibes and leaning nonchalantly on the bar.

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As I'm sure you're all aware, last week marked the launch of the sixth season of "The Girls Next Door," E!'s reality show about life at the Playboy mansion. Kendra, Holly and Bridget are out, and Crystal, Kristina and Karissa (the latter two are twins) are in. As I curled up with Hef and the ladies, sipping a cup of Bedtime tea and rocking my sympathy pajamas, all seemed right with the world.

But as the half hour progressed, I couldn't help but be struck by something peculiar. The prevailing aesthetic, I noticed, was one that screamed "Aryan Nation": mounds of bleached blond hair, svelte hips...mounds of bleached blond hair.

Where, I wondered, were all the Jewish Playmates?

Well, it turns out they’re not that easy to find because indeed, they are few and far between. Out of approximately 670 Playmates since the magazine's inception, only a handful are known Jews. Cindy Fuller kicked it off in 1959, then Susan Bernard followed in 1966. Sally Sheffield posed in 1969, and Hef's longtime girlfriend, Barbi Benton (nee Barbara Klein) was also a Jew. Lindsey Vuolo was next in 2001, and most recently, Anita Marks in 2002.

And so, when I first sat down to write this, I thought, "How unfair! Playboy gives preference to the goys, promoting a singular notion of beauty." I thought I would be speaking on behalf of all Jewish women when I expressed my outrage that Jewish beauty is being overlooked or underappreciated.

But the more I look around, the more I realize that may be a bit out of touch.

Let us look first at Vuolo. Of all the Jews that have relieved themselves of their garments on the pages of Playboy, she seems to be the most notorious. Following her spread (haha), she was vilified by the Jewish community for the most part, and a nice summary of said vilification can be found here, in an interview she did with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.

It's a painful read, but if you feel like a humiliating smackdown, go ahead and click over. I'll just wait. Done? OK. If you skipped that part, I'll summarize for you: Vuolo felt she had done nothing wrong by posing in Playboy, and Boteach took her to task for it. By the end, Vuolo said that she had begun to feel "like a bad person."

And Boteach isn’t the only one who feels like Vuolo let the Jews down; the same sentiment was expressed here at Jewcy. At other websites she was called stupid, blog commenters openly wondered what “happened to her,” and the general message was one we’ve all heard before: this is simply something that nice Jewish girls don’t do.

I'm beginning to wonder: is the lack of Jewish representation in this mainstream magazine a result of narrow definitions of beauty, or have Jewish women opted out of the running? And if it's the latter, is it because they truly don't want to do something like Playboy, or because they’re afraid that if they do, they’ll risk rocking the Jewish community boat to such an extent that they’ll knock themselves right off?

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Jewish Girls1. Move from New York City to Israel - Tel Aviv, to be exact. Board a bus driven by a bearded maniac; a wild-eyed, bearded maniac with hair sprouting uncontrollably from his knuckles.  He'll look like Mandy Patinkin, back when Mandy did a Yiddish album and grew a long beard for the cover photo...only hairier

2. Hairy Mandy will think it fun to race his accordion-style bus going 240 MPH down the tiny one-way streets of Tel Aviv. Yeah Mandy, that's fun. You have other ideas about what's fun - like making up words to The Daily Show theme song.

As the bus careens this way and that, struggle to keep your balance as you stand clutching a pole. All the while, eye a beautiful, curly-black-haired, dark-skinned local girl. Decide she looks like a Sagit, or maybe a Dorit, or perhaps a Galit...no, she's definitely a Hagit.

3. Hagit will smile at you as you lose your balance and slam into an elderly Russian babushka. Curse hairy Mandy left right and center as you fight to regain your own center.

4.  Ten minutes later, notice Hagit, still smiling. Wonder if she's just a girl that can't help but smile all the time or if she's flirting with you.

5. Think you're about to lose your lunch as the bus flies up to your stop. It will never actually stop, of course, but merely slow down just long enough for you to hop off. As you do so, notice Hagit getting off too. Get up the nerve to say "hi" as she comes up behind you. She'll hear your accent. "You're American?" she'll ask, like she's never actually seen one before.

6. Make small talk with Hagit. Learn her name is actually Sagit. When she asks what you do for a living, accidentally tell her that you're a professional napkin. When she laughs, explain that your Hebrew sucks and switch to English

7. Be taken aback for a moment when Hagit beats you to the punch and asks for your number. Take hers too and enter it into your cell phone. If you don't have a cell phone, you're not living in Israel. Go back to #1 and repeat until you get it right.

8. After a couple years, move back to New York. That is, after you've dated at least six of the IT variations -- Ashrit, Irit, Shulamit, Idit, Nurit, and Kalanit. The language barrier, you've concluded, while cute, can't be overcome. (Once you asked Nurit, wait - was it Sarit? -- what she was doing in the bathroom and she said, "washing my tooth.")

9. Aside from the new Anne Taylor store on Madison and 47th, New York won't have changed one bit. Be happy for the stability. Take long walks through Greenwich Village. Pass a film crew doing a movie shoot in Washington Square Park. Hope that some gaffer, grip or other minor pass-wielding hipster will notice you and ask you to be Ben Stiller's double. Better yet, fantasize about being Ben Stiller's double and doing such a wonderful job that you're noticed and asked to play your own part in the film. Take it one step further. You're at the Academy Awards. Now you're accepting an Oscar: thank your parents, your best friend, your agent, but not God. Well, perhaps God, but use the word Ha-shem instead. People will think you're cool, like when Madonna went and got all Kabala on everyone.

10. Leave the park and head south toward Tribeca. Stop in a small 'mom and pop' type book shop (the kind that you saw everywhere in the early 90s - before Barnes & Global moved in). Notice hot chicks browsing the stacks. Many will have blonde hair. You like blondes, but have decided to date only Jewish girls after a long tumultuous affair seven years ago with a girl from the Czech Republic who used to throw dishware around the room during fights.

11. Notice a really cute girl thumbing through a copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day. Wonder if the cute girl is Jewish. Her midriff will be showing and this will turn you on. Start to plan your introductory line. "So," you rehearse in your head, "I see you like Sedaris. Who isn't Jewish, by the way...are you?" Scrap that idea. Remember that the high holidays are approaching. Formulate a new opening line. "Excuse me, I couldn't help noticing that you're reading that Sedaris book. Just wondering...do you fast on Yom Kippur?" Realize the non sequitur might throw her for a loop. Scrap that line, too. Silently wish there were a badge Jews were required to wear in order to single them out in New York.

12. Suddenly she'll notice you looking at her.  Look away, and pull a book off the shelf quickly. Never mind that it's How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. Look back over at the blonde. Get up the courage to speak to her.

13. Say, "Sedaris, huh?" She'll say, "Yeah. He's the queen of comedy." Laugh. She'll laugh too. Crack; the ice is broken. Make small talk about the book. Tell her how much you liked Naked too. She'll agree and tell you how she wishes she could meet a straight guy even half as clever as Sedaris. Say, "Right. I know what you mean." Then ask if she ever walked by a movie shoot and wished that someone would notice her and ask her to be in the film. She'll have no idea what you're talking about. Switch the subject back to Sedaris.

14. Tell her that you've just come back from a couple years abroad and how refreshing it is to speak about the nitty gritty rat-a-tat of a book written in English. When you use the colloquial, "nitty gritty rat-a-tat", relish the fact that you now don't have to translate its meaning. She'll pretend to understand. Ask her if she'd ever consider living in a place far away, say, Israel, for example. She'll say, "I don't think so. I mean I'm not Jewish or anything." Smile and say, "Well, I don't think you have to be Jewish to live in Israel. I mean there are lots of Christians living in Jerusalem," but as you're saying this, start eying another hottie in "Religion" with dark curly hair.

15. Leave the book store and start to walk home. Begin to formulate a set of rules that all single girls in New York must live by:

A) All Shiksas will be required to wear necklaces with crucifixes. They must be easily seen by the naked eye, not tucked into shirts or worn backwards. They can be gold, silver, diamond, 14K-plated, wooden, or better yet, those really large metal ones that can be seen from the far end of a subway car.

B) Any Shiksa caught without said necklace must be willing to put out on the first date  open to converting on her own volition.

C) Any Shiksa caught without said necklace and not open to converting by her own volition must be willing to put out on the first date to apologize for misguiding you when you approach her at the bus stop and say, "Excuse me, but you look so familiar. Haven't I seen you on JDate with the screen name PUT-UP-THE-CHUPAH?"

The yentas over at celebrity gossip site Ohnotheydidnt are insisting that an actual Sarah Silverman/Jimmy Kimmel sex tape exists, citing ZackTaylor.ca's anonymous source that claims the twosome recorded it while on vacation back when they were a couple, and then forgot the camera in their hotel room! While I find this story, along with the grainy photos of the alleged encounter sent to Zack Taylor, tenuous at best, I can't help but hope it is all true. Horrible, right? The Sarah/Jimmy couple is one of my least favorite celebrity pairings, and we all know that Sarah was fucking Matt Damon the whole time.

Then why am I so interested? Honestly, it's because these two people, both of them hairy and somewhat misshapen, are some of the truest representations of actual-humanity that Hollywood has got. They're not Pam and Tommy, and they are certainly not Kim and Reggie; instead, they're you and me. They are that couple next door that never stops arguing, they are that couple you see making out in the same cafe every week and every time you see them you accidentally make eye contact and then can't control your own gag reflex. They are, undeniably, real human beings. And it's gross! So of course I want to see them having sex.

And I bet you do too. Just admit you'll be grabbing it from the torrents as soon as it's released.

I am completely fortunate that my whole life my parents encouraged me to marry for love. Not money, not religion, not security, just love. As a product of a middle class Jewish household, it is mildly surprising that I received little to no pressure to marry for love AND Judaism. There may have been a small ongoing threat that if I married a Jew, I would inherit my great-grandmothers candlesticks (heavy, silver, carried on her person from Poland) and if I didn't marry a Jew, I would be hit over the head with them. That threat was not often repeated over the years, especially after I fell in love with an amazing Jewish man - a man whom I found without the aid of JDate, blind dates, speed dates or any other system other than pure good fortune. So when the seemingly impossible happened, both families were ecstatic, and mine breathed a sigh of relief that the candlesticks would not have to be used as a weapon. But before the happily ever after could begin, the wedding needed to be planned. And by wedding, I mean weddings. See, this most amazing man is not just Jewish, but Israeli. Enter the main character in this story: conflict. Not conflict between my husband and me or our families, but between our cultures. Jewish translates in many ways from state to state and even across oceans but when it comes to wedding planning, Jewish is a whole other story. Thus begins the saga of wedding number one.

The American wedding was a celebration of values, tradition, love and, of course, an open bar. With my fiancé across an ocean somewhere due north of Tel Aviv, the initial planning was left to me...and my mother. There were many things easily pinned down: save the date cards (designed using a Mac and sent electronically); the venue (a platinum LEED certified non-profit/art space); the music (DJ, no line dances, minimal slow songs); the food (locally raised, vegetarian grub); the wedding party (none - less muss, less fuss); the rabbi (friend of mine from LA, woman, awesome). But somewhere between harpists and broken glass lay the rub.

Not only do Israelis plan weddings in roughly three days, they have much less to worry about: no flights (usually), no hotels, and no welcome bags or information sheets for the weekend-long festivities because Israel is a "celebrate and sleep in your own bed" kind of country. I also excluded all the pre-wedding American Jewish cultural uniqueness from registries and wedding showers to bachelorette parties and something blue. Try explaining over Skype to your mother-in-law-to-be that it's considered normal to sign up for things you want people to buy you and then kill trees in order to thank the people who buy you said things. The whole process of wedding planning is full of long standing traditions and rules that sometimes offer wisdom and logic and other times offer complication in multiple shades of taffeta. Fortunately, we successfully navigated this process in just four short months.

Continue reading...

I'm the only one in my immediate family who would ever go to Jewish services. My parents will go to a Bat Mitzvah or holiday feast, but my mom worships Bill Maher and George Carlin, and my dad is all about work-he does JDate, that's about it. My sister is just not interested.

I wonder why I have this desire to practice my Judaism. I spent the summer of my sophomore year at NYU in Krakow studying Eastern European Jewry and the Holocaust. I can't remember a time where I wasn't interested and connected to Jewish history, yet I can't find a lasting religious connection. I think it's more my ignorance and frustration, rather than a stubborn disbelief.

At this particular Friday night service, most people in the sanctuary knew when to bow and when to answer back. Most knew the Hebrew songs. I knew a few, but nothing compared to the rest of the congregation; I almost walked out. My ignorance, combined with harsh air-conditioning, made me feel stupid and miserable. I just wanted to leave, I wanted to go to 7-Eleven, buy a tub of Ben and Jerry's, and begin my year feasting on junk food. Thinking about how bad of a decision that would be, I moved seats instead. I just had to stick with it. I looked at how many more pages we had left in the Rosh Hashanah liturgy and I resolved to make it through until the end. Though, I also spent a good deal of time eyeing a goyishe-looking Jewish fox behind the curtain. I thought I might see him at the singles mixer after the service. Motivated by his penis, I stayed.

I had plans to meet my also-Jewish girlfriend after services to go to a strip club. I have to confess, throughout the whole service I kept thinking, "I'm a sinner. I'm a sinner." At one point, the Rabbi read a passage about God knowing the difference between the sacred and profane. "That's me!" I thought, "I'm profane!"

I texted my girlfriend: "Are you still up to going to Cheetahs Strip Club?" She texted back, "Yah! Are you?" I couldn't bail on her. I'm trying to be more social, but I felt like it was a deliberate choice to start the year off with a sin. When I originally asked her if she wanted to come to temple with me, she wrote "No, I think I'm skipping temple this year. But thanks! Strippers should be enough for me to ring in the new year :)." Her clarity and directness was refreshing. "Fuck it," I thought, "I'm not canceling. I'm just gonna go."

 

As I walked down the narrow Beverly Hills side streets on the way to my car, I saw a few families (I think they were Persian) having Rosh Hashanah dinner on their balconies. Sounds of joy and conversation filled the warm night air, and I was jealous. I would rather have been with a family, enjoying brisket and kasha varnishkes, than at temple by myself. One day I'll have a family like that, I thought to myself. Instead, I drove to Cheetahs in Hollywood to meet my girlfriend. Both events, the Temple and Cheetahs, were letdowns. I had built up both in my mind: a transformative night of prayer peppered with sex.

What I remember most about Cheetahs was talking to a stripper named Sarah. She wasn't wearing an ounce of makeup, and her hair was scraggly and her grammar was poor. Despite the lack of effort, she still looked pretty. She was talking to us about how badly the economy has hit strip clubs, and how little she makes now - which is more than I make.

Then she said "I've worked here for ten years." I found that shocking, because I haven't done anything for ten years. Talk about commitment: ten years at the same strip club. I was amazed. My girlfriend and I joked that she should have a 401(k), or at least a pension plan. She told us that she also goes to school. Relatively, she has her shit together. I figured that she was the Mother Hen of Cheetahs, and she watched over all the girls. When a dancer from Switzerland approached the stage, Sarah commented, "I mean some dancers...like that heffa', I mean come on!" The Swiss dancer was very voluptuous. She had rolls of stomach fat, but strangely, no cellulite. The skin on her legs was smooth and taut. "Look at that heffa'," Sarah repeated and walked away.

We watched the "heffa'" dance. "Wow," I said to my girlfriend, "She is really hot. She is like sex personified." She danced like she was fucking the stage, but at first it wasn't dirty; it was real clean. She wore this ballerina outfit, she had a Lolita look to her. See, Cheetahs is not a nude club. The girls wear panties or bathing suit bottoms and bra or bikini tops. It's so you can drink. In California, nude clubs are dry.

The Swiss dancer had on a pink bikini top, but not the kind of bikini top you can purchase at a swim store: this kind is only available at a Hollywood 'specialty' store. It was sparkly, pink and silver, and had two triangles that covered her chest. She also wore a black thong, which she lazily covered with a very short pink frilly skirt. That was a dirty outfit, so girly and naughty that it begged for a spanking.

She came out and folded herself down into a split. She put her arms forward and held that position, crotch down to the floor. She writhed slowly on the ground. "Holy shit," I said to my girlfriend, "She is really dirty." That's the thing with this girl, she wasn't cheap, and she had no qualms about the extra fat on her stomach and neither did I. She was a woman and a girl all at once. Even while posed, her face remained cherubic. She looked only twenty-two or twenty-three. This plump ballerina wore pinkish lipstick and soft, rosy blush.

Watching her dance, none of the other girls compared. The Swiss girl smiled at me longer than a stripper ought to stare. She knew I approved. The other girls were dirtier, and I felt their self-loathing. No one turned me on like the Swiss girl. It's not that I wanted to kiss her, but she had something that appealed to me: pride, brazenness, Chutzpah.

Near the end of the night, my girlfriend and I talked about tattoos. She recently decided that she wanted one, and I recently settled on a design I could live with. I don't have any tattoos, and I have never thought of getting one until now. I would get the word "COURAGE." Sure, it might sound juvenile, but it's what I lack. I feel like I don't always have the courage to be myself, and I need to be reminded. Still, I doubt that I will ever actually get a tattoo. No, I'm pretty positive that I won't. You're really not supposed to in the Jewish religion. Maybe it is just that I hate needles.

I'm not sure what will happen in 5770. I'm not sure if I'll continue going to temple or to strip clubs (not that I go to either very often), but I am sure that I will continue writing, and I will continue trying to have the courage and chutzpah. I will be brazen, I will be myself.

We just noticed that there is a Craigslist missed connection from the Saturday night Hidden Melodies Revealed performance in San Francisco. Rather than let this poor lovebird go on possibly unnoticed, we of the Jdub (and now Jewcy!) ilk are going to help by posting his plea on our blog. Can you help M. find his beloved?

We made eye contact several times outside Emanu-El on Saturday night. I wanted to tell you that you were so cute and looked amazing in that dress... I wish I would have. I saw you dancing with your friend during the concert, and I thought you were adorable.

I was wearing brown, and I have glasses and a short beard. If you think you remember me, let me know. I'd love to take you out!
- M

Are blind dates dead? Is the matchmaking industry going the way of the American automakers?

I was doing Google girl searches for a long time before it became acceptable to admit this. Back before Google became an official verb, I would do this, but it had to be kept secret. The one time I assumed the girl was relaxed enough to hear that I found her profile on Onlysimchas.com but was disappointed to find no picture she demanded to know how I had found the profile. I told her that I Googled her and she went berserk, like I was some freak for wanting to know more than what our mutual friend had told me, because everyone who wants you to go out with their friend switches to "sales mode" when talking about their friend's attributes.

Around the same time that Facebook opened its doors to tweens and preteens it became acceptable to conduct extensive back round checks on the internet of potential dates. Facebook is basically inviting you to look for dirt and thanks to my favorite feature - tagged pictures - the girl you are researching can't just hide her true figure behind a well placed column and a thinning black skirt. You would be surprised to see how different people look in their profile pictures versus their tagged pictures.

Blind dating has its virtues. For me it was a rush of sorts, kind of like playing the lottery: you never knew what was going to happen, although I mostly assumed it be crappy until I would win once in a while. I do wonder if I will miss the joy of haggling with the neighborhood shadchan and finding subtle ways to reject the dating offerings from my Charedi cousins in Monsey?

Although Googling and Facebooking potential dates can be a lot of fun and informative, one should keep an open mind. People are too quick to judge folks based on their friends, half-naked drunken pictures taken from their spring break in Cancun and whether or not they are a Yankees fan. There is more to people than what they put on their Facebook profiles, although if you find their blog you can pretty much assume it is describing their alter ego and what they wish they were but never will be.

Just in time for the holidays, Zeek editor Jo Ellen Green Kaiser talks to B'nai Jeshurun leader Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein about the declining role of men in congregational Judaism.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1954, Marcelo Bronstein was educated in Israel, Argentina and the United States. He holds an MA in Hebrew Letters from Hebrew Union College, where he also received his Rabbinical Ordination. He also holds a MA in Clincal Psychology from Belgrano University, Buenos Aires. In addition to his duties at B'nai Jeshurun, Rabbi Bronstein serves on the advisory boards of Human Rights Watch/Americas, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Soaring Words, and South Wing to Zion.

ZEEK: A recent study by Sylvia Barrack Fishman and Daniel Parmer (Matrilineal Ascent/Patrilineal Descent, Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, Brandeis University, 2008) seems to show that men are leaving Jewish congregational life. Do you see that trend at B'nai Jeshurun?

Marcelo Bronstein: Women participate much more than men in our congregational life. Don't misunderstand me: we have a full congregation, full of life. But the core of what we are about is thanks to women. If not for our women, we wouldn't have hazzanim, daily minyan, shiva minyanim, or chevra kedisha.

I am a product of the feminist revolution, so the fact that women lead most of the activities of our congregation never bothered me. I have always thought that the people who want to get involved, will get involved. I never paid attention to whether those people were men or women.

But suddenly, I began to hear people talk, and began to listen to others and even pay attention to what it was in front of my eyes.  Also recently, I participated in a conversation at NYU on gender and education. Speakers said that finding a male educator, a male teacher in New York, would be very soon like finding a diamond in the street. They are that rare.

ZEEK: So, where are the men? Why aren't they participating?

MB: Well, that's what I wanted to find out. So I started talking to men.

When you ask men who have left the congregation, men who have married outside Judaism, they say that Jewish women are too strong. They say they want to find Golde, the old-fashioned Jewish woman, but they can't find any Jewish women like her, so they turn to Asian women, women from other cultures.

Several men told me that, which confused me. I replied that the Golde in Fiddler on the Roof was very strong. They say, yes, strong but loving. Well, that is another conversation, a conversation about what men want or think they want in a woman. I felt that the answers they were giving me represented their emotional feelings, but maybe were not the whole answer to why they left.

When women were not happy with Judaism, they stayed. They stayed behind the mehitzha until they tore it down. But men are leaving. I am very concerned about Judaism. I don't think this is good for men, for women, for anyone.

ZEEK: What can you do about that, as a congregational rabbi?

MB: Well, I started a men's group, not because the men asked, but because I noticed these things. When I started, six men signed up, but at the first meeting, sixty came. They didn't want to sign up, but they wanted to come. Since then, we have held the group once a month.

I should say that creating a men's group at my synagogue, a very politically progressive synagogue in New York, was very politically incorrect. I thought someone would cut my head off. I was afraid of my feminist members.

So, before starting the group I went to talk to a feminist friend. I told her I wanted to start a men's group, and asked her opinion. She said, I love what you are doing. Why, I asked. She said, In the beginning, feminists chopped the testicles off men. That was a necessary act of war. Afterwards, when we achieved some equality, we sat and cried. Where are the men? They oppressed us, so we castrated them. So I like that you are trying to celebrate the differences without imposing power.

ZEEK: Woah.

MB: Yes. In the beginning, I called some guys about coming to the group's first meeting, and they laughed. They said, Ok, we will come, but this can't be a rosh chodesh group. We are not going to talk about feelings, we are not going to cry. I put that in the advertisement. It became a kind of joke.

ZEEK: What did they want?

MB: They wanted to daven. They wanted to hear just male voices. So we met at mincha, Shabbat afternoon. We daven together, and then have whiske--a very good single malt scotch whiskey--and crackers and cheese. And then we have a conversation. At first, we did Torah study, but I realized that these men really wanted to talk. Recently, we talked about Esther Perel's book, Mating in Captivity.

She came to talk to the group. Men were mesmerized. Some men were crying, because they felt they were being understood and not judged. They wanted more of that.

I think Jewish men have not found themselves. This is something women did during the feminist movement. Women learned how to find themselves. In the Jewish world, women met in rosh chodesh groups, created rituals. They gained equality but also found a way to be Jewish women.

ZEEK: Yes, including writing liturgy for women's lifecycle events like menstruation and menopause. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Jews are doing that now as well, with queer retreats like Nehirim and new LGBT siddurim. But men, well, men used to be the ones to say kiddush while women lit the candles. Now, women say kiddush. What is left for men to do? What is their role?

MB: Jewish men are lost. It's not clear to men what it means to be a man. If they listen to women, what it means to be a man is to be bad, aggressive, fascist. All their good qualities--tenderness, compassion, empathy--are called their feminine side. So what is my masculine side, what is good there?

I feel comfortable, personally, as a man, so I was surprised when a male congregant said I was a feminine rabbi. Why do you say that? I asked him. Well, he said, you cry, you talk about feelings, you hug. I can't relate to that. I was stunned. So I was thinking, what is a male role model?

ZEEK: That question reminds me of the poet Robert Bly, who wrote a memoir titled Iron John about his need to recover his inner warrior. Feminists criticized him for believing that the only way to be masculine was to be aggressive, a warrior. Can't men find a way to be manly without masculinity being associated with aggression and dominance?

MB: That is what I don't know. I do think, though, that we have an imbalance in Jewish life. I believe that men don't see a place for themselves in Jewish life. Men are not needed anymore basically for anything--not for the minyan, not for the reading of the Torah, not for witnessing. In life in general, men are not needed not as providers, or even as the ones that will impregnate women. Sperm banks do that too.

If the paradigm of the provider, the hunter, the dominant one is past, we men have to generate another paradigm that is liberated from patriarchal weight.

ZEEK: Western culture tells us that men are violent, aggressive and women are peaceful, submissive. Why does that binary have to define us?

MB: Well, what do you think, as a feminist, that men could learn from the feminist movement?

ZEEK: I'm thinking about the physical body. The early feminists, the first wave, often hated their bodies because they saw the female body as soft and vulnerable and what they wanted was to gain power. But once women began gaining more power in culture, we were able to embrace our bodies. I wonder if that is what men need to do? If they need to--well, to be graphic--to reimagine the penis not as a weapon, as a symbol of power and dominance, but in some other way? To find a way to be proud of hardness and strength without it being tied to dominance?

MB: Maybe. What we need is a role model for that. 

ZEEK: Yes, perhaps someone like King David, who was warrior and lover, king and poet.

MB: I love the David imagery. Yes he was a poet, a lover and a king, though for some, he was not a very good king--he was too controlled by his passions. David was human.

The issue that we cannot escape from is the issue of power.

Are men disappearing from Jewish life or from the world of education, social work, etc, because women came in? Because we men don't know how to be without being in control? If that is the case we desperately need to change the paradigm, because nobody is going back to the caves of inequality; that was a human's rights war and it was won.

In the equation of equal but different there is an answer, but I don't know which one is yet.

ZEEK: Thank you, rabbi.

 

**

The opening image for this essay is Tom Drury as Tevye in a 2003 production

Although I am not a believer in gods myself, I do have many religious friends from many different faiths. We who live in Western countries have the luxury of choosing our own level of observance. For the most part, we decide individually how strictly we want to adhere to any religious tradition--we can choose from any of them or make up our own, and in my case, we can even abjure these things completely. This isn't a liberty to take lightly. In many other parts of the world (and throughout human history) this kind of freedom seems absurd and wrong. In fact, I think there are many parts of this country where people think there is too much religious freedom in America (you'll have to check the comments section). Being able to freely choose a religion doesn't mean that all religions are choices, however, or that everyone is being entirely honest about why they chose one.

To put it bluntly, are some people pretending to be more religious than they are to get laid? Or in larger, sociological terms, how many people are just going through the motions in order to belong to a group? (All of them, says the cynic). It's what I think about if I'm ever at a religious ritual or ceremony. I know what the Hebrew prayers mean because I happen to have gone to a yeshivah when I was young, but I think most people who sing along at services don't know what they're actually saying, but they do have it memorized.

When I was an activist helping organize anti-government protests with thousands of people in attendance, I definitely met guys who showed up at the rallies to meet girls, and vice versa. When I was a student I met people who got involved with extracurricular activities for the same reasons. I know people who have moved, taken jobs, changed careers, renounced their families, and so forth to in order to belong somewhere, to meet the kind of people they always wanted to meet and join the circles they've always wanted to be part of. Many of us still recall the great wave of women who came to Manhattan in the last decade intending to re-enact Sex and the City or the crowds of hippies from across the country who flocked to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. The urge to join and be part of something greater than yourself is natural. So how much of it plays into the reality of religious practice? Does it matter if your religious journey ends up at a popular resort, or does everyone have to hike through the woods?

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I'm the 26 year old punk rock singer for Can!!Can, an observant Jew with three tattoos, host of PunkTorah.com and gainfully employed by an online Judaica store. 

Basically, I'm one big fucking contradiction.

On one hand, I cover my head. On the other, I daven with the Reconstructionists. I eat biblically kosher at home, but all bets are off if I'm out or at someone's house. My favorite rock stars are David Wolpe and Kurt Cobain. I'm typing this on Shabbat, but I pray from the Koren Sacks Orthodox Siddur.

And I'm single. And it sucks ass.

I've never dated a Jewish girl, but now I consider it imperative. I'm getting older, and not that I want to get married and have kids anytime soon, but I would like to know that if I did choose to knock up my beshert, I wouldn't have to deal with a church wedding and Santa Claus.

New to the whole "Jewish Singles" scene, I've put myself out there and discovered I am looking for a woman that essentially doesn't exist.

Sure, there are plenty of Gefilte-Fish-In-The-Sea, but I'm getting picky. I've boiled my soulmate to a very specific, bordering on psychotic, JDate Nazi-esque list of characteristics:

 

Age: 25-31 (I like older women but do give a 1-year exception)

Location: somewhere in the Confederacy

Tattoos: mostly Hebrew with some girlie floral stuff and possibly a chest-piece that pokes lovingly out of halter tops

Education: bachelors degree in something super practical from a pussy liberal state college

Boobs: proportional and large enough to give me hands full of fun

Musical Taste: '77 punk/garage rock, grunge, early metal, experimental in the vein of Velvet Underground/Brian Eno, early Americana and folk, lo-fi art pop

Hobbies: anything artsy, blogging, volunteering for apolitical non-profits, possibly plays the drums, visiting her kick ass grandmother who was the director of a feminist co-op in the 60's and makes really good brisket, fixing cars and other manly things, as I cannot do most "dude" stuff and really need the help

Life Goals: to start her own gender egalitarian Aleph Havurah and open a used clothing store/coffee shop

Spirituality: kicks my ass to be more observant

 

Most likely, I won't find a girl who loves the Ramones and considers shul and a trip to the Adult Superstore an awesome Shabbat experience. But that won't stop me from trying.

Zeek is pleased to present this excerpt from the forthcoming book, The House of Secrets, an inside look at the mikveh and its rituals, by Varda Polak-Sahm. This section focuses on a henna ceremony practiced mainly by Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews.

The henna ceremony is traditionally part of the fertility rituals that take place on the eve of a wedding, either in the mikveh or at the bride's home.  The Hebrew word for henna (hina) encompasses the essence of the compact between God and the bride that is made on the wedding eve. The letters of the Hebrew word allude to the three commandments in which women are obligated, with the addition of the name of God-het, for challah; yod, for Hakadosh Baruch Hu; nun, for niddah; and heh, for lighting Shabbat candles (hadlakat nerot).  If a woman devoutly fulfills the three commandments given to her by God, he will safeguard her from all evil entities, increase the fruit of her womb, and enhance her beauty.

Henna is made from the leaves of the kofer, a small shrub or ornamental tree with fragrant flowers that grows primarily in Egypt, India, and North Africa.  The dried green henna leaves are ground and soaked in water, which turns them red, and then cooked into a thick paste. The paste is placed in the center of a tray decorated with green leaves and candles.  After the bride has immersed, her mother lights the candles, lifts the tray over her own head, and dances a fertility dance to the sound of beating drums.  Wiggling her hips, she makes her way to the bride and holds the tray over the bride's head.  All the women trill "Kululululu!"

The bride takes the tray from her mother, raises it over her head, and dances with it until she reaches the woman she wishes to bless and holds the tray over her head.  The tray lit with candles is passed from hand to hand, above the heads of all the women.  The whole time, the women dance to the beat of the drums and are swept into a state of ecstasy.  Each time the tray is lifted over the head of the chosen woman, the rest erupt into a joyful "Kululululu!"  After all the women have received the blessing, the eldest of the group, the grandmother, dips her fingers into the paste and paints a circle on both of the bride's hands.  In the center of the circle she places a blue candy, to ward off the evil eye.  Then the grandmother does the same for all the other women.

The henna leaves a prominent reddish-brown stain imprinted on the skin for many days, preserving the memory of the compact while displaying for all the world a seal of approval for the women's sexual relations with her husband. All the women who receive the mark of the henna are made witnesses to the pact of fertility, love, and loyalty that was sealed in the ritual immersion in the mikveh.

The dry, infertile material symbolizes the virgin girl who is not yet a woman; she is an unripe fruit. Through the moistening and cooking process, the dry, green henna is transformed into moist, red henna, symbolizing the fertile woman brimming with life and vitality.  The henna turns red, the color that symbolizes the fertility of Mother Earth-red like the blood that is crucial for the renewal of fertility.

Symbolically, the transformation process undergone by the henna is identical to what happens to the bride's body in the mikveh.  She arrives from her mother's home "green" and unripe, and after immersing in the warm water, becomes "red" and ripe.  The male side is represented in this "cooking" process by the mother-in-law, who prepares the henna, symbolically strengthening her son's fertility by accelerating the bride's fertility potential.

The henna ceremony also highlights the community's involvement in the bride's physical and symbolic transformation.  An important part of the henna ritual is the cooking of festive foods by the women themselves, which enhances the joy derived from the preparations for this traditionally all-female event.  Nowadays, the henna ceremony may be a large celebration geld at a fancy banquet hall or other venue, with many guests of both genders.  This party is usually held about a week before the wedding, and thus is not connected with the bride's immersion.

"The real henna ceremony is when the bride returns from the mikveh and puts on the henna," Aunt Sophie explained to me.  "Then the groom is not around, whether he's Yemenite or Moroccan or Ashkenazi.  Not only in the mikveh is the groom forbidden to come near his bride, but also that whole night and the day before the wedding.  But these days very few people obey the prohibition against being together.  Most ignore the custom, and the bride sees the groom after the henna celebration."

Sophie also tells me about the magical properties of the henna.  According to the traditional Jewish superstition, demons lie in wait during times of transition, when humans are weak and sensitive.  The wedding eve is a perilous time for the couple, who are separated from one another, because the demons, who need humans in order to reproduce, try to mate with each of them.  The word "henna" itself is thought to contain a special magical quality that keeps the demons away.

"They used to put this green, magic powder in all the corners of the house, to keep the demons away from the people," Aunt Sophie said excitedly. "The henna fights off the evil spirits."

"Why don't they leave the henna around the house in Israel like they did in Morocco?"

"Because this party they throw today is not a real henna night. It's like a separation party from the family, from the friends and neighbors.  The real henna ceremony is when the bride comes back from the mikveh, when they put the henna on her, tie a cloth around it, and her parents lock up the house and sleep there with her, to guard her from the demons.  The groom does the same thing in his house.  His mother brings a little of the henna  from the bride's house, puts it on him, covers it up, and he sleeps there with it the whole night, together with his best man, who's accompanied him for all seven days before the wedding.  The two of them share the same bed.  That was the custom in our community."

House of Secrets bookThe Henna Ceremony is reprinted from The House of Secrets by Varda Polak-Sahm, Copyright © 2009 by Varda Polak-Sahm, Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston. Get your copy at http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2053

Henna Hands image by  Rashmi Nawa, Irving Texas Rashmi's website is Heena Designs at
http://heenausa.com/HeenaUSA/service.aspx

 

Across the street, over the rooftop, in the next building, a young man in blue cooks his single dinner over a tiny flame. Perhaps a student, I saw him once in the marketplace, bent over a wooden tray of lemons from North Africa. Sidling up to him, smitten by his pale green eyes, by the ringlets in his beard, by his dark fingers, curled around a lemon, cradling it in his palm, I began to tremble. Such beauty should not be allowed. Without him noticing me, I followed him to a grain vendor's stall, and watched him purchase a handful of rice and a handful of beans. Then I lost him in the crowd, and now - curse and blessing - he lives across from me, in a tiny attic room, with a fireplace just big enough for a single iron pot to hang above the flames.

O the flames that rise up in me, that burn me, as he turns and bends, cutting something I cannot see, on a board that I can't see either. Only the rise and fall of his arm, the way that his shoulder muscles swell and then stretch out, the rest of him out of view through his tiny window.

Did he see me!? I turn to look down at my book, then look back, like David on his roof, captivated by Bathsheba. I would kill for him, like David did. But how much better it would be if he were the son of a king and came to me freely, like Jonathan came to David, swearing his devotion.

He is gone now. And so is my ability to read. The text before me, "Berachot," is meaningless. What blessings can come to me with him living across the courtyard? I will have my windows sealed. I will move my study to another room. Down to the small one that faces the street. It's cooler there anyway, in summer.

He is back. He has changed his robe. Now in brown, with lighter stripes, are they tan or gray, I cannot tell from here. This robe is looser, a little bit open in front. God of Israel, have mercy on me. Through the opening, as he turns for a moment toward me, toward me without seeing me, a wash of dark hair, like a wave coming in on that beach near Cadiz, with all of its sailors, beach that we visited when I was a boy, the beach where first I knew the direction my heart turned, toward the west, away from Jerusalem. I will sell this house. I will live all year outside the city walls with my mother, in her summer house, overlooking the olive groves.

No, Ezra. Now you are being foolish. Open your book again. Read. Read and look out. Read and look out and recite the blessing your father taught you when you were a little boy, the blessing to recite when you see a king and his court. For if all the men of Israel are princes, this young man is surely a king, and the fire, his pot, and whatever he is chopping, are surely his retinue.

"Blessed are You, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has given of Your glory to mortals." And tomorrow, I shall go shopping again, back to the same marketplace, where if I'm lucky, I'll see him again. But should I wear the red robe with the yellow sash, or the green one with gold? And which sandals? No, this is holy ground. I should go barefoot.

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Photo by Angela Garbe, August 22, 2007, posted at http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/08/19-25

I recently became single. Yeah, sad, I know. But it happens.

So even though I'm looking forward to being Mr. Man On The Town during the 2009 CAN!!CAN/PunkTorah Tour, I thought it might be fun to check out JDate* and see what it is all about. Plus, Tu B'Av (Jewish Valentine's Day) is coming up, and it would be nice to not feel like a loser.

I don't know about you, but after ten minutes of being on the Golden-Calf-of-Cyber-Yentas, I can safely say that JDate is the epitome of boring ass, gaywad Jewish crap.

JDate exists in the same realm that suburban JCCs, "young professionals groups" and Temple Singles Clubs inhabit: "we're trying to be hip and edgy, but it takes gallons of fruit-flavored flourescent martinis, the latest Crackberry and shopping trips to Banana Republic to get us there."

To top it off, JDate costs a shit ton of money. Sure, it's free to get a profile. But that's like someone giving you a brand new Iphone...only without a screen. No self respecting bohemian Jew would do JDate because $40.00 to look at pictures of people you went to summer camp with is just not worth it. You can buy weed for that!

I decided that JDate needed to be hacked. I needed to see if it was possible to get around paying a billion dollars a month to talk to twenty-nine year old corporate paper pushers who enjoy jalapeno poppers at Chili's and going to the outlet mall on Sundays.

Here's what I tried:

Test #1: Simply put your email address in the profile (duh!)

Conclusion: Fail! The second you put a Yahoo, Gmail or whatever, the darn robots get ya! Try as you might with Y.A.H.OOs or gee-mail, but they'll find you out.

Test #2: Browse the photos of your Hebrew Hotties. Once you find a potential love/lust interest, you just remember what they look like and find them on the Facebook Jewster ap.

Conclusion: Moderate fail! The theory works. You can look at someone's age/location/Jewish background and use that criteria to search for them on Jewster. Problem is, Jewster just isn't that popular. I did have luck finding one girl who lives near me, but there's thousands of Jews in my area so one-out-of-a-billion is not a success ratio worth getting excited over.

Test #3: Make your profile name on the site the same as your Twitter name. Then, write your ad in all lowercase letters, except the letters that spell out the secret message "FIND ME ON TWITTER @".

Conclusion: After a few days, it looked like the JDate robots hadn't discovered my little technique. So I tried rewriting my profile and making it more obvious. Another day later, and it's still up!

I deserve some kind of award for figuring that out. If they catch me (which they will if they see this article), then I'll just find a new way.

 

*Full Disclosure: I'm not a virgin to the JDate thing. I actually asked the parent company of JDate to sponsor my band's tour. They respectfully declined and said, "maybe in the future". I think the Moshiach will come before then.

By Schwartzie, a contributor to my blog 

I remember the day in ninth grade when my rebbe was faced with the awkward task of explaining the concept of anal sex.  "Ah, boys," he told us, "lets say you have some thieves, and they want to rob a house. Biah she'lo c'darka, or, relations that occur not in the normal way, is an important concept when considering the finer points of the acquisition of a woman through intercourse- you know, the transaction.

"Now normally," he continued, "the thieves would go in the front door and in that case they would have access to all the rooms in the house. But if the thieves had occasion to use the back door of the house- for whatever reason- they would only have access to several rooms.  Would you say that the house was partially robbed, or is it considered a complete robbing?"

Indeed, is it considered a complete robbing? I don't remember the maskana, but I can tell you one thing- the lock on that back door is certainly a little harder to crack than the one on the front door.

Explaining this sort of thing, I suppose, is one of the hazards of teaching the mesechta on marriage to a bunch of heretofore sheltered yeshiva boys, some of whom had never heard the particulars of how sexual intercourse is supposed to go (my cousin Yaakov told me when I was seven and he was ten and my parents being reformed hippies and avid Doctor Spock readers had no qualms about filling me in on the details- which, by the way, scared the shit out of me. "What if it gets stuck?" I remember crying as I imagined some sort of zipper between a girl's legs).

I always wondered what my rebbe, obviously a talmid chacham, was thinking when he chose to teach us the most explicit of all the mesechtos of the gemara (though I hear that Gittin is pretty heavy, too. Go figure). "A woman can be acquired in three ways," the mishna says, "through money, a written document, or sexual intercourse." And contrary to popular belief, Chazal are no prudes.

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