At the Metro Club in New Orleans, I was dancing with a law school student named Hendrik, who kept palming his way down the backside of my thighs.  Without hesitation, he told me he had been waiting all night to dance with a Jewish girl, especially one as "full-bred" as myself.  Oh God. Was it really that obvious? I wondered, reminding myself that if I would just stand 45 degrees to the left of guys, when speaking to them, that my nose would not seem nearly as obtrusive.  "You know, its so funny," Hendrik said, "My grandfather was a nazi officer but my dad and I, we absolutely love the Jewish people.  Especially the women.  Huge fans."

It was weird and not very smart of Hendrik to natter on about his Nazi-infested genes before even scoring my digits.  I liked his honesty though. I also liked how his shoulder muscles packed so nicely into his ski sweater and how his strong, steroidal voice would crunch all the way down to a creak whenever he tried to be romantic.  "Did anyone ever tell you that your hair is the exact same color as your eyes?" Creak.  Creak.  Creak.  He made me want to dig into his esophagus and slowly and tenderly caress his vocal chords.  But I–fortunately–held myself back. 

My first date with Hendrik was a stroll through the New Orleans French Quarter. Hendrik spoke with terrific emotion about ex-lovers, probably to make me jealous, but I didn’t really like him enough to mind.  There was Michelle Rosenthal with her nasal South Jersey whine; Mimi Moskowski who sported an unshaven hippie bush which Hendrik found endearing (though he did not find Mimi herself endearing); and Avivah Katz who used to bob her tongue into Hendrik’s earlobe in the back row of Temple Emanu El’s Friday night services. "It was just her way of saying ‘Shabbat Shalom," Hendrik insisted.  The list continued on with clunky Jewish last name after clunky Jewish last name, lots of bergs and ovitskys, very few vowels.  I could just picture the kid masturbating to a map of Israel every night.

One night, when Hendrik and I were enjoying our privacy outside an empty Café du Monde, Hendrik traced his finger along the curve of my nose as if it were as arousing as a breast.  I wanted to reroute his fingers to someplace-anyplace-sexier.  Look! Down below! There’s these fat, flowering 32D melons just above my ribcage, here, have a stroke!  Hendrik couldn’t hear my thoughts of course, and began to molest the bridge between my nostrils. I could practically hear him humming, "Ahhhh Juuudaism."

Trying to be heard over street music jazz, Hendrik said to me, "Um Rachel…sweetheart…would you mind singing a little Hebrew prayer for me? Please? Like the ‘Barak ata’ one? It gets me off.  I’m being serious." He laughed at this, appreciating his own sexual weirdness.  I sighed and whispered "baruch atah adonei eloheinu meleh ha’olam" into his ear in my slinkiest phone sex operator voice.  He fondled my nose again and I giggled.

I imagined Hendrik dreaming up various Jew-girl-on-Nazi-descendant storylines before he went to bed at night. 

Fantasy #1: The Jew girl, with her inky black eyes and teeth slanted shyly inwards (think Anne Frank) kisses goose-stepping boy atop Noah’s ark.  The only two humans left after the flood, the fate of humanity rests upon them to procreate (cue the urgent music).  Their limbs tangle about, arms becoming legs and legs becoming arms, they tangle about some more, the rhythm of the Mediterranean Sea eggs them on and then, suddenly-voila! The bible’s first-ever half Christian/half Jewish baby is conceived! 

While my feelings toward Hendrik never did approach love, I, in utter anti-feminist fashion, wanted him to love me.  But I wondered: could a guy nursing a fetish ever truly fall in love with his fetish girl? 

I doubt it. It seemed I could never be the object of Hendrik’s cosmic, chemicals gone haywire, rocket-fire love because I was the object of Hendrik’s typecasting.  Hendrik was casting for his real-life Noah’s Ark Jewess and I was the one who best fit the bill.

A few weeks after I began dating Hendrik, I went through a serious Dolly Parton phase, perhaps in rebellion to all the pretentious snot clogging up my college campus. I wrote country songs and performed them before my full-length mirror and my roommate, who promised not to judge.  I wore cowboy boots and peroxided my hair so blonde it washed all the Jewish character out of my face.

I e-mailed Hendrik a digital picture of the new me labeled "Just as Hitler ordered" and I expected at least some kind of half-pleasure to come out from under him; maybe he would call me his "sexy little Barbara Streisand" or he would tell me gently that I looked very hot but that he wanted his Jew back. I just assumed that all guys, even the most Jew-chasing among them, were turned on by blonde.  I thought it an evolutionary thing.

For a good few hours, I stared, autistic-like, at my computer until an instant message from bodyofgod937 popped up on the screen: "Call me when you have better judgement" is all it said.  My better judgement told me that I should take Hendrik’s number out of my cell phone and that I should have listened to my mother in the first place and only date nice Jewish boys.  Jewish boys, after all, would never pass up on a good shiksa.

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