Jewish Singles, Army Women, and Israel Sex

Tenth in an ongo­ing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — So I was start­ing my first day at my first full-time job in Tel Aviv after mov­ing to Israel. I was an English-language mar­ket­ing writer for a high-tech com­pany. I was sit­ting in a room with two other employ­ees, and the depart­ment head came inside to wish every­one a good morn­ing. Soon I would have my first les­son in Jew­ish sin­gles in Israel.

After the usual pleas­antries, the 40-ish boss turned to my coworker, a 19-year-old stu­dent from Canada whose father is Israeli, and made a com­ment that shocked me: “Hey, your breasts look big­ger today.” I did not know what to expect: How would Israeli girls like her react? My col­league gen­uinely laughed. “Yeah, I’m wear­ing a dif­fer­ent bra today,” she said with a smile and a shrug. Then every­one started talk­ing about the day’s work as if noth­ing strange had hap­pened. If the boss had said some­thing like that in the United States, he would have faced law­suits and termination.

As a result of Jew­ish reli­gion and Jew­ish his­tory, Israel has var­i­ous cul­tural norms regard­ing sex that most do not see on Jewish-Israel tours and vaca­tions in Israel. This was my first intro­duc­tion to them. Later, the same boss asked me if I had spo­ken with “the MILF” in human resources. I laughed and shrugged it off.

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Israeli Girls

Before I moved from Bean­town to Illi­nois and then to Israel, I worked briefly as a mar­ket­ing man­ager at a Mass­a­chu­setts hos­pi­tal. Dur­ing the day­long ori­en­ta­tion, a group of twenty new employ­ees had to meet with human resources, lis­ten to var­i­ous speak­ers, and watch a series of videos. (Obvi­ously, the job did not work out.)

I was sit­ting next to the only other guy in the room since all of the other new recruits were female nurses. Soon, the HR man­ager pre­sented a video on sex­ual harass­ment in the work­place: A woman ran to a female col­league to com­plain that the guy who refills the vend­ing machines had asked her out. “I felt so awk­ward!” she whined to her friend. “I feel so uncom­fort­able, and I don’t know what to do!”

The friend advised her to talk to her boss or make a com­plaint to human resources. At this point in the film, the other guy and I started laugh­ing to our­selves. It was com­pletely absurd — God for­bid that a guy tries to ask some­one out on a date! The woman could have sim­ply told him, “No, thank you.”

I think about that video when­ever I observe the dif­fer­ences between Amer­i­can and Israeli girls. In such a sit­u­a­tion like the one in the video, an Israeli girl would have turned him down, prob­a­bly very rudely. If he per­sisted, Israeli girls would have hit him or kicked him in the crotch. No one here would run and cry to management.

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Israeli Army Women

Israeli girls are rough. They drink, smoke, and curse. They yell and argue. They are ruth­lessly blunt and usu­ally cyn­i­cal. They know how to fix cars and fire weapons. Part of the rea­son is that life is harder here, espe­cially dur­ing the first sev­eral decades since Israel was founded. Every­one pitches in equally. Every­one — men and women — serves in the mil­i­tary for a few years. Every­one works in the fields, sta­bles, and fac­to­ries on col­lec­tive farms named kib­butzim. I know sev­eral women who have turned down Israeli guys whom they deem to be “too sen­si­tive.” A bar­tender friend of mine, a woman, once gave me advice on meet­ing Israel women: “Don’t be so Amer­i­can!” (“Amer­i­can” is the code word that peo­ple use for “nice” when they talk to me.) Israeli girls will work hard all day, then make din­ner and clean house at night.

Israel is far ahead of the West­ern world in terms of the sexes being treated equally. But as I have always writ­ten, every­thing in the Mid­dle East is a para­dox. In other ways, Israel is far behind the West as well.

Part of the rea­son is that Israeli girls are very “macho” is that they need to defend them­selves against many Israeli guys. Men here, like many of their Arab cousins in other Mid­dle East­ern coun­tries, are not very nice to women in gen­eral. Men through­out the coun­try act like guys on a con­struc­tion site when­ever they see beau­ti­ful Israeli girls. Men have no shame when they are try­ing to get into a woman’s pants. Israeli guys think that I am a “friar” (the Hebrew word for “sucker”) when I refuse to try to pick up girls who are extremely drunk in bars. Israeli guys have no rules in the pur­suit of — well, you know. A later boss of mine at a dif­fer­ent job told me not to recruit any female can­di­dates for a posi­tion because “they get sick more often, and they get preg­nant.” Women need to be tough to suc­ceed in such a society.

Israeli, in many respects, is a con­ser­v­a­tive coun­try. Israeli girls are gen­er­ally expected to do the cook­ing and clean­ing. When­ever I am a guest for din­ner, I always offer to help with the dishes or the clean-up, but the woman of the house will threaten to hit me unless I go watch tele­vi­sion with the other guys. And she will only be half-joking.

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