Meet Jewish Girls: The Jewish Fetish in America

Sev­enth in a series of essays

JERUSALEM — Details mag­a­zine looks at Jew­ish and Israeli girls as the erotic fas­ci­na­tion of the moment in which men love to meet Jew­ish girls:

It seems that Amer­ica can’t get enough smoking-hot Semitic tush lately — whether on Jewish-Israel tours and vaca­tions in Israel or some­thing else.

In a recent poll on the porn blog Flesh­bot, “Jew­ish girls” ranked sec­ond among kinks (the win­ner: “freck­les”). Jew­esses aren’t just the rage in the triple-X realm, either: They’re seduc­ing goyim on Mad Men and Glee and giv­ing movie geeks con­nip­tions over reports of JILF-on-JILF action between Natalie Port­man and Mila Kunis in Dar­ren Aronofsky’s upcom­ing Black Swan.

That Jew­ish women have become the eth­nic fetish du jour is all the more remark­able given that Jews rep­re­sent a truly tiny minor­ity (2.2 per­cent) of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion. In recent years, God’s cho­sen men­folk have been objects of affec­tion, too, though they draw their appeal from cud­dly schlub­bi­ness, not sex­ual energy—consider Judd Apatow’s all-Jewish Frat Pack (Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Jason Segel, et al.). But unlike their fun­ny­man broth­ers, Jew­ish girls have had to over­come the old sting­ing JAP stereo­type of frigid­ity, whini­ness, and big hair.

Recently, how­ever, the Fran Drescher rep has given way to a more smol­der­ing image. Think cul­tural mutts like Rachel Weisz, Emmanuelle Chriqui, and Rachel Bilson—women who have lit­tle in com­mon beyond sul­tri­ness and Star of David necklaces.

My first trip to Israel was with Birthright Israel in 2006. I was twenty-six and on the wait­ing list, but a spot opened up at the last minute on a trip specif­i­cally geared towards col­lege stu­dents. I went any­way since I was excited to have a chance to go.

The Jew­ish Fetish

In ret­ro­spect, it was quite inter­est­ing to see the inter­ac­tion between the Amer­i­can guys and IDF Israeli girls on the trip. Birthright Israel usu­ally brings a dozen or so young, sol­diers on the trip as part of a cul­tural exchange — and the two groups, both just out of high school, are always excited to meet each other. And I mean “excited” in every sense of the word. (Here is an archived arti­cle I wrote on the trip while editor-in-chief of Spare Change News in Boston.)

The Amer­i­can girls were smit­ten with the mus­cu­lar, tanned, 18-year-old, Israeli sol­diers on Birthright Israel trips with machine guns. The Amer­i­can guys were awestruck by the bawdy, lively, Israeli girls on Birthright Israel trips in uni­form (see a pic­ture of mine below) who also car­ried the same weapons. The var­i­ous hotel rooms in which we stayed over the ten-day trip were put to good use.

I was not the only one to notice the fas­ci­na­tion that Amer­i­cans — whether Jew­ish or not — have with Israeli girls in uni­form. The Israeli gov­ern­ment decided a few years later to brand the coun­try as being full of gor­geous women to attract more tourism and estab­lish asso­ci­a­tions with some­thing other than war and ter­ror­ism (see here and here). Most sig­nif­i­cantly, one result was a cover page and photo spread in Maxim mag­a­zine in July 2007 with cur­rent and for­mer sol­diers wear­ing lit­tle (see here).

This video — which went viral — also brought the mes­sage of Israel’s unique, well, assets to the West­ern world (note: strong language):

Now, I do not mean to imply that there is some direct con­nec­tion between the Israeli government’s mar­ket­ing efforts and the recent inter­est in Jew­ish star­lets in Hol­ly­wood. No mat­ter what some con­spir­acy the­o­rists might believe, the Jew­ish world is nowhere near orga­nized enough to pull some­thing like that off. A group of four Jews can argue for hours over what to eat for break­fast — and some really expect them to run the world?

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