Considerations

Sev­enth in a series of essays

JERUSALEM — Details mag­a­zine looks at Jew­ish girls as the erotic fas­ci­na­tion of the moment:

It seems that Amer­ica can’t get enough smoking-hot Semitic tush lately.

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 Taglit-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.

In ret­ro­spect, it was quite inter­est­ing to see the inter­ac­tion between the Amer­i­can and Israeli Jews on the trip. Taglit usu­ally brings a dozen or so young, IDF 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 sol­diers car­ry­ing machine guns. The Amer­i­can guys were awestruck by the bawdy, lively girls 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 women 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?

Still, either there seems to be many Jew­ish stars gain­ing pop­u­lar­ity among Amer­i­cans or there are enough media out­lets choos­ing to focus on Jew­ish actresses, thereby mak­ing them pop­u­lar. (Chicken and egg.) But why?

One obvi­ous answer is that main­stream, white Amer­ica has always had a fetish for eth­nic women of var­i­ous types through­out the years. (See the Details article’s time­line of Jew­ish actresses through­out the decades — you might be sur­prised at who makes the list.) Peo­ple always have an erotic fas­ci­na­tion with that which is dif­fer­ent. More­over, humanity’s nat­ural instincts tell peo­ple to pro­duce chil­dren with those of other eth­nic­i­ties because the com­bi­na­tion of two immune sys­tems con­sist­ing of dif­fer­ent genes pro­tects bet­ter against dis­ease. (This is also the rea­son that insu­lar breed­ing within the same, closed com­mu­nity tends to result in more birth defects and other ail­ments through­out life.)

So, Amer­i­cans have always cel­e­brated the, um, beauty of diver­sity — after all, nearly all Amer­i­cans are descended from immi­grants from var­i­ous coun­tries — but why Jew­ish girls? Why now?

As with many sub­jects, the answer lies in pol­i­tics, cur­rent events, and sub­con­scious mind­sets. Many Amer­i­cans feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are under siege by Islamic ter­ror­ists, and they sub­con­sciously empathize with female, Israeli sol­diers whom they believe are on the front­line of the War on Ter­ror. (I am sorry to deflate their fan­tasies, but nearly all female, IDF sol­diers work desk jobs — the term in Hebrew is “job­nik” — or do guard duty. The machine guns that the sol­diers had on the Birthright Israel trip, for exam­ple, are some­times for show to impress the Amer­i­can boys.)

For those Amer­i­cans who believe that the world is engaged in a clash of civ­i­liza­tions between Islam and the West, Israeli Jews and Amer­i­can Jews are also seen — directly and indi­rectly, respec­tively — as allies with the West who have a higher stake in the out­come because of their eth­nic­ity and religion.

Many Amer­i­can men may also be tak­ing a lik­ing to Jew­ish girls because they are more tra­di­tion­ally ori­ented towards fam­ily and chil­dren — and they know how to cook amaz­ing food as well. As the West­ern world is begin­ning to expe­ri­ence a back­lash against fem­i­nism, such an atti­tude is not surprising.

Another rea­son is that many Mizhrahi Jews — those whose fam­i­lies come from Arab coun­tries — are a lit­tle too close to Arabs. As the Boston Globe’s Brainiac blog observed some time ago on the fact that Euro­pean fash­ion shows now fea­ture some Islamic outfits:

I have a psy­cho­log­i­cal, not bio­log­i­cal, burqa the­ory of my own. In the mid-1940s, the psy­chol­o­gist Anna Freud described “iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the aggres­sor” as a neu­rotic attempt to avoid pun­ish­ment by inter­nal­iz­ing the val­ues of one’s oppres­sor. It seems to me that Amer­i­cans are so wor­ried about Islam­o­fas­cist ter­ror­ists that we’re slowly turn­ing our­selves into con­ser­v­a­tive Muslims.

If it is true that Amer­i­cans can be described as hav­ing an increas­ing “iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the aggres­sor,” then tak­ing a lik­ing to Mizrahi Jews — like actress Emmanuelle Chriqui below, who became famous after play­ing Adam Sandler’s Pales­tin­ian love inter­est in “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” and whose fam­ily are Moroc­can Jews — is as close as one could get to Arabs with­out lik­ing, well, Arabs. (Ashke­nazi Jews, in con­trast, are those of Euro­pean descent. A slim major­ity of Israelis are Mizrahi Jews.)

There is yet another uncom­fort­able rea­son why Jew­ish women are becom­ing so pop­u­lar. As I noted in a prior essay, West­ern soci­ety is becom­ing increas­ingly super­fi­cial and more often view­ing women as sex objects partly as a result of the unin­tended con­se­quences of fem­i­nism. Jew­ish women, in gen­eral, tend to be more curvy nat­u­rally than many of Euro­pean descent, so they might become more pop­u­lar in a cul­ture that focuses more and more on appear­ance. After all, one of the most pop­u­lar porn stars today, accord­ing to the Details arti­cle, is Joanna Angel (below). (She comes from an Ortho­dox Jew­ish fam­ily, so that explains some of the per­verted inter­est as well.) And, no, I am not going to search for a link to her website.

An often-asked ques­tion in Jew­ish cir­cles is: “Is this good for the Jews?” I am con­flicted. Obvi­ously, any good PR for Israel is ben­e­fi­cial. But, as fre­quent read­ers of my blog know, I am very uncom­fort­able with women — Jew­ish or not — being viewed as sex objects. But as with all fads and fetishes, this, too, shall pass. For bet­ter and for worse.

Else­where: Jes­sica Pauline looks at the issue at Jewcy as well.

Prior essay: The Upcom­ing Gen­er­a­tional War

Related posts:

1. Jew­ish Refugees
2. Jew­ish Culture
3. Jew­ish and Democratic
4. Jew­ish Refugees
5. Jew­ish and Israeli News/Opinion Roundup