Gabrielle Birkner -
Staff Writer
Kristina Grish has never quite recovered from the time she
seduced a Jewish boyfriend on Yom Kippur. Grish, who is
Presbyterian, hadn’t known that the forbidden fruit was, well,
forbidden on the Day of Atonement. Their indiscretion would
leave her “Hebrew honey” so wracked with guilt that he began
to cry.
“It made me feel like the stereotypical bad,
bad shiksa,” says Grish, 29, using the Yiddish and, depending
on whom you ask, derogatory word for a non-Jewish woman.
The faux pas — arguably more his than hers — and
countless other curious scenarios she encountered dating
Jewish men were the raisons d’etre for her soon-to-be-released
book “Boy Vey! The Shiksa’s Guide to Dating Jewish Men” (Simon
& Schuster).' The slim volume is a generally light-hearted
guide to the rules of engagement for dating Members of the
Tribe.
The rules include: Ingratiate yourself with his
“Alpha Mom”; learn to pepper your conversations with common
Yiddish words like “nosh” or “kvetch”; listen attentively when
he reminisces about summer camp; and, oh yeah, no sex on Yom
Kippur.
But Grish’s book is more than just Survivor:
Long Island. “Boy Vey!” plumbs the growing popularity of
interfaith pairing. She attributes the phenomenon not only to
the Jewish men’s much-discussed fascination with gentile women
(“Shiks-appeal” in Seinfeld-ese). Non-Jewish women, Grish
says, are equally keen on choosing a “Chosen One.”
In
“Boy Vey!” Grish contends that compared to their non-Jewish
counterparts, Jewish men tend to be better educated, more
nurturing and communicative and, thanks to their often close
relationships with their mothers, more affectionate.
“[They] feed your mind and your appetite,” she writes,
“and they’re the ultimate caretakers without a hint of
machismo. They’re also generous and thoughtful thanks to a
matriarchal culture that’s taught them to appreciate women’s
strength, candor, humor and intelligence. And because Jewish
men value professional drive, your mom can finally tell
neighbors that you’re dating a doctor, lawyer or entrepreneur.
And she’ll mean it this time.”
The book, which is due
out next month, draws on Grish’s personal experiences, as well
as interviews with psychologists and matchmakers, and
interfaith couples and their parents and grandparents.
Grish, a slim brunette who purports to have dated 20
Jewish men “seriously or semi-seriously” since college, sees
no inherent danger propagating flattering stereotypes about
Jewish men.
“It’s just like saying, ‘I love Italian
men because they’re great cooks and they love food.’ They are
great cooks; they do love food,” says Grish, who grew up in
suburban Maryland and now lives in Manhattan’s West Village.
“There’s nothing to apologize about.”
But “Boy Vey!”
also references some less-than-becoming stereotypes of Jewish
men: their frugality, large noses and fiscal obsessions. For
example, the book includes in its list of “cunning spots bound
to locate the studs of your interfaith dreams” the coldest
subway car, “relishing the cheap, air-conditioned ride”; the
rhinoplasty waiting room, “pretending to meet his sister after
her consultation'; and a real estate open house, “estimating
how much his own space is worth, relatively speaking.”
The book also explains “Jewish neurosis and
guilt”(“Let’s call it N&G, for short; kind of like
S&M, except the whips and chains are mental”);
generational opposition to intermarriage (“It’s actually your
boyfriend’s parents and grandparents you have to worry about.
They’re the most fearful that the Jewish race will vanish from
the earth — and that wanton Goyim will lead the way”);
overbearing Jewish mothers (“Your boyfriend’s mom has worked
very hard to mold him into the cutest little Oedipus complex
you’ve ever met”).
Grish says “Boy Vey!” is likely to
be judged harsher than if she were Jewish and had written the
same book.
“Coming from a gentile, I knew the subject
was more than a little taboo,” says Grish, who is part
Italian, part German and part Native American.
Before
Simon & Schuster offered her a book deal, some publishers
passed on “Boy Vey!” telling her essentially, “If you were
Jewish and writing this, the deal would be yours,” according
to Grish, whose current boyfriend is not Jewish.
The
author knows the subject lends itself to backlash — from Jews
genuinely concerned with interfaith dating, and from those who
feel she is overstepping her bounds.
After a recent
speaking engagement in Toronto, for example, Grish received an
e-mail from a Jewish woman warning her to “back off our turf”
and stop dating Jewish men.
Grish, a freelance
magazine writer and the author of “We Need to Talk, But First,
Do you Like My Shoes? Dress Codes for Dumping Your Man,” says
“Boy Vey!” focuses on dating and intentionally leaves out the
subject of interfaith marriage.
“That’s something I’m
not equipped to talk about,” she says, adding that the topic
is too serious and explosive to talk about in a sometimes
tongue-in-cheek book.
Marriage, agrees Barbie Adler,
the founder of Selective Search, a Chicago-based personal
matchmaking firm featured in “Boy Vey!” is another ballgame.
“Jewish guys have the reputation for being good
husbands, and non-Jewish girls want to tap into that,” Adler
says in an interview. “But at the end of the day, married life
is hard” and a common spiritual foundation helps.
“Divorced Jewish guys who did not marry Jewish girls
the first time around tend to be looking for a Jewish girl
because they realized the [interfaith] relationship didn’t
work,” she says.
Still, the demand for Jewish mates,
as boyfriends or husbands, represents a societal shift, says
Robin Gorman Newman, a relationship coach from Great Neck,
L.I., and the author of “How to Meet a Mensch in New York.”
A generation ago, “mensch” — the Yiddish word for a
“good guy” — was used interchangeably with words like
“schlep,” “nerd” or “bookish,” says Newman, who is Jewish.
“Now it’s cool to be a mensch,” she says. “Now they’re
in demand.”
Newman says some non-Jewish women seek out
Jewish men, with their reputation for being “nice guys,” on
the heels of a series of bad relationships.
“They wake
up one day and say, ‘I need a Jewish man. That’s what’s going
to work for me,’ ” she says. “Like it’s a quick fix, like it’s
that easy. I say, ‘Bravo to Jewish men,’ if that’s the way
they’re perceived.”
Their appeal can be seen as well
by the burgeoning number of non-Jewish women on JDate, the
popular Jewish dating Web site.
Alon Carmel, a JDate
founder, says that while non-Jews comprise less than 1 percent
of its hundreds of thousands of members, gentile Jdaters are
overwhelmingly women seeking “a nice Jewish boy with family
values who can provide them with financial security.”
Grish has a special appeal, too, say those who know
her.
“Kristina’s not Jewish, but she’s pretty damn
close,” says Ben Kaplan, Grish’s former boyfriend, who
describes his ex as ambitious, organized and charmingly
neurotic — characteristics, he says, that are stereotypical of
Jewish women.
Kaplan, in his foreword for “Boy Vey!”
explains that he initially thought Kristina was Jewish,
despite her decidedly un-Jewish name.
“To the nebbish
young Heeb that prowls the city at dusk on Sabbath,” he
writes, “Kristina — and her Shiksa cohorts — represents the
best of all worlds: familiar yet exotic, proper yet fun, sweet
yet stern, comforting yet challenging.”
In an
interview, he points out that Jewish men aren’t necessarily
attracted to the archetypical docile, blond, anti-mother
figure known as the “Shiksa Goddess.” Often they go for
non-Jewish women who, like Kristina, “seem Jewish” and are
comfortable moving between distinctively Jewish and non-Jewish
circles.
Many Jewish men who look for non-Jewish
girlfriends, Adler says, “still want someone who can play in
both worlds, someone who’s passable.”
Passable, she
may be, but Grish says she has never been anything but honest
about her shiksa status.
“I’m not a Jew,” Grish says,
“but I know how to ingratiate myself into that culture.”
And when it comes to snagging Jewish boyfriends, she
says, that has made all the difference. n |
Click Here to Print