The Magical Mystery of Jewish Girls

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The other night, I was lying in bed in a beautiful, luxurious hotel room after I had just finished posting “I’m Afraid of Girls...”, and I found myself thinking, “It would be so nice if tomorrow I could just have a conversation with a Jewish girl.”. By the next morning, after checking out of my hotel and worrying about where I was going to go, I had forgotten about the thought. 

I’m walking through Balboa Park, and I see in front of me a girl soliciting donations for Save The Children. I am a supporter of this new-found strategy charities have of sending out enthusiastic smart young people to sign up donors. Nearly two years ago, I met a Swedish girl named Linnea who convinced me to sign up as a Save the Children donor, and subsequently, I signed up with several other charities. I canceled the donations when my financial life collapsed, but I still take time to stop and talk to these charity kids when I run into them. 

The girl I met last week told me that her name was Katie. Pretty quickly, I realized that she was Jewish. Abe Foxman might ask, “Michael, how can you know a girl’s Jewish without her telling you so?”

LEONARDO DICAPRIO

(The Departed)

Oh, you know, high-waisted pants, sandals or Converse Chuck Taylors, frizzy hair and an air of intellectual superiority. 

Actually, it wasn’t any of those things with this girl (except the hair!). It was her eyes. A lot of Jewish girls have unique beautiful eye colors that are not green, not brown, not blue but all three, like this girl and Scarlett Johansson. But after talking to her a while, I noticed more tell-tale Jewish girl traits, and then she told me her full name, and that sealed it. 

Despite my resistance and my current state of homelessness, Katie managed to convince me to sign up for Save the Children again. As I told an Israeli girl at the mall selling preposterously expensive cosmetics, I can’t turn down a beautiful Jewish girl for anything. 

Katie wasn’t what most guys would call beautiful, but she was extremely attractive to me. I am afterall a groupie for Jewish girls. I mean, she was smart, colorful, bigger than tiny little Scarlett Johansson, and most of all, like nearly all Jewish girls I interact with, she actually talked to me, instead of the way Gentile girls interact, dancing around like Floyd Mayweather trying not to let you get a handle on them. 

There was this ridiculously smoking hot probably-not-Jewish girl walking around Balboa Park taking pictures with what appeared to be a professional camera, and when I passed her once she smiled and said hi. But as cute as that girl was, I’d have been far more interested in a date with Katie than her. But that’s the other thing about Jewish girls—they don’t flirt. Because they talk to you like another human being, I don’t know how to tell if a Jewish girl likes me. 

But it is thanks in large part to my realization that Jewish girls as a group have what I want in a wife that I have learned to recognize something important about myself. My aesthetic appreciation for female beauty is something completely separate from my desires for romance or sex.  I think most guys confuse these things, and become womanizers because they are chasing after hot girls when what they are really craving is emotional intimacy, but they don’t know how to experience it. 

I remember I was looking at a picture of this one model in a Maybelline ad. I don’t know her name. I said to myself, “That girl is ART!”. I was watching Jennifer’s Body sometime later and marvelling at the scientific mystery of Amanda Seyfried’s smile. I started thinking about physics because there is a positive sensation that occurs in the observer when she smiles, and obviously other people feel it too since they pay her lots of money to stand in front of cameras. Where does that energy come from?  Is Amanda some kind of space-age happiness reactor? You don’t have to be beautiful to have that effect—a positive attitude can do it too.  But some girls can do it just standing there. 

In the last fifty years, there was this unfortunate backlash against beautiful women led by a powerful coalition of well-meaning but misguided advocates for feminine equality, less attractive women disguising their jealousy as feminism, and misogynist men angry that beauty can give women some power when men want all the power to themselves. 

This has thankfully started to change in recent years, even though, as I assert as part of the central idea of the MAT Girl, we still tend to ignore or diminish the significance of a woman’s accomplishments if she’s beautiful. Though she isn’t eligible, I’d vote for Natalie Portman before any of these girls running for president right now. Forget about Bernie Sanders. What we really need is a 78 year old Jewish WOMAN from Brooklyn as president. She’d start getting people IN LINE.  Black people like to talk about keeping it real. Nobody keeps it realer than older Jewish women. That would make a funny movie...

But while beautiful women still have trouble getting credit for their achievements, even moreso than women in general do, there is positive change in the air. And you know who I give credit for a lot of it? Kim Kardashian. 

During an era where beauty was being pushed aside as superficial and meaningless, Kim has been unrepentantly hot, and has encouraged other women to be hot. She’s actually not my type (her sister Kylie is another story!), but Kim shamelessly showed off a body that was not included in the mainstream idea of beauty when she arrived on the scene, but now it is.  I believe it is thanks in large part to her that more women are dressing to show their body as it is, rather than trying to disguise how they look to match some nonexistent ideal. And they look way better. 

Every day that I walk around and I’m in awe of how many beautiful women I see, beautiful not because they were blessed to be born Amanda Seyfried (though some are hot like that), but because they are shamelessly showing the beauty that they have, whatever it is. Hey, I thought we’d have starships and teleportation by now, but a world filled with smoking hot girls is way better! Thanks, Kim!

But for me, the fact that a girl is smoking hot has no bearing on my level of interest in her as a romantic partner. For me romance is something that starts in the mind. If I truly and deeply relate to a girl, I’ll be attracted to her no matter what she looks like. I just enjoy looking at beautiful girls and wish I could live in a world where I didn’t have to look away, and that I find a wife who appreciates the beauty of girls also and doesn’t feel jealous about it. Not that she has to be a lesbian. It isn’t a sexual thing at all. These Art Girls are beautiful like Monet’s paintings. Way better than that actually. If you believe in the God of creation, girls were her best work by far. But I’m fair and I’m not a hypocrite. I appreciate the beauty of Jude Law and Channing Tatum even though I’m not gay. 

I think I’m like a lot of the men who work in the fashion industry in that I just appreciate feminine beauty, human beauty even, except from what I hear a lot of those guys are misogynist pigs and just enjoy having the power to be mean to girls. I on the other hand sympathize with the often overlooked difficulties of being beautiful, and I want the power to be kind to girls. Jewish girls can go first if they want!

So I ended up talking to Katie for about ten minutes, in the middle of which I recalled my wish from the night before. As I was leaving, she gave me a little elephant charm carved out of bone that she had gotten in Zimbabwe. I told her that I would keep it forever. And I mean to. A Swedish girl got me to sign up for Save the Children the first time, and a Jewish girl got me to resume after I’d canceled. Hmmm....

It seems like I see Jewish girls everywhere I go now. There are only 15 million Jews in the world, but I feel like I see more cute probably-Jewish girls than that every day.  I’m so shy when I see them now. Maybe nobody’s reading this blog, but I’ve been saying a lot of these things to people in real-world conversation. The world is small and the Jewish community is even smaller. What if Jewish girls heard that I like them?!?! OMG! They probably HAVE heard! Lately, I get this occasional look from a probably Jewish girl like she wants to giggle but she’s holding it in. I wish they’d just go ahead and talk to me. I’m too shy to talk to a girl first. 

Part of the reason I think it is important to say these things is that Jewish girls, like Jewish people as a whole, have been the target of so much unfair criticism, but in this case often coming from their own. I don’t know what’s up with Jewish guys sometimes. Jewish guys in entertainment spend so much time making fun of Jewish women. I’ve heard so many jokes, coming from Jewish men, about how Jewish girls are unattractive or don’t like sex, or are just generally a pain in the ass. And I read enough Jewish media to know that there is a lot of hand-wringing amongst some Jews about the fact that so many Jewish men are marrying Gentiles, leaving many Jewish women no choice but to do the same, leading to a breakdown in Jewish cultural identity. 

I’m not Jewish, so I don’t understand all the gender dynamics that are going on there, but I think the preservation of Jewish cultural identity is important as well. I like the idea that if I marry a Jewish woman and we have kids, our kids will meet the official definition of Jewish, and I would encourage them to embrace that identity and be a part of the Jewish community. 

Sometimes I wonder if Jewish men are running the Seattle Scam. What’s that?  Well, I have a theory about Seattle. While obviously the National Weather Service and others gather data, I believe the residents of Seattle conspiratorially overstate how bad the weather is to prevent millions of refugees from California from moving there and ruining it. It is a fact that on average it rains less in Seattle than in New York City. 

Maybe Jewish guys spend so much time razzing Jewish girls so other men won’t recognize how awesome they are and start pursuing them. And so through all the jokes about Jewish women, we don’t notice that so many of the icons of beauty in our society are Jewish girls, and that so many of the most successful professional women in our society are Jewish girls. I hear all this stuff about Jewish women being neurotic, but White girls seem much more neurotic to me. The Jewish girls I’ve crossed paths with seem to have it TOGETHER. 

And then there is the sex thing. I was reading an article in some Jewish journal that was talking about the stereotypes that Jewish women don’t like sex, and how a lot of Jewish women overcompensate for this in the same way I overcompensated for the stereotype that Black guys are dumb by whipping the shit out of White kids in the classroom. And that article mentioned what I had noticed: lots of Jewish girls in porn, and as is usually the case with Jewish girls, they are good at their job. 

So yeah. I like Jewish girls. But the last thing I want to do is be a part of destroying Jewish cultural identity. I would suggest to the Jewish community that it should be okay if some Jews choose to marry Gentiles IF AND ONLY IF those Gentiles want to embrace the values and protect the cultural identity of the Jewish community.  And I agree with an article I read in The Forward from several years ago—the Jewish community needs to embrace as Jews people like Gwyneth Paltrow who has a Jewish father and a Gentile mother.  I don’t know how Gwyneth identifies, I just know she’s AWESOME at her job (better than Scarlett Johansson even!). 

I get the value of the matrilineal thing—the mother is the child’s first teacher who instills their basic values in them, and in an age before DNA testing, the matrilineal way is the only way to be sure whose child you’re really dealing with. But it is the twenty-first century now, and to best preserve Jewish culture, the Jewish community needs to become a bigger tent: if you embrace and live Jewish cultural values, you are welcome. There is no point in having one hundred million genetically Jewish people if Jewish values and culture are destroyed.  But there is no harm, and in fact many benefits in Jews genetically mixing with Gentiles if Jewish culture and values are preserved and strengthened. 

It’s really quite a gamble that I’m making if you think about it. I’m going all-in on about 0.2% of the global female population. But I think the girl for me is in that tiny group. Maybe its even actually Scarlett Johansson! How crazy/awesome would that be?

But man, Scarlett Johansson is a lot to handle. I was fascinated by the Marilyn Monroe/Arthur Miller thing even before I ever heard of Scarlett Johansson, and it gives me some inspiration now. But I haven’t yet achieved anything close to what Arthur Miller did as a writer, and Scarlett Johansson is so much way cuter than Marilyn Monroe. And way better at her job too. Look, Marilyn was an admirable and courageous girl who went through a lot to get where she did. But compared to these girls in Hollywood today, she was about a seven. Rappers are fond of referring to attractive women as “dimes”.  Scarlett Johansson is not a dime—she’s a half-billion dollars of cute. 

To be totally honest, though, I never wanted to be with a girl as absurdly beautiful as Scarlett Johansson. It brings so many challenges and I would always feel insecure that one morning she would wake up and decide she needs to be with a smoking hot guy instead of me. And knowing how men are, all the smoking hot guys she crossed paths with would be whispering in her ear, “What are you doing with THAT guy?!?”, and maybe eventually she would think, “Yeah, what AM I doing?”. I believe that if Scarlett really liked me, I would easily conquer these insecurities, but she would have a right to know that I have them. 

The ordinary cute nerdy Jewish girl is in some ways more attractive to me than Scarlett. I always liked the idea of being with a girl that other guys don’t necessarily think is hot, but I do.  

A part of me thinks that the perfect outcome would be for me to marry a nice cute nerdy Jewish girl who is not rich or famous, and have all these smoking hot Jewish girls in Hollywood as slave-driving bosses. Then I could say, “I wish Scarlett Johansson and Gal Gadot would stop calling me when I’m trying to spend quality time with my wife”. That would be so hot. 

But what would be even hotter than that would be if Scarlett actually liked me because I actually like her. She’s so cute. She doesn’t just play a superhero in the movies. She is one in real life. I can’t escape the power of that moment when I saw her, not knowing who she was, and thought, “That’s the one. Her.”. And then I realize years later watching Lucy that it was Scarlett. 

But Scarlett does have two ex-husbands, a six year old (I think six), and the very obtrusive baggage of fame. But I can’t help it—I like her anyway. And if she liked me, it would be the cutest thing ever. Like, we’re talking babies-chewing-their-own-toes level cute. And I always forget, she’s got a twin brother too and the probability is that he also is awesome. Scarlett comes with all these bonus people. I even like at least one of her exes. 

I can’t watch the Oscars. I never watch them anyway. But Scarlett got a nomination, so I kinda wanna watch, but I can’t stand it. I mean, I was trying to watch Dante’s Peak last night, which is a watchable if formulaic disaster movie, and there’s Scarlett on a commercial for some talk show on Sundance. And then I remember, Sundance is Robert Redford’s thing, who gave Scarlett her start...

I haven’t seen any of the nominated movies. I was about to go see Marriage Story, but like I said, I don’t think I could handle Scarlett in a sad movie right now. There is too much sadness in my real life right now. I kind of want Scarlett to win because she deserves acknowledgment for her work. But I was really hoping I would get to write the movie that won Scarlett her first Oscar. I don’t want her to have to wait for that, though. I hope she wins tonight. 

Has a screenwriter ever written a movie for which his wife won Best Actress? Hmm, that would be a new goal. I’ve got a movie. I need Brad Pitt, Jim Caviezel, Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, a current MAT Girl about fifteen who is really good and could realistically grow up to be...well, I didn’t think Scarlett was right for this other part, but in my mind she keeps inserting herself into it. Is Spielberg still working? This would have been right up his alley in the 80s. I need Steve Zaillian to help me out with the script. And I know Spielberg’s got his pet cinematographers, but I’d really want John Schwartzman for this. Or we could get a bunch of girl filmmakers. I’m partial to Karyn Kusama. It is a story about a small farm town in Kansas and the effect it has when an ag giant tries a clever scheme to force the farmers to use their genetically modified seeds. Though that’s not what makes the story really interesting...I’ve been working on this in my head for a while, so I’d only need about two weeks to produce a first draft suitable to kick the ball downfield. Maybe less if Scarlett gave me a deadline. I had actually started writing it as a novel but decided it would work better as a movie. 

I refuse to stop dreaming. I just want to move forward to a better place in life. It’s been seven years of darkness. I broke the mirror, had my seven years of bad luck, now it’s time for me to go free. I’m tired of going to bed every night dreading the next day. I’m tired of waking up alone every morning with nothing to look forward to. I really don’t need a career in Hollywood. I really don’t need Scarlett Johansson...but that’s what I want. 

I never wanted a famous girl. One girl I loved turned out to be a little famous, but that actually surprised me. I didn’t think she’d make it as an actress even though I knew she’d make it as a human being. I always loved regular girls—extraordinary, smart, awesome regular girls. But my time in prison severed me from my old life and broke apart my relationships with all those girls from my past that I was still carrying torches for. There is nothing left of my old life. Since I’m starting all over from the beginning, I might as well shoot for the stars—or one star. 

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