Jews, Shiksas, and the American Ideal of Beauty

Relevant to Tobias Langdon’s recent article on Jewish and leftist physical appearance.

NYTimes op-ed: “‘Nobody Wants This’ Pits Jewish Women Against ‘Shiksas.’ Nobody Wins.”

When I heard my community of mostly secular Jews use the word shiksa growing up, it wasn’t really used as a slur; it was used as a referent for the conventional American ideal of beauty. It was understood that as Jewish women, we purportedly existed outside this ideal. We were assumed to be emasculating scolds, obligations men were saddled with rather than women to be desired.

Our looks were all wrong and in need of expensive plastic surgery or hair treatments to even attempt to measure up. The feeling was summed up by a line from a throwaway character, apparently post-makeover, in a Season 2 episode of “Sex and the City” that first aired in 1999: “Well, you know, my boyfriend and I were really compatible, except for one thing. He liked thin, blond WASP-y types, so … now I am.”

That’s because the shiksa stereotype looms large in American pop culture as an object of Jewish male desire. It was largely constructed in the mid-20th century by Philip Roth, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. Writing in 2013 for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Menachem Kaiser described the stereotype succinctly:

By the 1980s, what I’ll call the Allenesque Jew/shiksa split was entrenched: Jewish = nonathletic, brainy, neurotic, pasty, dark-haired, profoundly unhealthy parental relationship, usually from the New York area; shiksa = healthy, WASP-y, carefree, blond, supportive (if judgmental) parents, from the Midwest or from a home that might as well be in the Midwest.

But it’s not 1980, 1999 or even 2013 anymore. It’s no longer shocking or novel when a Jew dates or marries outside his or her religion — 61 percent of Jews who have married since 2010 are intermarried, according to a 2021 Pew Research report. Among non-Orthodox Jews, that number is 72 percent.

…

Nearly every Jewish woman in the show is like this: manipulative, spoiled and selfish. They own ugly jewelry companies, breastfeed their children until they’re in kindergarten and try to control their families with money. They’re out to get Joanne and her equally blond sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe), because they see them as interlopers and as competition. As Esther Zuckerman wrote for Time magazine: “The series seems to loathe Jewish women, who are portrayed as nags, harpies and the ultimate villains of this story. I wanted to be swept away by a rom-com. Instead, I was faced with the reality that maybe this show actually hates me.”

By contrast, Noah is an actual saint — or if you prefer, a mensch. He’s a man of God who is depicted as the moral center of the show; he’s so perfect that at one point his brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons), who also has shiksa fever, calls him the “Jewish Jesus.” But also, no matter how inappropriate or commitment-shy Joanne is, Noah is a steady and adorable presence. His only flaws seem to be that he’s on a terrible basketball team, because duh, Jews are bad at sports, and he gives Joanne’s mother a bouquet of flowers that is way too big.

…

The show’s creator, Erin Foster, converted to Judaism before she married her Jewish husband. Zuckerman and I aren’t the only ones to notice the negative depiction of Jewish women on the show, and The Los Angeles Times asked Foster about it. She elided the question in a way that’s telling, saying:

I think we need positive Jewish stories right now. I think it’s interesting when people focus on “Oh, this is a stereotype of Jewish people” when you have a rabbi as the lead. A hot, cool, young rabbi who smokes weed. That’s the antithesis of how people view a Jewish rabbi, right?

[Reality be damned, this is how to portray Jews in movies:] Maybe Foster missed the very popular 2023 Netflix movie “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” (based on Fiona Rosenbloom’s young adult novel), which featured a hot, cool, young rabbi played by Sarah Sherman of “Saturday Night Live.” It also features a Hebrew school classroom filled with a diverse array of Jewish children, showing that there is no one way to “look Jewish.” My kids loved that movie so much that my younger daughter asked if Sherman could be her rabbi.