A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (18 page)

Lifetime Achievement Award I: curvaceous Lainie Kazan (AKA Lanie Levine from Brooklyn). My fixation started when I saw her in
Playboy
in the early 1970s. Known for her cleavage as well as her singing, she appealed to me back then when my mind was young and malleable. By the time I noticed her in movies like
My Favorite Career
,
Beaches
(starring the luscious Barbara Hershey),
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
and more recently
Don’t Mess with the Zohan
, her ripeness had evolved into double-plus-zaftig dimensions, but her confident, charge-ahead attitude always grabbed me. Even in her late sixties, she was getting it on with Adam Sandler in Zohan. We should all be so energetic.

The Secrets: This Israeli movie is set in a women-only Orthodox yeshiva in Sfad, the home of mystics and Kabbalah. The mix of clashing personalities, feminism in a regimented environment and unvoiced, smoldering passions makes this movie a spiritually elevated, shabbat-observing version of a 1970s Pam Grier babes-behind-bars prison epic. In this hothouse environment, romance blossoms for two of the women, Naomi and Michelle. They circle around an ailing, mysterious outsider named Anouk, who scandalizes students with a stash of erotic paintings from her late lover in France. Naomi and Michelle exchange long passionate looks, they kiss, they get to know each other in the Biblical sense, and then the hearts start breaking. The movie has an eye-popping scene where the modest clothes fly off so the young and the frum can dip themselves into the ritual mikvah bath as part of an exorcism. The Secrets blends in some humor about the mating rituals of the Orthodox and the requisite funeral and wedding found in all self-respecting Jewish movies.

Europa Europa
: This movie stands alone in its use of circumcision as a plot device and dramatic tool. It details the true story of a Jewish boy, Solomon Perel, who passes as an Aryan and even winds up in a Hitler Youth training program.
Europa, Europa
haunted me with its plot line about a decent gay (closeted) German soldier learning the true identity of his Jewish Wehrmacht comrade. Nothing happens between the two, as I recall, but the yearning and the doubled sense of fatal concealment (one’s gay, the other’s Jewish) have a terrible poignancy. Other parts of the movie detail Solomon’s desperate attempts to avoid revealing the sign of the covenant, which includes avoiding sex with Leni, the Nazi-admiring girl he loves. Sexual desire has never seemed as ominous as it does in
Europa, Europa
.

Lifetime Achievement Award II: Amy Irving. What can I say about Amy? Technically, she’s not Jewish. Her father had a Jewish background and she was raised a Christian Scientist, so the name and look mask a non-Jewish reality. Still, from her role as Isabelle Grossman in
Crossing Delancey
to Hadass in
Yentl
, to later works
Bossa Nova
and
Traffic
, she embodied my fantasies of what I wanted in a woman.

Lifetime Achievement Award III: Lena Olin for her work in
Enemies, A Love Story; The Unbearable Lightness of Being;
and
The Reader.
I always linked these movies, especially the first two.
Enemies
and
Lightness
burrowed deep into my consciousness.
The Reader
, while visually explicit, left me cold, and the characters repelled me.
Enemies
concerns Holocaust survivors in New York after World War II; one man, Herman Broder—played by the late Ron Silver—is involved with three beautiful women.
Lightness
is set in Czechoslovakia in the ’60s.
The Reader
takes place in the ’50s Germany and tells the story of the doomed affair of a teen and a mysterious woman who lives in his apartment building.
Enemies
and
The Reader
have Jewish aspects (and I read both the books);
Lightness
does not, as far as I can tell. Beyond their European settings or characters, the three movies all share one radiant connection: Swedish actress Lena Olin. She’s gorgeous in
Lightness
(released in 1988) and
Enemies
(1989), and then compelling in a dual role in
Reader
, released in 2008. At different times in the narrative, she plays Rose Mather and her daughter Ilana. Knowing Olin’s earlier work gave her small but critical presence in
The Reader
another layer of meaning for me. Olin may not be Jewish, but I’ll give her honorary status for her outstanding, passionate work in these movies.

Dreck Hall of Shame: Amy’s Orgasm, otherwise known as Amy’s O for prudish Americans who quiver at the very thought of the orgasmic pleasure of a young Jewish woman. Actually, they should quiver at the message of this movie, which I viscerally disliked. I place it in my “Dreck Hall of Shame” of Jewish erotica. It starts with the standard tropes of an ethnic romantic comedy—attractive young person laments inability to find a member of his or her group for marriage, then is endlessly hounded by family on this subject. In writer Amy’s case, she yaps about Jewish men. Then, she gets into a relationship with a man who’s not Jewish and their faiths never arise as an issue. The movie takes the easy way out—Jewishness is a shorthand for a set of personality traits and shrill family members, but it never assumes a deeper meaning in the lives of characters. When the appealing gentile man walks in the door, the convictions fly out the window.

Lifetime Achievement Award IV: director/writer/actor Henry Jaglom. Jaglom’s works are, I’ll admit, an acquired taste, like escargot. Henry Jaglom’s movies, made by Henry Jaglom and reflecting the obsessions of Henry Jaglom and the mostly female friends of Henry Jaglom, have a weird attraction for me. A direct descendant of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Jaglom is a strong supporter of Israel and his films typically have at least one main Jewish character. The movies are maddening, but they cast a strong light on women’s emotions and issues. Throw in the actresses’ curly hair, olive complexions and cute figures, and the tumultuous atmosphere is just plain catnip for me. Titles like Eating, Baby Fever, Going Shopping and New Year’s Day suggest the intense subject material. Sensuality and angst ooze from every frame. A quote from an article about Jaglom says everything you need to know to watch, or run screaming away from, his movies:

If you can handle that view, you can handle a Jaglom movie. Twenty years ago, I was so entranced by his movies that I engineered, on rather flimsy grounds, a telephone interview with him. I was writing the “Video Stories” column for
Video Store
magazine. We discussed advertising on videos or some related issue. Although baffled by the interview request, Jaglom was a good sport and answered my questions the best he could, unable to see the stars in my eyes.

Now we’ve reached the climax of the list, the titles of the three sexiest Jewish movies ever made (according to me). None of them are Hollywood films; indeed, none of them are even in English. All are set in the past and have an earthy, matter-of-fact sensuality rarely found in American films.

Black Book,
by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, observes sexuality in the context of the Holocaust, and features Jewish resistance fighters in Holland. Verhoeven is one of my favorite directors, having also been responsible for
RoboCop, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers
and the grossly underrated Las Vegas epic
Showgirls
.
Black Book
follows Rachel Stein—played by spunky Carice van Houten—as she struggles to survive and seek vengeance. Her main weapon is her sexual power, so, in the employ of the Resistance, Rachel dyes her dark Jewish tresses (everywhere!) to a glittering blonde to help her pass as an Aryan and penetrate Amsterdam’s Nazi power structure. The movie vibrates with sexual tension. Statuesque supporting actress Halina Reijn also brightens up the screen with her own blazing presence. The movie’s appeal is simple: Rachel is Jewish and she is sexual and she never forgets that she is both. Fun fact: I saw the movie with the Shabbat Seductress, discussed earlier.

German-made
Nowhere in Africa
won the Oscar for best foreign movie in 2002. Providing a different take on the Holocaust, it tells the story of a Germany family that escapes to Kenya in the late 1930s. The adults, Walter and Jettel, have a troubled marriage, but their daughter Regina thrives. The movie’s sexual impact comes from just a few scenes, but they make every second count. In one, the husband and wife are walking on a rural road, and he says, “You’re going to show your breasts like a native woman.” With a seductive smile, she takes off her shirt and sashays down the road, seen only from behind, a basket on her head. His demand followed by her playful acquiescence would not be easily understood by Western audiences. In another, Regina, who is friendly with a Kenyan boy, declines his request that she take off her blouse now that she has entered puberty. They banter back and forth until she decides to climb a tree. Not wanting to get her white blouse dirty, she takes it off and up she goes. No mainstream American movie would endorse such a casual, accepting attitude toward teen sexuality. Nothing happens between the boy and the girl, by the way, at least not on screen. The final scene takes place near the movie’s end after the war is over. The husband and wife reconcile, followed by lots of tastefully detailed
shtupping.
Jettel becomes pregnant, too, so the next generation of Jews is on its way.

And the winner is ...
Turn Left at the End of the World,
an Israeli movie set in 1968 in an isolated desert town for new immigrants, mostly from India and Yemen. Different Jewish communities clash amid a wide variety of sexual hijinks. I can honestly call it the
Gone with the Wind
of Jewish erotica. The movie opens with full-frontal nudity, setting the tone for the unblushing explorations to follow. Jews from different countries hook up, a student seduces her teacher, two girls partake in proto-lesbian Israeli folk dancing. In one sequence, a seduction-minded femme fatale daubs perfume between her breasts and on her upper thigh (gulp!), only to become the target of a bodily fluid-enhanced folk curse concocted by the angry wife of the man she seduces. Elsewhere, a teen muses to her engaged sister about “the first time.”
Turn Left
stands as a great example of the earthiness of Israeli movies, where you see Jewish bodies in various states with no false modesty or coyness. The message is, “This is who we are, what we look like, and what we do.” As the Hebrew phrase goes, “
L’chaim
”—“to life.” In the most erotic Israeli movies people exult in their sensuality, enjoying it openly in the shadow of danger. And
Turn Left
has the greatest deathbed line ever: “I want to die with my makeup on.”

Over the course of my Jewish online dating career, I learned a lot about Jewish body image. Pre-Internet, I knew about the issues—overindulgence countered with obsessive exercise and eating disorders, negative stereotypes about men and women. The digital era offered fresh insight into what women think about their Jewish bodies, although almost no Jewish men ever have much to say.

In online dating, I could see the challenge women face with the struggle to combine visual appeal with modesty and sensitivity to the realities of aging, even gracious aging. If men declare they are looking for younger, or
much
younger women, on their profiles, what’s a forty-something woman to do? Those who limit their photos to neck-up seem to be holding back, while only those with loads of self-confidence can carry off the swimsuit photos.

The anxiety of these women over their appearances metastasizes beyond the physical to overload Jewish male-female interactions with psychological baggage. The point was driven home for me when I read an essay in New York’s
Jewish Week
entitled, “The Anger, and Allure, of Jewish Guys.” Author Abigail Pickus presents a discouraging view of relations between Jewish men and women. She wrote of one male friend’s attitudes:

The article saddened and baffled me. The ill will between Jewish men and women sounds so foreign and implacable. In the small town where I grew up, I had no exposure to the experiences and stereotypes driving this rancorous divide in the Tribe. I knew no Jews outside my family, itself a heavily intermarried clan. My awkward teen passions focused on Christian girls.