A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (8 page)

These are women in Texas; plenty of men and women in the state throw TX onto their screen names. My all-time favorite was Texasbabydoll—who could resist that image? The contacts get even more interesting when folks (like me) fly the Texas identity like a battle flag when they live out of state. I particularly like the profile of JudyTX, a woman I actually met outside of dating sites because of our maverick political interests. Her profile said, “I am a proud native Texan, currently a Manhattanite (lots more Jews here—including family—but the sunsets are smaller).”

You’ll notice a pattern here. TexDG, GoodListenerTX and another called TexanAtHeart all responded to me, and women from the South and Latin America also have the fine grace to pen a polite reply. Some declined further contact, pointing to the distance between us, and I understood their concerns. Others, however, have become enduring friends. Whatever the future holds—as friends or strangers whose yearnings touched for an instant—I can say to all of them zol zein mit mazel, Yiddish for “you should be with luck.”

TexDG and I still have playful conversations that sound like two friends yakking over coffee. Once, we were dishing about women’s profile pictures. She wrote, “Jewish girls wear bikinis?”

I replied, “Sure, Jewish women in bikinis and low-cut tops. I’m amazed at some of the photos—stretched out on fur rugs, sprawled across a bed, in a bikini with the kids in the picture.”

The Texas and Jewish sides merged with one of my very first contacts on Jcupid. A woman in northern Mexico wrote to me. She posted no photo on her profile and didn’t indicate why she was on a Jewish website. I asked about her background, and she replied,

Given my future contacts with women in Latin America and trips to see them, this short-lived connection touched on some key interests—dare I say obsessions?—in my life. Indeed, I often wondered if any of my high school heartthrobs might be distantly Jewish, descendants of
conversos
or
marranos
hounded out of Spain and Portugal to settle and live secretly, in fear of the Inquisition, in Mexico and then Texas. Could any of them be the elusive JAP—Jewish Aztec Princess—integrating my Texas and Jewish elements? Did their grandmothers light candles on Friday, did their families avoid pork and cover mirrors after the death of a relative? I never found any evidence of this, but I like the great guessing game. As that email from Mexico indicated, the JAPs are out there. Call it wishful thinking, but some Valley friends definitely give me a Jewish Aztec Princess vibe.

More typically, I met Texas Jews in New York. I could always sniff them out using “texdar,” my variation on the concept of “gaydar.” Like their counterparts back home, these urban cowgirls almost always replied to me and we sometimes met. We had great conversations about hometowns, educations, and bloodlines. One woman even had family members named Michelson, as I do, so we are probably related from way back in the 1860s, when the first Michelsons bid a not-so-fond
auf wiedersehen
to Germany and headed for post-Confederacy Texas.

The Texas identity does carry risks. One on one, women were curious about the place and kept any prejudices in check, but in public somebody always felt compelled to spout off. I once attended a Friday night singles event where a Chabad rabbi (!) said, “Oh, you’re the guy from that hick town!” On a singles hiking event in Connecticut, I was trapped in a car with people who assured me that Republicans would never go on a hike because they hate the environment. Later, a man said, “You’re from Texas, so you must really hate Bush.”

I thought, What a
pinche
pendejo cabron
(“dumbass” and even more insulting meanings), as we used to say in Hidalgo County. To this perfect specimen of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome), I replied, “I like what President Bush says and does, and I definitely approve of the War on Terror.” That shut him up pronto.

I was ready to talk when women asked about Texas. My whole brand positioning depended on delivering the goods about that unique upbringing. Without some colorful anecdotes and family stories, I’d get an “all hat, no cattle” reputation. Fortunately, I remember (or wrote down)
everything
. What follows are some of my favorite informational crunchies:

My family has been in Texas for a long, long time. There are little kids down there that are seventh-generation Texans. My great-great-grandfather, Chayim Schwarz, was the first ordained rabbi in Texas. In 1873 he moved to Hempstead from Germany. He’s the guy on the cover of the book,
Jewish Stars in Texas: Rabbis and Their Work
, by Hollace Ava Weiner.

I graduated from the same high school that my mother did, exactly forty years later. Talk about continuity.

When I was a kid, the family story I heard was that relatives passed through San Antonio in the 1870s and they could still see blood on the walls of the Alamo. The spookiest Texas stories always involve the Alamo.

Texas breeds wacky politics. I had a high school typing teacher who argued that motorcycle-helmet laws were a form of communism. At my tenth reunion in 1986, a classmate was certain that the Sandinistas were going to march up from Nicaragua and invade Harlingen. The wife of another friend used to talk earnestly about “the black helicopters.”

Growing up in Texas and then moving to the Northeast scrambled my politics. People down there think I’m a commie-hippie-pinko-treehugger. Folks in the Northeast think I’m a crypto-fascist Texas gun nut. The truth is actually in the middle. I’m a free thinker, and that drives people crazy.

Heard of Kinky Friedman? Heck, I interviewed Ol’ Kinky once for a magazine article I wrote about the Lone Star Roadhouse in New York. We had a real nice visit, too.

A college roommate thought my mother sounded exactly like Lady Bird Johnson.

You find six streams of political philosophy in Texas: Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, Extremely Conservative, and East Texas.

The longer I did online dating, the more I found my profile worked exactly as I wanted it to. Years of tinkering polished it to a high gloss of effective communications. I mentioned
The
Odyssey
and the final lines of
Ulysses
by James Joyce (“and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”); I spoke frankly about my interest in Judaism. I skipped, to the greatest extent possible, the clichés of dating profiles: fine wine, walks on the beach, skiing, and whatever I figured the other guys—those tall, dark, rich and handsome swordsmen I imagined running wild—were saying. I couldn’t compete except on my own terms, and I made a joke about that. So I accentuated the positives that would work for women who would want a guy like me.

I eventually evolved away from the screen name that worked so well. TexasHoldEm got stale after a while. Even a good name needs a refresher. Nice new merchandise always gets at least a glance from the window shoppers, so my last iteration at JDate used the name OurYidinHavana, chosen after I went on a week-long Jewish humanitarian trip to Cuba. I liked the ring of it, the reference to the Graham Greene novel
Our Man in Havana
and the exotic locale of the trip. Here’s a compilation of my evolving profiles:

The constant wordsmithing of my profiles paid dividends in contacts. The messaging always got high marks for literary value. The responses to Judaism surprised me, in that some women thought I was “too religious” for them, although I don’t keep kosher and, at the time I was active, didn’t belong to a synagogue. I kept informed on Jewish issues, strongly supported Israel and attended pro-Israel rallies whenever crises brought mass events to the United Nations Plaza. But for the women that mattered, the upfront Judaism sent a clear signal of how we could connect. And I enjoyed my share of contacts from women who weren’t going to sit back and miss out on their chance at a good thing.