Why Hollywood's Jewish guys fall in love with shiksas

From Diane Keaton to Mariel Hemingway to Scarlett Johansson, Woody Allen's favorite women have been WASPy blonds. [UPDATE: As many readers have noted, Johansson is actually Jewish, so perhaps I should call her a WASPy blonde Jewess.] At any rate, Allen is not alone. As Liel Leibovitz writes in a fascinating new essay in Tablet magazine, "Since the dawn of American entertainment, Jewish women were largely rendered invisible, absent everywhere from burlesque to Hollywood to prime-time television. Instead, they watched as their sons and brothers and husbands became successful producers, directors and impresarios, powerful men who then chose to populate their works with a parade of sexy, sultry shiksas who looked nothing like their female kin."

It's a big, bold accusation, but Leibovitz does a pretty persuasive job of proving it, digging all the way back to the earliest days of burlesque, when if you worked for the striptease kingpins the Minsky Brothers, you had to be a blond or a redhead, never a brunet. The early Hollywood moguls, eager to shed their shtetl roots, quickly dumped their first wives for Gentile trophy dames and largely banished both Jewish men and women from their all-American hymns to assimilation, forcing Jewish actors like John Garfield (Julie Garfinkle) and Danny Kaye (David Kaminsky) to change their names to far less ethnic-sounding monikers.

But Leibovitz argues that even today, long after Jewish TV execs allowed male characters to be named Seinfeld, Steinberg and Fisher, they still required the guys to lust after decidedly non-Jewish women. She points to a slew of shows, including "Mad About You," "Chicken Soup," "Flying Blonde" and "Anything But Love," that all feature neurotic Jewish (filmmaker/pajama salesman/biz exec/writer) men pining after gorgeous and free-spirited shiksas. Each show was designed around the idea of transformation, or more specifically, the power of a non-Jewish woman to extricate her Jewish lover from his suffocating, crass and unhealthy environment.

When it comes to being an onscreen presence in a Jewish guy's life, blonds clearly have more fun, whether it's Cheryl Hines playing opposite Larry David in "Curb Your Enthusiasm" or Drew Barrymore being Adam Sandler's love interest in "The Wedding Singer" and "50 First Dates." (Maybe I'm forgetting someone, but by my count, it wasn't until 2008's "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," where Sandler played an Israeli hairdresser, that he cast an actual Jewish actress -- Emmanuelle Chriqui -- as his romantic partner.)

Leibovitz could expand her critique, since when it comes to being invisible, African American women have it even worse than Jewish women, rarely if ever getting a meaty part playing opposite black mega-stars like Denzel Washington, Sam Jackson and Will Smith. But her point is well taken. In an era where Jewish women have cracked the glass ceiling time and again as producers and studio executives (from Sherry Lansing and Laura Ziskin to Gail Berman and Amy Pascal), it's slim pickings when it comes to parts for actresses looking to shine in the spotlight. In Hollywood, if you're a Jewish woman, your best career possibilities are still behind the camera, feeding all the good lines to the shiksa goddesses.

Speaking of shiksa goddesses, here's one with a spider in her bathroom:

  

Comments

[Dave]

How many more of these articles are going to be written? They're so ridiculous. Leibovitz's essay is not fascinating, it is a re-run of this story-line and typically error-ridden.

And Scarlett Johansson is Jewish! Figures you'd make a pointless factual mistake right in the first sentence of this article. Come on! She's been famous for so long now, and has talked about her Jewishness for quite a while. Can't you at least look up her background before you write? If you did your research on which actresses are Jewish (and there are plenty) maybe you wouldn't have to write tortured articles like this anymore.

[Dave]

Oh yeah, and you did forget something re:Sandler's love interests. His love interest in Little Nicky was played by Patricia Aquette (yes, she's Jewish). In Mr. Deeds, it was Winona Ryder (yup, Jewish again). In Eight Crazy Nights, the animated character he ended up with was Jewish.

In Bedtime Stories (admittedly a post-Zohan) movie, it was Keri Russell (yup).

[Dave]

BTW, maybe I ought to also point out that Liel Leibovitz is, in fact, a man (not a "her").

[Eyal Feldman]

It is embarrassing that the writer does not know Scarlett Johansen is Jewish.

[Jimbo]

Dave is right. I found Leibovitz' article to be a superficial piece of c--p. I'm really sorry she got dumped for a blond shiksa, but that doesn't justify her ridiculous psychological projecting posing as "insight." No wonder we have so much polarization going on.

Finally, why not at least point out the exceptions like "The Way We Were," where blond goyim Redford goes for all-American leftie Streisand.

[Jenna]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_actors

[patricia]

Woody Allen is a perv. He prefers them young (as in "Manhattan")...Jewish or not.

[crosspost]

2 out of the 3 actresses mentioned by the ever-postful Dave are not 100% jewish - which makes them as equally goy. the other is questionable at even 50-50: wishful thinking doesn't make someone jewish: wiki lists or not

as to why the shiksa-fetish amongst jewish men -
aside from wanting the unobtainable, or someone who doesn't remind them of their nagging mothers, or isn't a spoiled, whiney jap -

2 words

low maintenance

shiksas. like goyim in general, got nothin' to prove

[ReasonedResponse]

Getting a little tired of puffery about "shiska goddesses". Why can't some Jewish people just see themselves as part of the human race? There's J-Date for people who want to date and marry other Jewish people, not to mention the synagogue, for those who actually practice their faith (nothing more annoying than people who identify with a religion who don't practice it, and I include Christians and other religions in that). Plenty of Jewish men seek and find partners in such places. It's actually more crucial for Jewish men to marry and have kids with Jewish women, since the identity is matrilineal. Movies and TV shows are just that, movies. There are also plenty of Jewish actresses who get work and play romantic leads, but their religious and ethnic identity just don't always figure in the plot (I'm thinking of everyone to Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler to Gina Gershon).

[fman]

I'm happy that Goldstein corrected that Johansson thing (however reluctantly). However, there's still the incorrect/misleading statement about Sandler's Jewish co-starlets (Arquette, Ryder and Keri Russell) and Liel Leibovitz's gender (less important), as well as that abominably offensive and untrue last sentence (and paragraph), which should be deleted and hopefully also purged permanently from memory.