Flying back from Honduras last night (oh yeah, that happened) I watched this show Numb3rs where JEWS…FIGHT…CRIME.

I didn’t have headphones and I didn’t need them. I just watched in total delight. As Whitney put it, “Look at all those noses!”

(And what noses. The show’s got the kid from Addams Family Values, Judd Hirsch, that hilarious guy from Ghostbusters 2, PLUS Rob Morrow. Morrow played Dick Goodwin in Quiz Show and Goodwin is the basis for Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint, though he’s also sorta Philip Roth - meaning I might just love one Jewish man - an overrighteous oversexed nerd.)

And the best part: they fight crime using Math. My favorite moment, and I bet this happens every episode, is the scene where the gentile criminals are explained the math that’s ensnared them! Oh man. I just couldn’t be happier.

But if I love Jews so much on TV (and in the Kennedy era)…why don’t I like them that much in real life? My phone’s got 140 contacts and of them, only 27 are Jews, mostly from Big A Little a.

Maybe that’s impressive if you live somewhere else, but for a Jewish Columbia grad living in Brooklyn 27 is pretty shabby. I mean that includes my family! And why do I find Jewish-hipness: HEEB Magazine, J-Date, later Seth Cohen, so utterly, disproportionately repulsive?

I guess I am only now realizing a famous and obvious thing. So-called Jewish “self-loathing” and “pride” aren’t opposites - they’re best friends. (Dag. I saw that movie THE BELIEVER twice and it still didn’t sink in.)

Anywayz, on the plane, I made Whitney promise that we’d find ourselves a Jewish male actor soon. I’m fine fetishizing blondes and blonde-ness for another year or two, but then we’re spending some time on olive-skinned thick haired people with nasal voices and the world on their back. And we are objectifying the fuck out of them.

They deserve it.
L

P.S. And it’s not just me. Did you know that my sister pronounces her great TV-crush David Duchovny’s name with a guttural “ch”? What is that but a protest against the teasingly never-stated Jewishness of our sexiest TV Jew? It’s not enough that we _know_ Fox Mulder is Jewish - that you can literally see it on his face. We want you to hear it too.

P.P.S. I especially love it when non-Jews go out of their way to have awesome Jewish characters. Wes Anderson’s doing G-d’s work.

Last Modified: Sunday, August 19th, 2007 @ 20:04