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JDater of the Week: The good, the bad, and the non-Jewish

Ugh. It took me exactly two weeks of searching for JDaters of the Week before I had an ethical crisis. Who am I to rain down judgment upon the good people of JDate just because they call themselves things like "Portnoy4U" and adamantly refuse to proofread? If someone dug up my long-retired Nerve profile and mocked it on the Internet, I’d be pretty devastated. (And it’s SO mockable – I’m pretty sure I actually compared myself to Natalie Portman in Garden State. In public. In order to impress boys.)

The feedback I’ve gotten about the column didn’t help much. Readers like it, but my friends and family all seemed ambivalent at best. This weekend a rabbi I know told me he thought it was un-Jewish. “Like lashon hara?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “A lot worse.”

The truth is that the column doesn’t have to be cruel. As it happens, the whole time I was scouring the site last week, my mock JDate profile (you need one to check out the goods) was getting IM’d by a totally cute, totally interesting, totally un-douchey-seeming Manhattan boy. I kept ignoring him, caught up in my quest to find the most ridiculous profiles on the site, but maybe I should have just featured him. Maybe one of you would have sent him a message, and a lovely shidduch would have been made.

So this week, I’m taking a new approach, mitigating the negativity a bit with a three-pronged format. I’m picking one profile that’s good, one profile that, um, needs work, and one profile that represents the most fascinating tribe on JDate—the non-Jews.


The good: He’s a twin! He has five little sisters! He says his family life has giving him “Mideast-peace-summit -level negotiating skills and Barack Obama-esque motivational speaking” abilities! You will seriously never be able to have a fight with this guy—no matter how hard you try.

The bad: “Sometimes I feel that I am Neo” is a totally understandable sentiment. We all get a little Keanu sometimes. But it’s generally a good idea to save that kind of revelation for the second date.

The non-Jewish: He recently shattered his knee in a motorcycle crash and quotes Courtney Love on his profile. He says he majored in keg stands and freely admits that he looks like a serial killer in his photo. And I bet that every time a Jewish organization releases a study about the perils of intermarriage, his profile gets another thousand hits.

Previously: The Guy Who Volunteered Jerry Seinfeld Meets James Bond

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