Swipe me a match! Find me a find. Catch me a catch! All Jewish singles will be happy to know (if you’re not into goys) that the Jewish man of your dream awaits, right behind the facade of his iPhone.

JSwipe is basically Tinder, except that it matches you with other single Jews depending on your Jewish affiliation. The most annoying part of Tinder, from personal experience, is that you cannot discriminate on age, ethnicity, or height. Now at least, you can swipe a Jew for a Jew.

Another app that may land you your beshert? JCrush. These “swipe” apps are so tailored for our generation, you don’t even have to be motivated enough to make a profile. They simply take your “curated” Facebook information and translate it on the app. JDate is so yesterday–or maybe just for the older generation who were already in their late teens by the time the internet was booming; those who enjoy reading and writing in length.

Get swiping!

(Image: Shutterstock)

The post Jews Seeking Jews Apps appeared first on Jewcy.

“Find someone who wasn’t on your Birthright trip.” “Shiksappeal is overrated.”

JDate has a new advertising campaign, and—much like the experience of online dating—you’re either gonna love it or hate it. The ads, which launched today online and in New York’s Times Square, have elicited a mix of responses from the Jewish community. For some, the punchlines evoke cheesy (but benign) borscht belt humor. For others, they reinforce negative cultural stereotypes about Jews and gentiles.

Jeff Newelt, comics editor at Heeb and social media/public relations consultant, described the campaign as “obvious and hackneyed,” and many on Twitter agreed:

If my eyes roll any harder they’re gonna roll right out of my damn head http://t.co/F0sjJxKbvS

— Daniel Sieradski (@selfagency) February 13, 2014

Cringeworthy is too polite – @JDate‘s Brash New Advertising Campaign: Clever or Cringeworthy? http://t.co/oUxhUKjrTm via @tabletmag — Tema Smith (@temasmith) February 13, 2014

*cringe* RT @tabletmag .@JDate’s brash new ‘Get Chosen’ ad campaign: clever or cringeworthy? http://t.co/x8GRJOaOVE pic.twitter.com/AhkWZqlF3l — liprap (@liprap) February 13, 2014

But responses were positive too:

A genius is behind the brilliant advertising of @JDate http://t.co/ygUQwNQxkG via @tabletmag

— Andria Kaplan (@Andria_Kaplan) February 13, 2014

I think the @JDate ad is funny and clever, but consider my comedic track record. Also, still not subscribing http://t.co/Oy0HdqQyXa

— Rabbi Josh Yuter (@JYuter) February 13, 2014

Tablet Magazine put the question to their readers on Facebook, and a comment war basically erupted.

Nu, what do you think? Clever or cringeworthy? Would you ditch OKCupid for JDate?

The post JDate’s New Advertising Campaign Launches Today appeared first on Jewcy.

Back in September, JDate announced that it was looking for the “Next Top Proposal” video. The rules went something like this:

JDate®.com, the iconic community responsible for more Jewish marriages than all other online dating sites combined, is in search of the most surprising or unique JDate marriage proposal. Former JDaters® who met their fiancé or spouse on JDate and who captured their engagement on camera are encouraged to share their proposal videos via JDate’s Facebook page for a chance to win a seven night all-inclusive stay at Breezes Bahamas.

With all the sweet, tear-inducing, online proposal videos, how was the panel of five judges to choose just one lucky couple? Well, while the three finalist videos were great and all, it was obvious that “I Do Love You,” the “best Jewish musical marriage proposal video,” was the winner, said judging panelist, Laurie Davis, author of Love @ First Click: The Ultimate Guide to Online Dating and founder of eFlirt Expert.

“I just thought that it was such a creative proposal, and anyone who puts that amount of thought, and effort, into popping the question has really given a lot of thought to their relationship.”

Davis said that it was a touch choice because whoever won would be awarded a dream honeymoon, making lasting memories. But if you’ve seen “I Do Love You,” you just know that this guy put in his all— this couple deserves some beach time.

Before they were crowned King and Queen of Viral Proposal Bliss, Eric LaBarre and Nina Sturtz rallied on Twitter to get votes:

Last day to vote and help us win the #JDateProposal video contest! Thanks for voting!"I Do Love You" @jewcymag #jewcy http://t.co/wHwHdEic56

— Eric LaBarre (@EricTheBar) November 1, 2013

Happy Friday! HELP US WIN AND VOTE! @EricTheBar and @jakewil did such an amazing job- it would be a shame not to win! http://t.co/IW4QsDy1bQ

— Nina Sturtz (@YayNina) October 25, 2013

It all paid off. If you don’t remember the winning video from last year, watch it again here. But get the tissues because this one has romcom game.

Previous: JDate is Looking for the Next Top Proposal

The post JDate Announces Winner of “Next Top Proposal” Contest appeared first on Jewcy.

Well, well, well. There’s a new online dating site in town. The mostly free website, Jzoog, launches on November 7, and depending on how it fares, JDate might have some competition.

Rabbi and dating coach Arnie Singer, who wrote From I to I Do: How to Meet, Date and Marry Your Mr. Right, created Jzoog as a way to help single Jews find each other, but without the “online shopping” feeling that’s often experienced on so many dating sites. On Jzoog, users see each other one at a time, and they’re unable to check out the next person until making a decision on the current one, according to Jzoog.com.

Instead of glossing over you in a race to scroll through as many matches as possible, Jzoog users get the opportunity to give every potential match a chance. That’s good for both parties.

Online dating shouldn’t be like online shopping. You shouldn’t be treated like a piece of merchandise. Everyone deserves to be the center of attention

Often times, online daters will message the hell out of everyone they see because there’s nothing to lose, wasting the time of people seriously looking for relationships. To avoid that burden, JZoog tried a different approach: users don’t pay a fee unless they want to actually contact someone, NY Blueprint reports.

With Jzoog, users pay for tokens, which are used to contact someone. A smile, which is similar to a poke, is 50 cents, while sending a message is one dollar, or two tokens. There is no charge to respond to a message and there is no charge for sending additional messages to a person, once the conversation has begun. A smile may be a common choice for women who don’t want to appear aggressive but want a guy to notice them.

And, keepin’ it old country, Jzoog has a matchmaker feature, which allows users to set each other up.

Only time will tell if Jzoog has got the moxie to make it in the online dating game. Let us know about your experiences with Jzoog come November 7. If you meet, date, and marry Mr. or Mrs. Right within a week, we’ll buy each of you a soda.

(Still image from Jzoog.com)

The post Jzoog: A New Spin on Jewish Online Dating appeared first on Jewcy.

Online dating is all the rage. Men swiping through pictures of girls, based on their hotness, within proximity on Tinder, and women making kissy faces in their OKCupid profile pictures, describing themselves as “adventurous” and other fun-loving adjectives.

In Islam, however, online dating is purely for marriage, decided the Supreme Council of Religious Ruling in Palestine on Tuesday. Given the success of sites like JDate, the council could not ignore the pervasiveness of couples meeting online, but it included numerous ground rules, reports the Times of Israel.

Women, continues the religious opinion, may not describe themselves in detail to men and may not share photos of themselves, nor may they meet the potential groom alone without a male family escort.

“These permissions do not substitute for the formalized, traditional methods of encounter for the purpose of marriage,” the council underscored. “It is better for those wishing to marry to enter the house through the front door.”

For the man, that would entail meeting the prospective bride at her family home in the presence of her custodians.

Eek, meeting the parents on the first date. Hopefully the people on the Islamic dating sites are better adjusted than some of the ones we’ve got stateside.

(Photo by Shutterstock)

The post Online Dating Allowed in Islam, But With Restrictions appeared first on Jewcy.

Everyone’s searching for love—an Odyssean quest that begins in grade school and continues until you’ve found that someone that makes you whole, or something. The internet, namely JDate, has spent years making it easier for Jews to find each other, love each other, and make babies with each other. Now, it’s calling all of its past couples who’ve found marital bliss through the website to show off their engagement videos because there’s actually nothing better than online proposal videos. Tears stream down all of your faces just thinking about them. The “Next Top Proposal” contest is here and it could be any one of you starry-eyed lovebirds.

So here’s what’s going on:

JDate®.com, the iconic community responsible for more Jewish marriages than all other online dating sites combined, is in search of the most surprising or unique JDate marriage proposal. Former JDaters® who met their fiancé or spouse on JDate and who captured their engagement on camera are encouraged to share their proposal videos via JDate’s Facebook page for a chance to win a seven night all-inclusive stay at Breezes Bahamas.

Breezes, Bahamas, all-inclusive—beautiful words that awaken the romantic consumer in all of us. Let’s all get engaged tonight, share our proposal videos with JDate, and watch our love go viral.

Game on. May the cutest couple win.

(Photo by icsnaps/Shutterstock)

The post JDate is Looking For the Next Top Proposal appeared first on Jewcy.

Whether you’re spending Valentine’s Day watching movies on the couch with your girlfriends or on a romantic date with your significant other, we’ve got you covered with some of Jewcy’s best love stories. As Sir Marvin Gaye says, “As long as you’re groovin’, there’s always a chance, somebody watching, might wanna make romance!”

When hundreds of drunk young Jews are piled into a loud, sweaty club for a ‘Jewish singles’ event, it’s natural to expect sparks, butterflies, and a little bit of mishegas. But if you’re looking for your beshert, the shlep to the party might not be worth your time—you’ll have a fun night out with your friends, but you probably won’t meet your future husband.

Jewish law student falls for blonde Southern belle, finds out he’s the first Jew she’s ever met.

This one makes us feel a little uncomfortable, but we have to admit the sentiment is cute: They met on JDate, and he proposed with this elaborate song-and-dance video.

Now that marriage proposals are going viral, the bar is being set higher and higher for nice Jewish guys popping the question on camera. This groom-to-be went with the Bruno Mars approach for his choreographed proposal video.

Who doesn’t love Shosh? I mean really, she’s the epitome of neurotic, funny Jewish girl stuck in the days of Juicy sweat-suits. In real life, actress Zosia Mamet would rather be home reading a book, and we’d definitely rather be watching her on Girls than on a lame Valentine’s Day date tonight.

Craigslist can be creepy, but we’ve all prowled the site looking for an apartment or a job. There was no lasting love connections made at the infamous Craigslist Shabbat shindig, but it sounds like it was a fun night at least. There’s always JDate…

Happy Valentines Day from all of us at Jewcy!

(image via Shutterstock)

***

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The post Booze, Taboos, and Shidduchs: A Year of Jewish Love Stories appeared first on Jewcy.

In a well-known portion of his standup act, comedian Louis C.K. talks about how it’s better to be a white male. Not that whites are better, mind you, but that it’s clearly better to be white. To prove his point, he uses the example of time travel and how only white men can go backwards in time. And since I’m in no way funnier than he is, I’m just going to quote him directly:

Here’s how great it is to be white. I can get into a time machine and go to any time and it would be fucking awesome when I get there. That is exclusively a white privilege. Black people can’t fuck with time machines. A black guy in a time machine is like, ‘Hey anything before 1980, no thank you, I don’t want to go.’ But I can go to any time. The year two? I don’t even know what was happening then. But I know that when I get there, ‘Welcome, we have a table right here for you sir.’

This bit came to mind when I was considering data published in The Unfinished Revolution, Kathleen Gerson’s 2010 book about modern attitudes toward relationships, work, and family. Encouragingly, 80 percent of young women and 70 percent of young men said that ideally, they would favor an egalitarian arrangement where both partners have high paying careers and share equally in child rearing responsibilities.

But since we don’t live in an “ideal” world, Gerson asked her respondents about how they would handle a situation where this 50/50 split isn’t possible.

When confronted with the impossibility of attaining equality in their relationships and professional lives, the men opt to jump into their time machines and go back to the past—preferring that their female partners deprioritize their jobs and tend to hearth and home while they continue on their career paths and become the primary breadwinners for their families.

Women, on the hand, opted to keep their jobs and hypothetical children—and ditch their men. They wouldn’t give up their careers and become housewives. Because women, unlike men, can’t mess with time travel. For most women with modern sensibilities, life in the 1950s is not a palatable choice.

Obviously, this is a pretty extreme example. There are many couples who may not have perfectly equitable partnerships—working women still do a disproportionate amount of the childcare and housework compared to their male counterparts—but have made it work while keeping their jobs and being supportive of each other’s goals.

Yet this data reminded me of another place where gendered time travel is possible—the Orthodox community. It’s a world where the old gender roles are still alive and kicking. Orthodox women may have careers, demanding ones at that, but once they step into the synagogue, that ritual space with its male-only clergy and clearly demarcated sections and roles for women, they may as well have traveled backwards in time.

I can’t take full credit for the Orthodox time-traveling analogy, sadly. I recently bumped into a guy I met on J-Date several years ago (he was testing the Orthodox waters just as I was getting out of them, and it never went beyond one date) who directed me to the Louis C.K. clip in the context of our discussions of Orthodoxy. We had stayed in touch and during one conversation a while back I remember expressing my disapproval of his choices. How, I asked, after being raised secularly, could he choose to enter a world where he, as a man, possessed certain privileges that were the result of biology, not merit?

This, I later realized, was wholly unfair. He wasn’t trying to oppress women or deny them their rights or take more than his fair share. He was merely searching for the best spiritual course for himself. He didn’t create the system even if he benefited from it—the same way that I, as a white woman with well-educated parents, wasn’t turning away advantages or opportunities that came my way as a result of my race and educational class.

I also realize that part of my frustration was due to my own confusion. At the time, I felt a sentimental connection to Orthodoxy and was trying to maintain some semblance of it while also feeling that it was wholly incompatible with my feminist beliefs. The fact that he could slip easily (or at least I thought) into the world I was born and raised in really bugged me.

It’s the same sort of annoyance I feel when anyone expresses nostalgia for a so-called halcyon past, as Aaron Sorkin did before the premiere of The Newsroom, when he waxed poetic about journalism in the age of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow—a world that excluded women and minorities. Nostalgia, I learned in one college class, entails a whole lotta forgetting.

And time travel. As Louis C.K. pointed out at the end of the bit, white men can travel in only one direction—backwards. “I don’t want to go to the future and find out what happens to white people,” he says. “We’re gonna pay for this shit.”

I certainly don’t wish to see any group punished. But if I were to time travel—future only—I hope to see a little less privilege and a little more fairness for everyone.

(Note: this whole essay about time travel was written without any recollection of Back To The Future, so my apologies if I got any of the science wrong.)

Previously: A Jewish Childhood After Divorce
Don’t Call Me a Rebel
The Problem With Modesty Blogging

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post The BallaBuster: Time Machines Don’t Work for Women appeared first on Jewcy.

Forget JDate and the 10,999 Jewish singles who are online now and share your desire for friendship and romance. Seven Jewish men living in DC have decided to find their seven soul mates with a supremely cringeworthy Craiglist ad:

Shalom! We are five handsome and two not so handsome single men. And, yes, we are Jewish. Bound by tradition and emboldened by wit, we are hosting an epic Shabbat dinner — a little challah, a little wine, and a lot of gefilte fish — in downtown Washington, DC on Friday, January 18, 2013. In a nod to our orgiastic traditions, we are inviting seven lucky ladies to feast with us. Echoing the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, we will consider you, “irrespective of religion or race,” as long as you “bring your own lactaid pills.

To be considered, please submit a picture of yourself. We’d also like to hear more about you.

While the men have most certainly congratulated their own brilliance (demanding photos ≠ very original), the litmus test they’ve created to narrow down their apparently large romance pool inadvertently concedes the limitations of their wit. If you can correctly decide what the the 11th Commandment should be and what your favorite episode of Seinfeld is, but then avoid revealing your answers, you might just win a spot at the table.

Please answer two of the following questions with another question: What’s your favorite Shabbos activity? Which biblical forefather do you admire most and why? What would you establish as the 11th Commandment? What’s your favorite episode of Seinfeld? Curb Your Enthusiasm? Which character from Girls speaks most to your personality? What is your favorite double mitzvah? Why would you answer a Craigslist ad about a Shabbat dinner?

You must also answer two of the following, not in question form. Where do you go to get your hair straightened? Are you a self-hating Jew? Have you read Portnoy’s Complaint? Explain why a two-state solution would or would not work? How do you feel about the Shoah? What is your favorite yiddish word and farvus? Zach Braff: Dreamy, or in your dreams? Do you appreciate hairy backs?

The ad has been updated to report that many interested parties have in fact already contacted them, though they’d still “love more responses” in order to find their true besherts.

Suffice it so say, Jewcy isn’t swooning.

Seven Single White Jewish Males Looking to Host Seven Single Females [Craigslist] (image via Shutterstock)

The post Craigslist: Desperate Jewish Men Seek Attractive Jewish Women appeared first on Jewcy.

2012 was quite a year for viral videos. From the wacky to the touching to the downright graphic, here are the most memorable Jewish contributions:

1. The Meme-Ender

Olympic gold medalist and Jewish golden girl Aly Raisman went Gangnam Style, and it was a little confusing.

2. The School of Rock Remix

Israeli kids cover Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble,” and it is all sorts of awesome.

3. The Dancing Jews

“Is it the look in your eyes, or is it these dancing Jews?” Isaac Lamb asked girlfriend Amy Frankel in this elaborate song-and-dance proposal. Yes, a million times yes.

4. The JDate Proposal

Not to be outdone, Eric LaBarre tangoed his way through an even more elaborate musical proposal for girlfriend Nina Sturtz, who he met on JDate. The highlights:

He’s filmed taking the train to her parents house in White Plains to ask for permission—while she’s in Israel on a Birthright trip. Then he tells his mom and brother, two of her friends, and even her ex-boyfriend, and dances in the street with some of his friends.

5. The Sarah Silverman Proposition

The Jewish comedian got graphic—for a cause. She memorably offered to scissor gazillionaire Sheldon Adelson if he donated the $100 million he pledged to Romney to Obama instead. We all know how that turned out.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post The Top Five Jewish Viral Videos of the Year appeared first on Jewcy.