Vulture has unearthed the high school yearbook photos of dozens of celebrities, confirming that no matter how famous someone ends up, they probably had an awkward phase growing up. Not even the most glam of celebrities can escape the pitfalls of adolescence, and now you can gawk at the former gawkiness of endlessly photoshopped stars. (Though the picture of fresh-faced Lindsay Lohan just makes us sad.)

From the embarrassingly time-stamped (we’re looking at you, Anthony Weiner) to the suspiciously different-looking, not even your favorite Jewish celebrities are safe from class photo embarrassment.

Mark Zuckerberg Jesse Eisenberg had not yet perfected his perpetually-in-high-school look, but it’s not for lack of trying. Paul Rudd, apparently, was always Paul Rudd. Mila Kunis rocked the curly half-pony even after her Lisa Frank days (not pictured: Ashton Kutcher). Natalie Portman, however, takes the cake with her studious pre-Harvard look and Long Island-straight hair.

See the rest of the images here.

(Images via Vulture)

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Jewish porn star James Deen, last seen in this bizarrely riveting New York Times Magazine piece about his upcoming film, The Canyons, which co-stars the volatile (yet sort of sympathetic?) Lindsay Lohan, has taken his acting prowess elsewhere recently—and it’s not X-rated.

“Do you have an equivalent to a chalupa?” Deen asks the drive-through attendant at Del Taco in California, before proceeding to order the entire menu in a weirdly entertaining episode of James Loves Food, a video series we’re upset we only just heard about.

See for yourself, and let us know what you think in the comments:

Previously: Culture Kvetch: Stop Calling Porn Star James Deen a ‘Nice Jewish Boy’

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• Documentary nominees for the Directors Guild of America include Allison Klayman, the filmmaker behind the award-winning documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (who was Beijing’s most popular bat mitzvah tutor during filming) and Lauren Greenfield, whose film The Queen of Versailles offers a revealing look into the astronomical excess of the wacky Siegel family. [THR]

• Larry David watches Degrassi. Someone tell Drake. [Huffington Post]

• This is pretty much what Shoshanna’s Emoji-ridden texts look like [Vulture]

• Brisket, so trendy right now. [NYMag]

• Etsy’s Jewish stuff (see: this and this). [Forward]

• A scene from the ill-fated James Deen/Lindsay Lohan flick, The Canyons:

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• Steven Spielberg’s cinematographer, the Polish-born Janusz Kaminski, discusses how he created the iconic Schindler’s List shot of the girl in the red jacket. [Vulture]

• There’s a Pita Nazi in Tel Aviv, people. [Tablet]

• Because no interview with Lena Dunham is complete without her Instagram photos. [Esquire]

• Our girl Mayim Bialik on the red carpet for the Breaking Dawn 2 premiere. [EW]

• Watch the latest teaser for Bret Easton Ellis’ The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan and James Deen—a porn star who happens to be Jewish. [New York Post]

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Of all of his varied, sometimes conflicting identities—soldier, novelist, New Journalist, proto-hipster, brawler, politician, director—Norman Mailer could never settle into the persona of the “nice Jewish boy.” In fact, he detested it, once writing, “The last thing I want to be in life is the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.” Many figures from Mailer’s life have cited this phrase, along with Mailer’s fear of appearing weak, timid, or self-censoring, as a justification for his bombastic behavior and his taste for violence. Friends and colleagues have also argued that it’s this very image of the nice Jewish boy—so dominant among mid-century American Jews and those who observed them—that contributed to Mailer’s ambivalent, if not rejectionist, attitude toward Judaism.

Mailer’s biographer Mary V. Dearborn writes that, at a young age, Norman was inspired by his father Barney, who combined an elegant South African manner with a tendency toward drinking, philandering, and gambling. It wasn’t that the behaviors themselves were admirable but rather the sort of identity they reflected: “Barney’s small acts of rebellion mirrored his own desires, and Norman felt heartened that he could escape the fate of the “nice Jewish boy” he had so long feared was to be his.”

Of course, in his long, heady life, Mailer often went too far in the other direction, at times displaying a brutish, callous character, particularly toward women. (In 1960, locked in a drunken argument with his wife Adele Morales Mailer, he pulled out a pen-knife and stabbed her.) And he may never have fully escaped the shadow of the nice Jewish boy—he was, after all, an exemplary student—in part because he couldn’t escape Jewishness itself. “He’s the prisoner of Jewish history,” Alfred Kazin said of Mailer, “and no matter how gifted you are, how courageous, you always feel you’re under wraps.” Kazin added, “So I understand it when I see him break against that restraint, only there’s also a positive side to being Jewish, which he hasn’t begun to acknowledge.”

We’re a long way from the kind of torturous battles over identity fought by Mailer and by Philip Roth, who, in works like Portnoy’s Complaint, pits the nice Jewish boy against his natural counterpart: the libidinous lapsed Jew with the raging id. The “nice Jewish boy” has ossified into a commonplace, alongside its “girl” counterpart. A decade ago, they made for presumptuously clever T-shirt slogans. Now the phrase is infantilizing, if not distancing and derogatory; it may even not mean anything at all. (It’s also far from its Yiddish antecedent, which carried a more expansive range of associations than simply “nice.”)

If you read the press surrounding him, James Deen is a nice Jewish boy and comfortable with that. Deen is among the most popular male porn actors, and he also stars in Bret Easton Ellis’ upcoming film, The Canyons (here’s the new trailer). Deen is also the latest in a list of porn veterans (see: Sasha Grey, Jenna Jameson, Ron Jeremy) about to be marshalled into the mainstream. That is, if he isn’t there already: Deen’s distinct brand of stardom has been widely dissected, including in GQ, GOOD magazine, and ABC’s Nightline (which fretted about his following among teenage girls). He’s tremendously popular on Tumblr and Twitter and often tweets back at fans.

The rap on Deen is that he’s an unassumingly handsome (and well-endowed) guy, who cares that the girls he performs with enjoy themselves. He does a lot of BDSM but he doesn’t cross any lines. He’s approachable and funny, he loves his job, and he doesn’t have any perceivable hangups or history of trauma. He’s frighteningly normal, even modest and cool. It’s not just that (heterosexual) guys want to be him and girls want to do him; it’s that they all want to hang out with him.

For a lot of commentators, this set of characteristics has proved alternately thrilling and baffling. Some of it comes back to Deen’s regular-guy looks—he’s 5’8″ and has the body of someone who jogs often but doesn’t try too hard—but also his Jewishness. A New York Observer profile of Deen carried the subhed “In defense of the not-so-nice Jewish boy.” Nightline wondered, “So how did Deen make his transition from a young Jewish kid growing up in SoCal, to a teen internet porn sensation?” (You can almost see where the writer highlighted “nice” and replaced it with “young.”) Wells Tower, writing in GQ, noted that Deen lost his virginity at Jewish summer camp—a site notorious for sexual misadventure among erstwhile nice Jewish adolescents. The GOOD article quotes a fan who says that Deen appeals to “her interest in ‘nerdy Jewish dudes’” and reminds her of guys from Hebrew school.

Deen is active in this shaping of his image, using his Jewishness as a metonym for likeable and unthreatening. The GOOD writer also noted that Deen “cracks Jew jokes” (at one point he refers to “my skinny little Jewish ass”), and he’s mentioned to a couple reporters that he’s “an over-analytical Jew.” His very NSFW blog—which is frattishly funny and genial but not very analytical—recently featured a post in which he exulted in getting free beers at a Vegas club: “this totally appealed to the jew in me.”

I have no problem with porn or with presenting James Deen as its most palatable public face. And perhaps, as Ellis and some of Deen’s other ardent boosters claim, he’ll use his acting skills, which make him the Brando of his current industry, to impressive effect in The Canyons. But for now, there’s a troubling way in which Deen’s Jewishness—his “nice Jewish boy”-ness—is used as a gloss to make him acceptable for public consumption. There’s a strange justificatory tone in the desire to explain it all, as well as an element of surprise: who knew that nebbishy Jews could fuck better than steroidal goyim? (Ron Jeremy, himself a failed actor, is sometimes ironically praised for being the stereotypical hirsute, soft-bellied Jew—another kind of sympathetic everyman, save his enormous member.)

It may seem incongruous to circle back to Mailer here, but why not. There’s much to dislike about the man, and he never seemed to find a useful accommodation with his Jewish background. But in his rejection of being a nice Jewish boy, Mailer did find the courage to forge his own distinct identity and, as a Jewish celebrity, represented a necessary counter-example to popular conceptions of Jewish weakness. That can’t be said for Deen, who doesn’t seem to have given these issues much thought at all. But then, neither have his journalistic admirers, who have yet to ask any questions beyond the obvious.

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• Meet Faygele ben Miriam, the gay rights activist who mobilized Washington state’s battle over marriage more than 40 years ago.

• Bravo’s Andy Cohen totally understands why we watch reality TV, and will get us to watch even more of it.

• A first look at LiLo as Elizabeth Taylor.

• We’re very sorry we missed Bar Refaeli’s 27th birthday earlier this week. Please accept our sincere apologies:

The post Daily Jewce: Bar Refaeli Turns 27, Joe Biden Does the Hora, and more appeared first on Jewcy.

• In Boca Raton, turning to social media as a way of publicly pressuring husbands who refuse to grant their wives a get.

• Woody Allen and Lindsay Lohan spotted having dinner together, possibly discussing casting roles in upcoming films.

• Jazzrael, a 10-day jazz and world music festival in New York, is underway.

• In NYC tonight? Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry will be moderating a panel on the changing role of music in new original theater at the JCC in Manhattan.

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Little known fact about Judd Apatow: he’s a huge fan of nonsectarian humanitarian assistance and emergency relief to disadvantaged people worldwide. This would probably explain why he decided to call up friends like Sarah Silverman, Don Johnson, Sir Patrick Stewart, Tracy Morgan and Lindsay Lohan, to make a video for American Jewish World Services, because, well, that’s what AJWS is all about.

Want to learn more? AJWS is on Twitter and Facebook.

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