Under this narrative umbrella, Miranda dates a modelizer (“a step behind womanizers, who will sleep with just about anything in a skirt”), Carrie runs into Mr. Big with a model on his arm (“I felt like I was wearing patchouli in a room full of Chanel”), and Samantha sleeps with a confirmed modelizer (“Samantha demanded nothing less than the same consideration given every other model in town”).

Juxtaposing the glitz and glamor of model-life against the flaws-and-all realness of “mortal” life, the show makes a surprisingly compelling case in favor of the latter. I say “surprising” only because the show is so deeply associated in the public consciousness with glitz and glam. 

This, however, is not at all the world we see in Models and Mortals. These are real New Yorkers. They sit on the floor and eat takeout. They buy cereal at the bodega. They eat too many sweet potato canapes after a fashion show. 

The “model” is deployed in this episode as a symbol of acquisition. For the men who date them, they are a trophy to be won (and perhaps to be captured on film). For the models themselves, modeling is framed as a path to a life of excitement and material gain. As supermodel Xandrella coos to the camera in a cutaway “interview” scene, “you can get anything, I’ve been offered trips to Aspen, weekends in Paris, Christmas in St Barts, a Bulgari necklace, a breast job…”

The “mortal,” on the other hand, is portrayed as having both less and more. Lacking in money and flawless good looks, they are possessed of a joy and good humor that comes from being real—from eschewing the fantasies of endless acquisition for the pleasures of the here and now. As it says in Pirkei Avot: “Who is rich? He who rejoices in his lot.”

This “rejoicing in one’s lot”  is highlighted by a memorable scene between Carrie and Derek, aka “the Bone,” who we are told is “the world’s biggest underwear model and Stanford’s most important client.” Lounging next to Carrie as they share a cigarette, he asks her: “what do you want to be when you grow up?” 

Carrie responds: “Well, I think this might be it.”

Watching the show as a teenager and a young adult, I didn’t bat an eye at this response. I assumed that’s how life worked. You got a charming apartment, you had good friends, you figured out how to make a living, and then, well, you enjoyed those things.

At age thirty-three, I can appreciate how revolutionary Carrie’s response really was. Most of the people I know, whether in their twenties or sixties, would never say “this might be it.” Rather, we live as though life is something that will start as soon as… as soon as we have more money, as soon as we have more status, as soon as we get a promotion, as soon as we’re married, as soon as we have kids, as soon as we retire, and so on. 

The “mortals” of Models and Mortals offer us a different way of being in the world—one in which life is not about endlessly grasping for more. Uninterested in living life as a grab for prizes, they are equally uninterested in being a prize for someone else to grab. 

This, it turns out, is more alluring than the “perfection” that a model could bring to the table. As Mr. Big states to Carrie at the end of the episode, “There are so many goddamn gorgeous women out there in this city… [but] after a while you just wanna be with the one that makes you laugh.”

Unlike so many other shows on TV in the 90s and early 2000s, Sex and the City was never about “trying to have it all.” This was a show about having it all—about having everything that really matters. Little did we know as we watched it on dorm room beds and in our first apartments, that we already did. 

Inspired by the sages of old who paired the weekly Torah reading with a selection from the books of the prophets, I will be pairing my SATC commentary with a selection from the later works of the franchise (the two movies and “And Just Like That…”) with the hopes that this act of juxtaposition can help us make meaning: 

Pair SATC S01E02 with the Sex and the City movie’s opening scenes. In voiceover, Carrie states: “Year after year, 20-something women come to New York City in search of the two L’s: labels and love.” With this opening line, she sets up the movie as a story of upward mobility and acquisition. Let Models and Mortals be a tonic and a tikkun for this low point. 

The post Having It All appeared first on Jewcy.

This is undeniably a different show—with a different sensibility—than the series it would over the years grow and evolve to become. Carrie is a brunette. She’s saltier and less precious. She talks directly to the camera.

A self-proclaimed “sexual anthropologist,” she spends the episode investigating ideas about relationships: why are there so many great unmarried women, and no great unmarried men? Or: can women have sex without emotion—like men do? To get the answers, she interviews friends and acquaintances. Here we meet Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte, along with a roster of toxic bachelors who give us the male perspective as they pump iron at the gym.

As the years passed, however, the show drifted away from this early vision. Carrie stopped talking to the camera, they lightened her hair and ditched the light jazz, and the aesthetic became somehow pinker and shinier. It would seem, then, that the Sex and the City we have (along with its movies and reboot) is only one of many possible shows that could have emerged from this pilot.

So what is it that pushed SATC to choose the path they chose? And was that choice inevitable? The answer—it would seem—is Mr. Big, smiling from the back seat of his limo, offering Carrie a ride home from Manhattan’s hottest new club—Chaos. 

It’s Mr. Big who will pull Carrie out of her role as “sexual anthropologist” and make her the hero—not the observer—of the story. It is their great and tortured romance that will transform her character from smokey sex columnist to wide-eyed romantic. His story arc will end up becoming the arc of the show itself. 

This is made all the more fascinating by the fact that Sex and the City very nearly had no story arc at all. According to the ever-valuable SATC coffee table book, Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell, Darren Star originally conceived of the show as an anthology series—a kind of relationship procedural, with Carrie as the investigator focusing on a different “case” each week.

Having ditched the anthology idea, Sex and the City became something akin to a romcom adapted for the small screen and spread out across six seasons. To characterize it as such, however, requires the clarity of hindsight. Watching SATC in real time back in the 2000s, it was not at all obvious that this was a love story at all, let alone Mr. Big’s love story. It felt entirely plausible that Carrie would end up with someone else, or with no one at all. 

Perhaps, however, such speculation is fruitless. As the sages wrote of the book of Genesis in the Midrash (forgive me, I’m a rabbinical student), it is not appropriate for humans to inquire of what happened before creation. The Torah begins with the moment order emerged from chaos, and we will never know what came before—nor what alternative creations could have possibly emerged instead. 

Similarly, we cannot know what would have happened had Carrie not stumbled out of Chaos that night. We cannot know what would have happened had Big not been there to pick her up. All we have is what’s in front of us. 

That said, seeing Carrie and Big sit together in the back of Big’s limo, I can’t help but be impressed with a sense of rightness. 

Yes. This is how it had to be.

Inspired by the sages of old who paired the weekly Torah reading with a selection from the books of the prophets, I will be pairing my SATC commentary with a selection from the later works of the franchise (the two movies and “And Just Like That…”) with the hopes that this act of juxtaposition can help us make meaning: 

Pair SATC S01E01 with AJLT S01E10 (minute 35:44-37:00), in which Carrie scatters Big’s ashes off of “their bridge” in Paris. It would seem that this would end Big and Carrie’s multi-decade story arc. This arc emerged from Chaos, and to chaos it has returned. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

The post In the Beginning, There Was Carrie and There Was Big appeared first on Jewcy.

There are other such memes out there, comparing the down-to-earth, Chinese food eating, TV binging Miranda of yesteryear with hopeless romantic, reckless, trying-to-have-it-all-and-more Miranda of today. The idea is that this new Miranda is not Miranda at all—that she has, in a sense, been body-snatched. 

Who is this imposter? Some have ventured to say that Miranda has been overtaken by the actress who plays her, Cynthia Nixon. Others think that the writers simply lost the thread, transforming Miranda into a new character. But perhaps this new Miranda is not new at all. 

Consider, for instance, the scene in this week’s episode when Miranda shows up to Che’s apartment unannounced with cookies. She thrums with giddiness and radiates a familiar nervous energy. Are you not reminded of early 2000s Carrie showing up in a beret at Mr. Big’s apartment with a bag of McDonald’s?

Consider also the words she used when she asked Steve for a divorce. “[I want] more… more everything… more connection, more energy, more sex, more me.” Is this not an echo of Carrie’s famous plea to Petrovsky for more? “I’m someone who is looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.”

It seems that Miranda has become the friend she once judged, losing herself in pursuit of the intensity of the show’s unlikely new Mr. Big, Che Diaz. 

Carrie, meanwhile, has become Miranda. Gearing herself up to go on a second date with Peter, the teacher who puked on her, Carrie warns Charlotte not to get too excited. “It is not a date,” she demurs. “It is a do-over between two people who got sick on one another. Let’s take the romance out of it.” She has at last heeded Miranda’s words and stopped “living in a fantasy.” 

How are we to understand the Carriefication of Miranda and the Mirandification of Carrie? We might venture that this is who Miranda has always been — a “pick me girl” who defines herself in opposition to those around her, basing her self-worth on the extent to which she is not “like other girls.” When her best friend was a starry-eyed, boy-crazy romantic, she played the down-to-earth professional, and when Carrie slows to her speed, she responds by amping up.

We might also venture to say that Carrie and Miranda represent a sort of archetypical Yin and Yang, held eternally in balance by the difference of the other. When Carrie is brought down to earth by hard life circumstances, Miranda correspondingly lifts off the ground. 

This last theory, however, ignores the fact that Carrie and Miranda are not a dyad, but rather parts of a quadrangle, more akin to the four elements than the Yin-Yang. It is the four gals—Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha—whose essential prototypical energies hold the universe of Sex and the City together. 

And yet, Samantha isn’t here.

Perhaps that’s why the cosmic order has been disrupted. Perhaps that’s why the show has a chasm so deep that not even Seema, Nya, Nya’s boyfriend, LTW, LTW’s husband and kids, and “Lisette from downstairs” can fill it. 

Perhaps also this why up has become down, Carrie has become Miranda, and Miranda has become Carrie. 

Some other thoughts:

• The structure of this week’s episode, locking all the characters together in a women’s shelter in Brooklyn, worked very well—as close to a “bottle episode” as SATC has ever done. 
• This show has too many new characters. Seema is flawless and fits right in, but please, I don’t need more “Lisette from downstairs,” or LTW. Nya and her partner deserve their own show, but they don’t work on this one. 
• Lily’s tampon plotline got some genuine lols out of me, and I also feel like I learned a lot about tampons. 
• Charlotte once again proved to me why she is TV’s best Jewish mother. Unlike the typical overbearing Jewish mother trope, she is a fierce balabusta—the spiritual core of her Jewish home, ready to accept her non-binary child’s identity but unwilling to let them slouch on their Torah portion prep. 
• Anthony’s unequivocal rejection of his date’s holocaust denial was a real gift on Holocaust Remembrance Day. 
• One critique of the episode’s Jewish content: the Jewish world already came up with a word for a non-binary Bar/Bat Mitzvah and it’s “B-Mitzvah,” not “They Mitzvah.” Come on, now.

The post The Carriefication of Miranda appeared first on Jewcy.

Wanna feel old? Consider this: ‘Sex and City’ premiered sixteen years ago today.

Now, I know it’s cool to hate on Carrie et al these days, what with Girls and Broad City bringing the sexting, q-tips and authentic Brooklyn hipster poverty to the small screen. But I still have a soft spot for SATC, and I have a feeling you, dear reader, might feel similarly. Before it descended into the slavish consumer-fest of the later seasons (and the movies, of which we shall not speak), it was really, really good. Edgy! Risque! It’s where I learned about anal sex! And vibrators! (Ah, the sheltered decade of dial-up internet: we were such innocent teens.) Don’t pretend you don’t stop and watch an episode when you’re channel surfing/illegally downloading in the liminal hours between updating your OKCupid profile and falling asleep. You do, and you love it.

Anyway! SATC had a number of good Jewish moments, mostly focused on Charlotte’s conversion to Judaism for husband #2, Harry Goldenblatt, who woos her with his menschy, honest charm—one of more engaging plot-lines in the harried, lackluster final season. Wrote Sala Levin in 2012:

Nebbishy, lawyerly Harry certainly seems to be cut from the same cloth as his anxious, uncool brethren. Harry knows that the “shiksa goddess” Charlotte seems to be beyond the reach of “a putz like me,” as he puts it. But while the stumbling nerds of the popular imagination typically win the affection of their crushes despite not knowing how to interact with members of the opposite sex, Harry gets the girl with his brazenness, a forthrightness that Charlotte finds difficult to resist. It’s his openness about his desire for her—coupled with a talent for coupling—that distinguishes Harry from his geeky cohort. Like the female characters of Apatow’s movies, Charlotte ultimately develops feelings of real depth for Harry, noting that if his warmth and kindness are part of his Jewishness, being Jewish might be something she would want for herself. But—unlike in Apatow’s films—these feelings emerge only after the ignition of a sexual spark.

Charlotte and Harry’s love affair is served up with a generous dollop of borscht belt vernacular—a lot of putzing and schvitizing on Harry’s part, which feels tonally off for a 30-something man in the early 2000s—but underneath the schtick, theirs is a love affair of equals: two people who really understand and accept the other for who they are, hairy back, WASP-y affectations and all.

The depiction of Charlotte’s conversion is fairly accurate by sitcom-land standards: she’s thrice turned away by the rabbi before being accepted as a candidate for the “Jewish faith,” she and Harry bicker over differing levels of religious commitment, and eventually we see her take a dip in the mikvah to complete the process. There are a few anomalies—i.e. the rabbi’s family members seem to have confused Shabbat and funeral attire, and the rituals are overly-formal, almost robotically executed—but for the most part it’s a faithful (if abbreviated, sentimentalized) depiction of a non-Orthodox conversion.

Back in 2003, Samuel G. Freedman wrote that Charlotte’s conversion to Judaism radically redefined interfaith relationships in American popular culture:

Until the HBO series, no television show had ever presented a conversion with such visual and theological detail. Even more important is what the approving portrayal represents: a reversal of the entertainment industry’s tradition of viewing Jewish identity as something to be shed in the quest to become American.

For nearly a century, ever since the Broadway comedy Abie’s Irish Rose, the standard narrative of love between a Jew and a Christian has pointed toward interfaith marriage, and the implicit abandonment of Jewish observance and continuity, as the epitome of the melting pot… Unlike all of those Jewish characters of yore, who were so ready to reinvent themselves with a gentile wife, Harry insisted that Charlotte convert; he wanted their children to be fully Jewish.

And Charlotte wanted to be fully Jewish, too: from the very first heartfelt ‘shalom’ she offers to the custodian of the synagogue, to her decision to stop celebrating Christmas (a ritual she loved), she’s in it 110 percent—she even chastises Harry for watching baseball during Shabbat dinner, leading to a massive fight and temporary break-up. But it’s OK! They reconcile at a depressing singles’ event at shul, and have a big, fat, disastrous (but happy) Jewish wedding.

http://youtu.be/GKKau5XVF7k

So happy birthday, Sex and the City. I still love you, and I’m not ashamed to say so on the internet.

Image: HBO

The post Happy Birthday, “Sex and the City”! appeared first on Jewcy.

For many Americans, Christmas Eve can be a time to go to church, sing carols, and be with loved ones. But, Dec. 24 also marks a lesser known, but just as memorable time of year for the Jewish singles of New York: The Ball, a time to squeeze into cleavage-baring cocktail dresses, do shots of flavored vodka, and hook up with other members of the Tribe.

Organized by LetMyPeopleGo (yup, that’s the real name), The Ball is billed as “the nation’s largest Jewish singles event.” Not to be confused with the Matzo Ball or the myriad others singles events for Jews that are held on Christmas and Christmas Eve, The Ball is its own unique set of debauchery for the youngest People of the Book, as well as the largest in the New York area. When I bought my first ticket to it, my mother beamed at the thought of me mingling with clean-cut, eligible Jewish bachelors. Little did she—or, at that time, I—know that The Ball is arguably the sloppiest gathering of Jewish singles looking to get some outside of an AEPi formal.
  


That first encounter was in 2010, one month after my 21st birthday. I was halfway through my senior year of college, and I was very ready for my first taste of the future post-college world of dating. Of course, that’s because I assumed it would be just like Sex and the City—complete with handsome older (Jewish) men, witty banter, and fabulously delicious cocktails that I’d never have to pay for.  



Yes, my expectations were fantastically, unrealistically high for a Jewish singles event, but it wasn’t as if I had expected to find my beshert, my destined Jewish soulmate, there. Okay, maybe a small part of me was hoping I’d find him. Like most of my Jewish friends, we prioritized dating a member of the tribe over anyone else, and a club on Christmas Eve seemed like it offered the best odds.



However, as we piled into the cab to Marquee, I quickly realized that nobody was expecting to find her beloved that evening—or do much talking. One friend announced that the girl who made out with someone first earned free drinks from the rest of us. Her co-worker added the same went for whoever hooked up with the most guys. There was a bounty on heads; apparently, we were going to be the New Orleans Saints of the Jewish singles scene.



Everyone had wised up to the fact that a giant Jewish singles event is the last place on Earth where you’d actually experience love at first sight. It was too loud and too crowded to even find the dear friends you came with. In this environment, you wouldn’t recognize your beshert if he fell from the sky and landed right in front of you stomping on a wine glass.



Within minutes of entering the club, I was standing alone as my fellow Jewesses had dispersed to flirt. I felt like I lost my voice and could only squeak against the blare of “Bottoms Up.” At that moment, I realized this was survival of the fittest; I was scared, lonely, and vulnerable. Switching my focus from romance to competition seemed like the best strategy for surviving the evening.



Minutes later, I was kissing the first guy who wrapped his arm around my waist. You could offer me a million dollars and a date with Andy Samberg to tell you his name or a single fact about him, and I still couldn’t. The same goes for the second guy I hooked up with that night. I can recall more identifiable features of the guard yelling at me for making out on the leather couches than my fleeting partner in crime.



And I didn’t, and still don’t, have, any regrets about my random make-outs. It was fun; I felt grown-up, sexy (yes, to my goody-two-shoes self, that was sexy), and most importantly, I felt emotionally unscathed. 



By my second year of The Ball, I was happy that hookups rather than romance were the only thing in store for in the evening. I was a few months into New York’s Jewish dating scene, and it left me with the desire to shield myself from failed expectations. I hadn’t ventured into JDate, but only because I couldn’t imagine paying a fee to engage in intra-Tribe dating when it already disappointed me so much. Unreturned texts, promising first dates that never led to seconds, and overwhelmingly crowded Shabbat onegs had only frustrated me. The right Jewish guy seemed too precious and, therefore, impossible to find in any of the five boroughs, let alone at The Ball.



So, to dampen any hopes for love, I treated the night as a game. I cooled my desires with competition, as I had learned the safest skill in romantic survival was to expect nothing great and nothing permanent. My second year proceeded much as the first, with the biggest difference being Artichoke Basille’s replacing McDonald’s as our post-Ball meal.



Yet over the course of the following year, I became more aware of how The Ball mentality was impacting my approach to dating. I was overly pessimistic and distant toward romantic prospects. I spoke about relationships as if it were implausible for their shelf lives to last longer than a week. A friend who’s attended The Ball with me every year called me out on this behavior. “It’s one thing to have a cautious mentality,” she said, “but yours is apocalyptic.”

It is with her words ringing in my ears that I contemplate buying a ticket for my third consecutive trip to The Ball. I looked forward to it every year, and not just because I enjoy the random, PG-13 hookups. The ritual of embracing my identity as a single Jewish woman, of owning an aspect of my life that the rest of the time I find myself either trying to change or having to justify, is liberating. At the same time, I wonder if another year is good for me. The ironic distant I cultivate at an event like The Ball isn’t so healthy to have year-round. And maybe now, I need to let my guard down a bit. 



My first time at The Ball taught me how to protect myself against the disappointments of dating and armor myself from the pain of attachments. Perhaps by abstaining from it this year I can undo just the right amount of that learning.

The post Finding Love, Or Just Another Makeout, at a Rowdy Jewish Singles Party appeared first on Jewcy.

• What would Shoshanna do? Girls actress Zosia Mamet got into rough waters while taking a dip in the Hamptons this weekend.

• Great news, Homeland fans. Claire Danes says her character, Carrie Mathison, “gets her mojo back” in Season 2.

• Go inside the closet of legendary Sex and the City costume designer Patricia Field.

• Scouting Annie Hall locations in New York and Los Angeles.

• Drew Barrymore drinks Cel Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Soda.

• Rashida Jones visits Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, and he’s in disbelief that she wrote a comic book
about a socialite and not a nerdy Jewish guy with superpowers.

The post Daily Jewce: Drew Barrymore Drinks Cel-Ray Soda, Rashida Jones’ Comic appeared first on Jewcy.

Despite taking place in New York City, which is, as everyone knows, the center of the Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world, HBO’s Sex and the City didn’t feature a significant Jewish character until the show’s fifth season, when the blue-blooded, Connecticut-bred, straight-haired Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) divorces her equally WASPy surgeon husband, Trey MacDougal (Kyle MacLachlan). The divorce lawyer Charlotte employs? Harry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler), the bald, stocky, sweaty (Jewish) attorney she turns to only after his goyish partner in the law firm proves to be distractingly attractive, preventing Charlotte—who wants to appear ladylike in the eyes of a handsome man—from being as aggressive as she would like in pursuing her share of the marriage’s assets. Thankfully, there is nothing sexy about Harry, leaving Charlotte uninhibited enough to roll up the sleeves of her sweater set and come out swinging.

But Harry, of course, doesn’t see himself as the sexless creature that Charlotte does. Lured by shiksappeal, a phenomenon well-documented in popular culture, Harry falls for Charlotte, telling her once the case has settled that he is infatuated, a man stricken. He is mad about her, approaching her with a carnal gaze and a speech declaring his intense yearning for her, telling her that he has been unable to stop thinking about her since they met.

Why, hello, sex-crazed Jewish man desperate for an—ahem—outlet for his desires; I believe we’ve met before. (Spoiler alert: The next sentence contains an obligatory Philip Roth reference.) From Leopold Bloom to Alexander Portnoy, novels are filled with the sexual frustrations of Jewish males, men confounded and immobilized by their lust. Director Judd Apatow has built a career largely on the nervous fumblings of Jewish men—Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, all of them have shyly and awkwardly bumbled their way through Apatow’s films, shocked into near paralysis when the pretty (and not Jewish) girl lets them unhook her bra or come home with her.

And yet, Harry is not quite of their ilk. Because, you see, it turns out Harry is something of a sex savant. Though he schvitzes (his word) on Charlotte’s divorce papers, gets bits of tissue stuck to his damp, shining forehead and suffers from a general lack of suaveness, Harry manages to woo Charlotte with his open admiration of her, and then wow her with his sexual prowess. Initially rather repulsed by Harry’s poor etiquette, hirsute body and—oh, cruel fate!—hairless head, Charlotte is drawn to her ugly paramour for their unexpected chemistry. They begin what starts as a purely physical relationship and turns into a full-blown love affair, one in which Charlotte eventually converts to Judaism in order to marry the man who once disgusted her. (Though she gradually embraces Judaism, Charlotte is at first confused by its complexities; Harry’s willingness to order pork at a restaurant baffles her. “I’m not kosher, I’m Conservative,” he tells her. “I’m conservative, too,” Charlotte says, to which Harry responds, “My Conservative doesn’t have anything to do with wearing pearls.”)

Nebbishy, lawyerly Harry certainly seems to be cut from the same cloth as his anxious, uncool brethren. Harry knows that the “shiksa goddess” Charlotte seems to be beyond the reach of “a putz like me,” as he puts it. But while the stumbling nerds of the popular imagination typically win the affection of their crushes despite not knowing how to interact with members of the opposite sex, Harry gets the girl with his brazenness, a forthrightness that Charlotte finds difficult to resist. It’s his openness about his desire for her—coupled with a talent for coupling—that distinguishes Harry from his geeky cohort. Like the female characters of Apatow’s movies, Charlotte ultimately develops feelings of real depth for Harry, noting that if his warmth and kindness are part of his Jewishness, being Jewish might be something she would want for herself. But—unlike in Apatow’s films—these feelings emerge only after the ignition of a sexual spark.

Harry may have surprised audiences with his Casanova ways, but maybe he shouldn’t have. After all, in the show’s first season, Charlotte has a brief but passionate romance with Shmuel, a Hasidic artist in Williamsburg. The Jewish men of Sex and the City, it seems, have a power of seduction not found in the often self-conscious, insecure Jewish men of books, film and television. Must be something in the Cosmopolitans.

Previously on Network Jews:

Max Blum, Happy Endings‘ solution to the Joey problem

Seth Cohen, The O.C.’s loveable dork

Hesh Rabkin, Jewish Loan Shark on The Sopranos

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Today in Tablet Magazine, Rita Rubin reports on the evidence that suggests that, among Jews, nose jobs are no longer as popular as they used to be. Rubin explains:

In 2011, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 37 percent fewer Americans got nose jobs than in 2000. The economy surely played some role: Surgical cosmetic procedures across the board declined by 17 percent during that period, coinciding with the economic downturn, which left people with less money to spend on nonessential surgery. But rhinoplasty, or “nose reshaping,” saw one of the sharpest drops among all procedures, from 389,000 in 2000 to 244,000 in 2011.

However, Rubin notes increasing numbers of Hispanics and Asian Americans seeking rhinoplasty, which leads her to conclude, “If the total number of nose jobs in America is rapidly declining, while their popularity rises among certain non-Jewish groups, one likely conclusion is that rhinoplasty is declining among Jews.”

To pay tribute to the role of the nose job in the American Jewish consciousness as the procedure nears cultural extinction (or something), we figured we’d showcase the most talked-about Jewish nose jobs and remember a simpler time, when rhinoplasty was rampant and imperfect schnozes were so last season:

Sarah Jessica Parker: From Girls Just Want To Have Fun to women just want to go to Abu Dhabi.

(Photo by Jeff Schear/Getty Images for Ann and Robert H. Lurie Hospital of Chicago)

Tori Spelling: Beverly High’s own Donna Martin becomes a reality TV star.

ScarJo: The big screen’s Russian-born Black Widow whose maternal family comes from Minsk IRL.

Natalie Portman: the Israeli-born, Long Island-bred actress formerly known as Natalie Hershlag.

Jennifer Grey: the Dalton grad who will always be Baby to us.

Just saying, ladies:

Also…

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