I was at a friend’s house last week when my favorite of all conversations started: Israel.  We discussed birthright, our last visit, the annoying feeling your skin gets after the Dead Sea, and if it was necessary to spend the whole night sleeping in a Bedouin tent. Only my husband, the host and I were Jewish, but our gentile friends enjoyed the diversity in conversation. 

In the fall of 2006, Adam Rosenfield arrived at the University of North Texas armed with a typical American Jewish upbringing—Hebrew school education and involvement with B’nei Brith Youth Organization. He shared nothing more than a tenuous association with Israel and Jewish nationalism. Indeed, when he began college, his strongest identification with the Jewish people had come from reading the Diary of Anne Frank in public school. With a miniscule Jewish community at North Texas and no surrounding synagogues for miles, Adam expected to live a life unconnected from his Jewish roots. 

Debauched, wanton, salacious. Words used to describe a seedy brothel, or, these days, a high school dance in America. As young as fourteen, the once innocent sweat of a young dancer has fermented into something more foul, as members of the opposite sex throw arms and buttocks into the fray. Religious conviction or self-consciousness leads some students to ditch or sit estranged in a corner. However, everyone else is out on the dance floor freaking with the rest of ‘em—or at least trying not to look too out of place. Perversely, teachers and parent chaperones are expected to watch—or ignore—as these young’n’s get frisky like disowned cats in a dumpster. Upon matriculating to college or metropolitan nightclubs, jungle cat imagery would seem more appropriate to describe the scene. Whether in clubs or our schools’ hallowed walls, there is an alternative to American dance ethos, and it rests in Zion.

As a single, twenty-something Jewish coquette, I, like many of my single, twenty-something Jewish coquette peers, am plagued by a conjunction of that constant onus to date and marry a nice Jewish boy and my suspicion that, well, I’m just not attracted to nice Jewish boys. Blame it on an evolutionarily supported predilection for genetic diversity; whatever it’s about, they’re lacking something. Something that grabs me. Something that’s patently not lacking in the tow-headed, Roman numeraled squash players I knew at Princeton or the smoldering immigrati recenti who—far more than the cannoli—make so tempting my jaunts to the North End of Boston.