Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

  I stood alone in the foyer trying to decide where to go first when a woman came up and introduced herself. Her name was Carol and, in a manner that was direct and friendly, she invited me to join her for a drink. Often it is the women who make the first move at these events; the men, for all their macho pose, seem shy, even a bit frightened. Carol, who told me she was a clinical psychologist from Long Island, explained the dynamics of the Singles’ Weekend.

  “People come here expecting a big sex scene,” she said. “A lot of guys are afraid of sexual encounters and so they freeze. But once you’ve been up here a couple of times you realize that there is very little sex. For one thing, people live two or three in a room, and it’s not convenient. But mainly, sex is a waste of time. People come to meet other people, to build up a social life back in the city. If you pair off with one person and it doesn’t pan out, where are you?”

  Put another way, sex at a Singles’ Weekend is not cost effective. It involves some preliminary work and perhaps a commitment for the rest of the weekend—and what if somebody better turns up? The system is to keep moving, keep circulating, keep getting names and numbers for real life. If the Concord is a kosher meat market, it is a wholesale one.

  Of course, Singles’ Weekends are not celibate; sex has been known to take place on the premises. With the AIDS scare, Carol admitted that she had brought condoms, just in case. “I can’t believe I did it,” she said, laughing. “I mean, the other day I called a girlfriend and asked her how to ask for them in a drugstore. What are you supposed to say, like, ‘Gimme a dozen rubbers,’ or what? It’s such a high school thing, but what choice do you have? Listen, some people are really freaked—I met a woman up here with a doctor’s certificate, and she won’t even dance with anybody who doesn’t have one too. Now that’s sick. I mean, who brings a health certificate to the mountains?”

  Carol got up to mingle as the band whanged its way into a Junior Walker medley. She was unembarrassed about the defection. “I’ll see you around,” she promised, “but I want to try to meet as many men as possible tonight. It’s good to start weeding them out early.”

  I went to another table and introduced myself to a very pretty tax lawyer in her early twenties and a young man who told me in simple Hebrew that he teaches special education. The lawyer had curly brown hair and dark almond eyes, and the teacher was obviously taken by her. They had known each other only a couple hours, but they allowed me to interrupt their budding courtship and talked candidly, almost clinically, about their hopes for the weekend and beyond.

  “I live on Long Island,” the man said. “I have a nice house, a nice car. But I’m lonely. You have no idea how desolate Long Island can be in the winter. I’ve never been to one of these weekends before, but I want to find someone, a nice Jewish girl, and this is the place.” He looked fondly at the lawyer, and she smiled.

  “I’ve been up here five times,” she said. “I moved to New York after law school, and I don’t have many friends in the city. This is like a whole separate social life up here. I’m not hung up on finding a Jewish man—I want to find the right man, and he could be anything. But the truth is, I’m more comfortable with Jewish guys. It’s just that a lot of them are very spoiled. But I’m ready for a family, and I’d like to have a Jewish family. I’d just feel more comfortable, that’s all.”

  It wasn’t hard to figure out that they were speaking mostly for each other’s benefit, bouncing courtship signals off me like a communications satellite. I made a mental note to look them up again on Sunday, wished them luck, and headed back to the promenade.

  There is an intentional sense of timelessness at the Concord; things stay open all night and there are no clocks. By two in the morning, the urinals in the men’s rooms were clogged with Budweiser cans and some of the dancers were panting for breath, but hundreds of people still surged up and down the halls. The more impatient ones were already a bit wild-eyed, working up the courage to take direct action but uncertain about what to do.

  I decided to call it a night and headed for the elevator. On the way I saw a lurching, almost menacing approach by a man who passed a woman, turned, stared at her for a moment, and then yelled, “Hey.” She spun around, five or six paces beyond him, and waited. “What’s your name?” he called in an aggrieved voice, as if she had just smashed into his car.

  The woman didn’t seem to mind the tone. “Mine? Debbie. What’s yours?”

  “Mine? Howard. Hey, you want to go in and dance or something?” She nodded and they walked together toward the disco, but both of them kept glancing around to make sure they weren’t missing anyone better.

  On Friday night I didn’t see a single book, not even carried as a prop. But at Saturday breakfast, the huge dining hall of the Concord Hotel looked like a college dormitory during finals week. Hundreds of red-eyed singles dressed in jogging suits and leisure outfits sat at the round tables, bent in concentration over their Digests. They had pencils in their hands and made notes next to the entries, like handicappers before a big race. Some of the ads were sexually explicit. No. 1208 claimed that “They call me marathon man and I don’t like to jog. I’m here for one thing and one thing only—to break my old record of four hours and twenty-six minutes.” No. 1166 was terse: “I want good sex. Answer only if you can give it.” And No. 653: “Single male seeking dominating female to put me in my place. Leather preferred.”

  On the distaff side, No. 222 described herself as “An attractive, tall blond looking for strong Jewish man for less than meaningful relationship. Must be into mayonnaise and leather.” A balding man at my table broke the silence with a low whistle and read the ad out loud. “You think it’s for real?” he asked, scanning the room.

  “Even if it’s not, imagine what kind of a girl thinks up an ad like that,” said the man sitting next to him with a wolfish grin.

  The Digest is unedited, and its entries appear in random juxtaposition. “Party animal, action packed looking for wild time with right partner” was next to “Sincere, respectful, nice looking seeks shy, quiet, friendly female.” Some of the ads were cute in a New York Magazine way (“Furrier looking for a fox. Beavers also accepted”); a few alluded to drugs (“Snowloving entrepreneur looking for snowgirl”); but most were middle-of-the-road come-ons aimed at attracting as much weekend business as possible. There were some overtly materialistic pitches—“Knock, knock, who’s there? A rich successful businessman who wants you to knock on my door”; or “Englewood Cliffs JAP with condo in Florida. Daddy is a doctor and very particular about my dates. Be Mr. Right!”—but most advertised physical attributes rather than financial assets.

  Many of the singles asked for Jewish partners or listed themselves SJMs or SJWs in the stylized way of the personal columns. A typical entry was, “Wanted, nice-looking, educated Jewish male, age 24–28, 5′8″ to 6′0″ tall, for attractive, 5′2″ Jewish teacher. Nerds need not apply.” Or, on the male side, “Wanted, that special Jewish girl. Down-to-earth person who is willing to share their [sic] special feelings with me.”

  “Down-to-earth” is a phrase I heard all over America from Jewish men. It is what they want Jewish women to be, and claim they rarely are. A man who came all the way from Cleveland to attend the weekend told me he hadn’t been able to find a down-to-earth Jewish girl in the entire state of Ohio. “You take them camping, out in the woods, and all they can say is, ‘Ick, I’m freezing out here, when are we going home?’ ” he complained.

  Jewish women, for their part, complain that Jewish men are nerdy, or spoiled. They have stories of their own, and the phrase “God’s gift to women” keeps cropping up. Jewish men and women seem both attracted to and angry with one another. Partly this is an expression of the general hostility between the sexes in America; but at least some of the animosity is specifically Jewish and reflects the distorted way Jews often view themselves and each other.

  No. 1427: “JAP princess wanted for immediate session of intense whining and verbal abuse. Just like mama.”
It is American Jewish humorists and writers who have stigmatized their women—mothers, wives, and daughters—as shrill, castrating, shallow, selfish, and spoiled, held them up to ridicule in a hundred films, a thousand comedy routines. In the Philip Roth–Neil Simon–Woody Allen world, Jewish women are always second best, consolation prizes or stopgaps until the Real Woman (blond, blue-eyed, and down-to-earth) comes along.

  No. 0039: “Single female, 30. No nerds, no JAPs, seeks handsome, exciting man with brains.” What Woody Allen and Philip Roth did to Jewish women, they have done to themselves in spades. They, and an army of lesser writers, routinely depict Jewish men as neurotics, mama’s boys, victims, wimps, or money-mad materialists in gold chains. Jewish men write and produce much of America’s cinema, theater, and television. It is they who create these stereotypes. The most enduring and recognizable Jewish character in American popular culture is Woody Allen’s bumbling romantic who plays the fool for his Christian girlfriends and, by extension, for a Christian audience.

  The striking thing is how little most of the young Jews at the Concord, or indeed anyplace in America, resemble these caricatures. Allen, Roth, and the others belong to an older generation. Their notions of Jews are derived from the ethnic neighborhoods of their boyhoods, and the now middle-aged people who emerged from them. But that first-generation community, still quivering with the traumas, temptations, and timid gratitude of the immigrant’s children, is rapidly disappearing. Even at the Concord, bastion of the still-ethnic Eastern Seaboard Jewish middle-middle class, the squirrely little nerds and cloying princesses are mostly a figment of each others’ imaginations.

  “You want to know who these people are? They’re Americans,” said Jeanie, a pert blond of about thirty who was sitting at our table. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she was at the Concord to find a Jewish husband. When Jeanie said “Americans,” it didn’t sound like a compliment.

  “Look at these guys,” she said, pointing at two powerfully built young men who sauntered by wearing only red bathing suits and wolfish grins. “They parade around like stallions. I have a real hard time finding Jewish men with what I consider Jewish values. A lot of Jews today believe that how you look or what you do for a living is what you are. That isn’t Jewish, that’s American.”

  “What’s Jewish?” I asked.

  “Jewish is being a mensch. Jewish is caring about tradition. Anyway,” she said, gesturing at the room, “it sure as hell isn’t about this stuff.… The thing is, my parents were in the camps. They’re real Jews, and so am I. I wouldn’t want my children to have a father who was an outsider.”

  Jeanie’s father, a small businessman in Queens, survived Auschwitz. Her mother was orphaned at seven and spent her childhood hiding from Germans in the Polish woods. Jeanie was educated at a girls’ yeshiva in Queens, and at Columbia, where she got an M.A. in social work. No longer Orthodox, she is still militant on the subject of gentiles. “I’m very, very careful about picking non-Jewish friends. That’s a statement, I guess, about how little I trust them. When I hear a woman at work talking about rich Jews or whatever, I look at her and think, ‘This chick would send me to the gas chamber.’ I can’t help it, it’s just the way I feel.”

  Jeanie’s entry in the Meeters’ Digest—“hip, cool, healthy woman”—was a fair self-portrait. Her hobby is painting and she knows the Manhattan art scene and the fashionable clubs and restaurants. Her conversational style was funny, direct, and surprisingly candid.

  “I’m up here for exposure,” she said, dissecting her case with the curious dispassion of many of the singles I talked to. “I turned thirty this year and I’m pushing myself now. I want to get married, and I don’t want to get schlepped into any long relationships.” She lives at home, for the sake of economy, but that doesn’t bother her. “My parents are religious, but they’re also practical people. They know what you have to do to get married in America, and they trust me to lead my own life.”

  A handsome even-featured man in his thirties came over and introduced himself as Frank. This kind of intrusion is considered acceptable Singles’ Weekend behavior. Frank had a copy of the Digest. “I bet I can guess your ad,” he said to Jeanie in a bantering tone. He did not offer to guess mine.

  “What do you want to bet?” asked Jeanie, suddenly flirtatious.

  “How about a game of tennis? I guess your ad and we play tennis together,” said Frank. They shook on it and, after a few broad hints, he found the ad. Jeanie was obviously attracted by Frank’s easy manner and taut good looks. Just as obviously, our conversation was over. I had my project, she had hers.

  I stopped by the message center to see how my ad was doing, and I was secretly gratified to find a stack of replies tacked to my number on the bulletin board. Suddenly I was a sought-after single, able to choose from Judy (“Let’s meet, talk, and see what happens”), Carole (“You sound interesting, give me a call”), Marge (“Hi, author. I’m smart, interesting, tall, blond and love to read”), and an anonymous “Meet by fountain, I’m wearing black sweater.”

  Faced with such prosperity I chose Jackie, whose note was a cryptic, “Can copy, room K221.” I called her from a house phone in the lobby. “This is 1680,” I said, feeling foolish. “You know, the author.”

  “Hi, author,” she said in a New Jersey accent. “I’ll meet you downstairs at the bar in ten minutes. I’m tall, slim, and dark haired, and I’m wearing a red sweater and black ski pants. Think you can find me?”

  I found her easily. She was an attractive woman of forty, with a wise-guy Jersey grin and a Kent going in the ashtray. She also had fingernails bitten to the quick and shifty brown eyes. I got the feeling she didn’t enjoy meeting men in bars.

  “I might as well tell you right away that I really am writing a book,” I said. “I live in Jerusalem. So if you don’t want to waste your time, I won’t be offended if you don’t want to talk to me.” Jackie took a deep breath. She was relieved rather than put off, and her relief made her voluble.

  “If you’re really a writer, you’re going to fall off your chair when you hear my story,” she promised, taking a gulp of her Bloody Mary. “I’m a widow, okay? I mean, can you believe it? Do I look like a widow? One day I’m married, living in Glen Rock, New Jersey, with my husband, who’s also my best friend, and two kids. And then, all of a sudden, at forty he drops dead. Just like that, drops dead. Of an aneurysm. And there I am, all alone.”

  It took Jackie months to begin looking for a new man. But despite the fact that she is attractive and financially secure, she hadn’t found anyone she liked. “It’s a couples world among the Jews in my age bracket,” she said. Finally desperate, she decided to come to the Concord.

  “Being back in this scene is shit,” she said, gesturing broadly at the crowded bar. “I went through all this before, fifteen years ago. I even went to Singles’ Weekends up here. Want to know something? Nothing’s changed. The people haven’t changed, the lines are the same, the only thing that’s changed is me. When I came up here fifteen years ago, I was looking for a good time. Now I’m looking for survival.”

  Survival means a man, and for Jackie, with a split-level home in the suburbs and two children, a man means marriage. “My husband was a real tough act to follow,” she said, and her eyes grew moist. “I’m ready to settle for less, that’s the truth. I want somebody as tall as me, somebody not ugly—bright, a nice man. Does he have to be Jewish? No, not really. The first time that was a condition, but I’ve already got my kids; they’re Jewish no matter what, so to be honest I’d have to say that it would be nice, but it isn’t necessary.”

  Jackie and I chatted for a while longer, but she was already distracted, looking around the room and checking her watch. “I’m supposed to be meeting a stockbroker and I don’t know what he looks like,” she said, unapologetic about having allotted me only half an hour. If I had been a prospect, she would have given me her phone number and told me to call her when we got back to the city; but I was merely an Israeli w
riter, and what good could that do her?

  On the way out of the bar I ran into Huey, Dewey, and Louie, the brothers from Brooklyn. They were sitting on one of the gray couches along the promenade, making rude remarks to the passing women. “Hey, professor,” one of them called out. “You’re from Israel, you know Arabic, right?”

  I smiled, and he made an obscene remark about my mother’s anatomy. All three broke into raucous laughter, like the juvenile delinquents in The Blackboard Jungle.

  I ignored the remark. “How are you guys making out?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  The question ruffled them. “Hey, we’re up here to relax and have a good time, period. That’s it, okay? Don’t worry about us.”

  I took their advice and headed for the traditional Saturday night cocktail party, a Concord-sized bash with hors d’oeuvres and second-line booze for two thousand people, compliments of the management. The party marks the official beginning of Saturday night, which at Singles’ Weekend is a combination of New Year’s Eve and the senior prom.

  Strangely, there still weren’t many couples. Eighteen hundred people is too many to survey in one day, and most of the singles were still reluctant to make a commitment. Arrangements were tentative—“Maybe we’ll have dinner together” or “I’ll try to look for you at the show tonight,” with “unless something better comes along” implicit and acceptable. They were all here for the same reason, and they conducted their transitions with a fine professional courtesy.

  At the party I ran into Jeanie. She was alone. “How did it go with Frank?” I asked, and she sighed. “It was going great. We played tennis, we talked, and then he asked me to be his date for tonight.”