In 2023, I wrote an article for JWA about Love Is Blind, a Netflix reality TV show where participants propose to one another without having ever seen each other in real life. Prior to the proposal, they spend hours at a time speaking to one another through a wall—literal blind dates—to determine if someone might be their future lifelong partner. 

In my article, I highlighted the marriage of Alexa and Brennon Lemieux—a Jewish Israeli woman and a Christian Texan man—and criticized Netflix for tokenizing Alexa’s Judaism as a way to diversify their cast. The shallow representation of her religion, I thought, may have led to the antisemitism that Alexa faced after the season aired. Ultimately, though, I was impressed by the couple genuinely celebrating their different backgrounds, illuminating a very sweet interreligious relationship. Despite the risky nature of their engagement, the Lemieuxs have remained married (unlike many other contestants) and even welcomed a daughter last year. 

Writing this piece two years ago, I couldn’t fathom holding religious preferences while dating. Back then, my crushes were entirely dependent on whether they could make me laugh or curate good Spotify playlists. In my first week of university, though, a new friend—Alex—told me he would never consider dating a girl who wasn’t Jewish. I was flabbergasted, a feeling only amplified when the men around me immediately announced their agreement with him. 

Let me acknowledge my positionality here.

Growing up, my Jewish experience was expansive, but not all-encompassing—I was raised in a fully Jewish household, and we frequently celebrated Shabbat, the high holidays, and went to services at our synagogue. I went to a secular public school and Jewish summer camp and—of course—was involved with JWA. 

Currently, I’m a sophomore student in the Joint Program between Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary, studying sociology and Jewish ethics. I’m also involved with Chabad, a secular on-campus job, and multiple nonreligious clubs. So, I interact with way more Jews than I ever had a chance to in high school, but also tons of non-Jews each day. 

Because of my background, though, before university, I had wholeheartedly believed that religious dating standards were antiquated, equating dating standards as similar to the religiosity of ripping toilet paper squares in advance. 

Now, I am lucky to be around a diverse range of friends in college, and it has made me aware of all sorts of dating preferences. In fact, last year, I wrote a research paper on how racial preferences in dating indicated racist socialization based on fetishization and stereotypes. 

Despite my exposure to these biases, though, in the last two months, I was still quite surprised by a trend I watched unfold: Three of my female friends have confided in me that they broke up with their long-term partners because they were not Jewish. 

I brought this strange trend up to Alex. “We’re in style!” he cheered. Like a Jewish Carrie Bradshaw, he got me thinking: “Is it really ‘in style’ to date Jewish right now?”

As a sociology major, I had to run the facts: although all three of the women are Jewish, they were each raised in different cities, attended different colleges at Columbia, and ranged in grade and religiosity. Making matters more confusing, each woman had a different reason for wanting to date Jewish people.

The first woman explained her dilemma to me on a walk through Riverside Park. We had been discussing how I had struggled with a sense of belonging in both queer and Jewish spaces, as holding both identities often created assumptions about my political beliefs. Because of the unique combination of communities I was a part of through my university program, it often felt jarring to move quickly from people who may have never had a Jewish friend and then to those who had never had a queer friend.

She related this desire to be understood—in full—for her background and beliefs to her own relationship of over a year. She told me that without the shared cultural framework, she didn’t feel like her identity was fully acknowledged by her ex-boyfriend, confiding, “I have Israeli parents, and I have an Israeli name. It’s not like I’m getting married right now, but it’s also not like I can hide this part of myself. Eventually, I’m going to get married, and I want that man to understand this piece of my identity on a deeper level.” 

The second woman had been dating her boyfriend since university began. “Of course, the topic of Israel came up, but for me, the real problem came in how we would raise our kids in the future,” she told me briefly over our weekly drinks before we headed to Chabad dinner.

“I was adamant that I needed to raise my kids Jewish, not just because of religion, but because my grandfather is a Holocaust survivor. It would be a disservice to my family for them to have gone through a genocide just for me—two generations down the line—to decide it’s too much to be Jewish,” she noted.

She explained to me that when she brought this up with her ex, he would always say, “‘You’re barely even Jewish.’” 

While her ex-boyfriend had continuously devalued a piece of her identity, her reasoning actually went beyond feeling misunderstood: she had brought up a new question of tradition and familial honor, wanting to raise the next generation with someone who appreciated and related to the cultural significance of doing so. 

The third woman to confide in me had been dating her boyfriend for almost three years. Her boyfriend was smart, kind, accepting of her identity…and not Jewish. She told me that when she finally broke up with him, after numerous conversations about how she wanted to raise her children Jewish, he begged for her back and ultimately told her that he would convert for her. “It was too late!” she exclaimed over coffee that day, making the universal hand motion for cutting it off forever. “I couldn’t believe that after all of our conversations, he only said he would convert after I broke it off.” 

The results of my undercover investigations left me puzzled. I had thought that the thread would lie in something more grounded: namely, how polarized the political landscape feels right now for many Jews. I was even tempted to write off the pattern altogether—maybe we were just growing up, or perhaps all three women had just had boyfriends who didn’t meet their needs. 

The virality of the recent Vogue article by Chanté Joseph, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” shed light on how these oversimplifications of the trend would be oversights of what was really happening. In her article, Joseph wrote that having a boyfriend was something that heterosexual women had begun to hide from their social media followings due to new feelings that it was lame or undesirable to have one. 

There have been very few times in my life that I have seen such a mass migration towards a certain dating preference, and I would like to say that I think I see what we’re all getting at. It is not that dating Jews will absolve the sins of my friend’s exes or mitigate the harm they may have done to their confidence and identity. 

Instead, women everywhere are raising their standards and seeking more: a partner who will put in the concentrated effort to truly understand their background, rather than just tolerate their differences. For young Jewish women specifically, this deeper connection and empathetic understanding seems to have most profoundly impacted how they think about and act on religious preferences. 

Put simply, the three women I spoke to just wanted to feel valued and validated in how their backgrounds might blend with their partners’ in the relationship. Having a boyfriend (Jewish or not) wouldn’t be embarrassing if we moved beyond this extremely low bar for what constitutes a good relationship. 

This may be what has made the Lemieux's marriage actually succeed: on Love Is Blind, since they cannot see one another, the only factor they actually have to base their relationship on is their identities. Without any knowledge of superficialities, participants are forced to actually talk about how their identities might manifest and be implemented in their relationship. In real life, though, we often don’t build in this concentrated time and effort with our partners to have these types of conversations. 

Right before we left for Chabad, my friend told me, “The last thing he said to me was, ‘All this because you wanted a Jew…your next partner won’t be, I’m calling it right now.’ I literally packed my shit up, said ‘Watch me,’ and left.” 

So—and I dread admitting this—this might be one thing we can learn from the show. In the age of superficiality, hookup culture, and dating apps dominating the dating landscape, having these conversations early on instead of years in might be the cure to the embarrassment. These are the types of basic conversations we shouldn’t be overlooking, helping us create relationships founded on trust and empathy rather than glazing over the pieces of ourselves we hold so dearly. 

Of course, my friend proved her ex wrong, and she’s now dating my best friend. Hopefully they’ll figure out a double date for me, too—l’chaim!