According to a 2013 DNA test, scientists believe that some Irish people may have originally come from the Middle East. “The ancestors of the Stone Age farmers [in Ireland] began their journey in the Bible lands,” reads an article about the findings. “They brought with them cattle, cereals, ceramics and a tendency to black hair and brown eyes.”
It finally makes sense. For years people have tried to figure out the origin of the “Black Irish,” Celtic people with dark hair and eyes. I’ve always found the most beautiful women were the Black Irish ladies like Jennifer Connelly and dark Jewish women like Natalie Portman. These two different tribes might just be one tribe. Both Gene Tierny and Gal Gadot belong.
Growing up in Maryland I had a kind of scientific environment to measure my attraction to different women. The lab was the street where I lived. My neighbors on one side were Jewish. They had a son and three daughters. One of the daughters, Rachel, was two years older than me. The other girls, Sarah and Eva, were my age. They were twins.
On the other side was a German family who had a blonde daughter I’ll call Jennifer. She was beautiful and also about my age.
I was a kid in the 1970s, the era where the blonde California girl was queen. And yet my eye wasn’t drawn to the German girl Jennifer, but to Rachel, Sarah and Eva. Rachel was my first mad crush. She was four years older but I worked up the courage to ask for a kiss one summer, which was granted. She looked like Mila Kunis.
Then there were her twin younger sisters, Sarah and Eva. One memory is sitting on the front stoop on a summer day eating watermelon and seeing Sarah and Eva walking up the street. It was the Disco era and they wore cut-off Levi shorts and halter tops. Their legs were light brown, sexy, Mediterranean, their eyes green and lovely. Black hair in a ponytail running down the back.
There was an earthiness to these Jewish girls that was absent in the popular cheerleaders and blonde starlets of the time. The Jews were like us Irish—big families, talkative, funny, suspicious of authority. Like Rachel and her sisters, my mother, Irish Catholic and originally from Boston, had jet black hair —she looked like Gene Tierney. Mom was funny, glamorous, real and loved Barbra Streisand.
I thought of her recently when I was reading Chasing the Light, Oliver Stone’s autobiography. Stone describes how he loved his mother, who was glamorous, rebellious, sexy and smart. “Possibly I adored her too much,” Stone writes, “but I’d prefer this fate to the cold, queer dislike or distrust of women I see in some men. Nor was she ever the shrew out of Tennessee Williams plays—castrating, bossy, loud. Selfish and self-dramatizing, yes, passionate and punishing at times, but always with a sense of love. ‘I’m punishing you, but I love you’ is human to me. ‘I’m punishing you because I love you’ is not.” Stone then offers this: “My mother made me aware early that women were earthy human beings, and not the big-titted goddesses whose image so many men distort and fall prey to.”
The Jewish girls I adored were, like mom, earthy. They were erotic creatures, joking about the bodies of the boys at school and mooning over Mark Hamill’s hair or Richard Gere’s lips. This was beautiful not just because femininity is naturally good, but as a rebuke to the anti-Semites who’ve tried to silence and destroy the female Jewish body. In a powerful paper published in the Critical Gender Studies Journal, Liliane Steiner, a researcher at Bar-Ilan University of Israel, writes how Jewish women were so starved in the Holocaust that observers thought they were men:
This startling depiction of the Jewish feminine body portrays the torture and torments that Jewish women were forced to endure at the hands of the Nazis and their perpetrators. Femininity and Jewish identity have been both assaulted and marred, leaving no external traces or physical traits to allude to a familiar physical past. Only the voice testifies to the gender, while Auschwitz testifies to the identity. In the universe of Auschwitz, the voice becomes the sole remaining marker. It bestows identity and restores the cognitive dissonance among the assembled army personnel… Female Holocaust survivors' memoirs inscribe in their testimonial act not only the unique Jewish feminine experience in the Holocaust but also expand our knowledge of the Jewish female bodily experience.
This kind of erasure persists, as witnessed by the rape and murder of Jewish women at the hands of Hamas. Women like Shani Louk, who was kidnapped and killed after Hamas’s assault on a music festival in Re’im last October 7. Louk was paraded on the back of a pickup truck half-naked and beheaded. Seeing old video clips of her dancing made me think of the beautiful Jewish girls next door—and my mother.