Tales of a Jewish matchmaker

Some cultures have different attitudes towards marriage, and the NY Times reports on a Jewish matchmaker:

Women can be superficial — “A lot of women don’t like bald men,” Ms. Weinberg said — but men are worse. “I’ll have a singles party, they’ll come into the room, look around, say, ‘Bye!’ They don’t even get to know anybody. They don’t look at the neshama,” the soul, she said.

Some of the men have mommy issues, too.

“I have this one man,” Ms. Weinberg said, “whose mother used to be a ballerina, so he is looking for a woman with long legs, no chest. And he’s a rabbi!”

Ms. Weinberg will work with any client as long as he or she is Jewish by the traditional standard of maternal descent: “I work with everyone whose mother is Jewish. The father could be the pope.” And she will work with clients who are gay, as long as they are looking for a straight marriage.

“They have same-sex attraction,” Ms. Weinberg said, “but they don’t want to pursue that line. They want to marry a woman, and they want me to tell the girls they are homosexual but they don’t want to act on it.” Such a man “wants to have a normal house; he wants a house and a family.”

And even for these men, Ms. Weinberg said, there are women.

“I have to tell the woman” about the man’s situation, she said. “But there are women who are asexual, and there are women who don’t need to be — hugged and kissed, sure, but. ...” She trailed off. “I have made matches like that.”

Ms. Weinberg will take extraordinary measures to help put a man and woman together for life. She told one of her sons she would give him $10,000 if he found a husband for his sister, and he did. She will also take certain liberties in the service of love.

“Something you should know about Tova is she creatively alters the truth under certain circumstances,” said Beverly Siegel, a documentary filmmaker from Chicago. Widowed after a long first marriage, Ms. Siegel met her second husband through Ms. Weinberg.

“She told Howard some things about me that were not exactly true,” Ms. Siegel said.

Hmmm. Okay with me, up until the point where they start imposing their twisted values on me.