Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Self-Avowed ‘Jewish-American Princess’ Chronicles Quest To Be African Masai Warrior

Mindy Budgor spent three months in training with Kenya’s Maasai tribe

(Haaretz) — Mindy Budgor spent three months in training with Kenya’s Maasai tribe, fleeing rampaging elephants, drinking fresh, warm goat blood, and learning how to live at the mercy of the elements. All this was supposed to toughen her up so she could trek for days, evade wild animals and survive on only what she killed herself. But it didn’t quite prepare her for the brutality of the response to her book about becoming “the first white, female, Jewish, American, Maasai warrior.”

Warrior Princess – a pun, she says, on her self-avowed JAP status – relates how, as an aimless 27-year-old from Santa Barbara, California, she travels to Kenya on a two-week volunteering trip, where she encounters Maasai warriors for the first time.

Inspired by their fearless confidence and sense of identity, as well as turned on by their “perfectly chiselled” physiques, Budgor, now 32, is personally offended when Winston, a tribal chief, tells her, “Women aren’t strong enough or brave enough to do the work we do.”

That, to Budgor, is the equivalent of a direct challenge – part of the same trajectory of formative traumas that saw her deemed too fat to be a figure skater and the wrong gender to be an ice-hockey player.

She becomes determined to prove him wrong and return to Kenya to become a warrior herself.

To read more, go to Haaretz. 

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.