Want to Date Jake Gyllenhaal? Gotta Go Through Mom.

Image by Getty Images

By Anne Cohen April 28, 2015

Jake Gyllenhaal is a good Jewish boy.

Exhibit A: to meet his mom, producer and screenwriter Naomi Foner.

“I always bring my dates to my mother’s house for the first date,” your former fantasy boyfriend told Ellen DeGeneres on Monday. “I think that’s a good move.”

Really?

“My mother thinks arranged marriages actually might be able to work … in a good way. She thinks that if she picked for me that I’d do a lot better.”

Taylor Swift, whom Gyllenhaal dated in 2010, alluded to the actor’s mama’s boy complex in her song, “All Too Well”: “You used to be a little kid with glasses in a twin sized bed. And your mother’s telling stories about you on a tee ball team…”

I guess she didn’t pass the Jewish mom test. Don’t feel bad T — it’s a tough one.

Anne Cohen was the Forward’s deputy digital media editor. When she’s not looking for the secret Jewish history of Voodoo in New Orleans, or making lists about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she writes for The Assimilator. She graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism with an M.S. magazine concentration in 2012.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

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. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO