Dan Brownstein / Susan Shapiro and her husband You would think finding someone their bashert would ensure a lifelong friendship, not a vendetta. When I was 29, my friend Valerie set me up with “Aaron,” “a smart handsome screenwriter mensch” she said I should marry. After a tumultuous off-and-on courtship, I finally heeded Valerie’s advice….
In 1926, a distraught father wrote to the Forverts’s advice column, A Bintel Brief, with a problem: Where are all the Jewish men? With four daughters to marry off, and no Jewish husbands in sight, the man was considering moving to another city. “We live in a country town where we are the only Jewish…
Rachel Garfinkle, 29, an ultra-Orthodox stay-at-home mom in Cleveland, Ohio, was married to her husband Michael in 2003. Her cousin, who also happened to be Michael’s best friend, set them up. As the norm goes in her community, they were married after five dates. Since then, Garfinkle has looked for opportunities to make matches for…
In an online age, Jewish mothers worried about their children’s romantic prospects have found a new way to intervene. Rather than simply gifting a JDate membership or forwarding tips to find a match online, more than 5,000 Jewish mothers are using TheJMom.com to network directly in search of their child’s beshert. The site takes old-fashioned…
A New York securities trader who has spent more than $65,000 on high-end matchmaking services is calling them a “rip-off,” the New York Post reported. Millionaire Larry Greenfield, 47, of Long Island, told the newspaper that he has tried six different agencies in the last 12 years and has gone on dates with 250 women,…
Video: Nate Lavey When New York freelance writer Abigail Rasminsky published a piece in the Forward about a nontraditional Passover Seder that she had hosted with a group of non-Jewish friends, she never expected she’d get a pen pal. Certainly not one who lived on a different continent. Least of all, one that she’d end…
I had wondered whether Yitta Halberstam’s “Plea to Mothers of Girls in Shudduchim” [the process of dating for marriage], published recently in the Jewish Press, was really a Purim spoof, even if it did come out well after the holiday. Alas, no. Her suggestion that Orthodox women of marrying age should take any and all…
When I was 23, I interviewed a Lubavitch [matchmaker]( (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadchan ‘matchmaker’) for a story I was writing. The more she explained her profession to me, the more appealing the whole idea sounded: Your parents get together with a professional and find someone for you. You’ve got a say in who you match with, but none…
