Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Need a Valentine? Date My Jewish Friend

Comedic actress Michelle Slonim may like to joke around, but she is taking Valentine’s Day very seriously. So much so that she has planned a Date My Jewish Friend Extravaganza for the entire month of February. Known for the young Jewish singles events she has been organizing about once a month for the past year and a half, she has decided to take this social scene to a whole other level.

For Slonim, 31, who staged her original party as a way to support her “Michelle’s Jewish Date Party” interactive comedy show, told The Shmooze that she is motivated to bring young Jews together while supporting the arts and partnering with local businesses and organizations. “I like building community,” the New York native said. “I do it through comedy, through talking to people.”

Why go it alone when it comes to finding your love match? “Date My Jewish Friend harnesses the power of the original social network — real friends — to bring together young Jewish professionals ages 21 to 40. We think that no matter how fly you are, you could always use a wingman to give you that extra lift,” Slonim explains to potential funders on her project’s IndieGoGo page.

With no part of the extravaganza scheduled to take place exactly on February 14, it is clearly not about finding love on a single hyper-commercialized day. Rather, Slonim is offering a smorgasbord of varied activities to get the crowds of New York Jewish singles out meeting one another this month. The events planned are: a learning session on “Sex, Lies and Biblical Text”; “Date My Single Kid Live!” for moms and their single sons and daughters; a storytelling night; a comedy night; a “Get Your Shabbat Shalom On” Friday night dinner; a “Date My Gay Jewish Friend” party (“Hags, Hunks and Horas”) hosted by comedienne Jackie Hoffman; and a big “Winter Love Bash” finale.

So, if you are a young single Jew in New York, this month may just be the right time for you to get your Nicki Minaj-enstein on, as Slonim puts it…or at least to get by with a little help from your friends when it comes to seeking your bashert.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  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.