Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Lesbian ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Star Says Israeli Women Are All Hot

(JTA) — On her first visit to Israel for Tel Aviv’s gay pride week, “Orange is the New Black” star Lea DeLaria was wowed by the attractiveness of Israeli women.

“There are apparently no ugly women in Israel,” DeLaria, who plays a butch lesbian prison inmate on the hit Netflix comedy and is gay in real life,  Ynet Tuesday soon after arriving in the country as a guest of Israel’s Tourism Ministry.

“I’ve not seen one ugly woman yet, but I can’t figure it out because I’ve seen, I’ve definitely seen ugly men here.”

“Orange Is the New Black” is an award-winning TV series produced by Netflix and created by Jenji Kohan, who is Jewish. The show has had many Jewish moments. Netflix, an online streaming giant, does not publish the specifics of its viewership statistics, but DeLaria told Ynet the series had reached more than 80 million viewers worldwide.

The series follows an upper-class woman’s trials in federal prison. Lesbian relationships are central to the plot, including in the life of the protagonist.

DeLaria, who is a gay rights activist, said she “never in a million years” thought homosexuality would feature so prominently in a mainstream TV series. She also didn’t believe the United States would legalize same-sex marriage as the Supreme Court did last year in a ruling striking down state bans.

“It’s something I’ve been fighting for,” DeLaria said, adding that she had been assaulted and hospitalized for being gay.

She said she was amazed to “be in Israel, in the Old City, standing at the Western Wall and have a man in your army, with his gun, there to protect people, come up” and ask her to pose with him for a picture.

Israel’s Tourism Ministry invited DeLaria to tour the country for Tel Aviv Pride, which will culminate Friday with a parade through the city. Tens of thousands of locals and tourists are expected to participate in the parade, which features floats with dancers and ends at a beach party that usually continues until well into the following morning.

Tel Aviv, whose fist gay pride took place in 1993, is a leading tourist destinations for gays and lesbians, with several gay publications crowning it the world’s best.

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.