Author name: Orit

So what does a good Jewish girl do when her date goes in for the kiss after he downed meatloaf and she mac-and-cheese? In “Life, Love, Lox: Real-World Advice for the Modern Jewish Girl” (Running Press, $13.95) by Carin Davis, the issue at steak (pun intended — the book inspires them) is not breath or kissing technique, but whether the kiss violates the rules of kashrut that dictate separation of meat and milk. “I could have used the milk-before-meat rule, where you wait 30 minutes, eat something pareve and gargle,” Davis suggests in her opening chapter. Eventually, she realized, her date would have to dump his “grill-friends”; she prefers kissing kosher meat. This is just one of many personal tales of the author’s love for Jewish tradition and her quest for Jewish men at a time when, as she puts it, “good men are harder to find than the afikoman.” “Life, Love, Lox” is more than just an assortment of singles columns, an art Davis perfected as a writer for The Jewish Journal since 2001. It’s the Shulchan Aruch (code of Jewish law) meets “Sex and the City.” Geared to what she describes as the “JDate generation,” including the “Jew-ish” and converts, the book covers the gamut of Jewish holidays, rituals, concepts and, of course, food, through hilarious word-plays, pop-culture references, anecdotes and a high-level Jewish literacy that comes from Davis’ own Jewish education and Conservative upbringing in her hometown […]