Jews: Top Ranked Attractive, Alluring, Winsome, Charming, Fetching…..

Why do they say Jewish people aren’t attractive? Young American Jews are highly attractive and perhaps their elders are too.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a gold standard health survey interviewed face-to-face over six thousand randomly chosen high school students in the U.S. The interviewer was asked to rate the student they were interviewing by physical attractiveness on a scale: Very unattractive, Unattractive, About average, Attractive and Very attractive during the 1994-95 school year.

When looked at by religion and percent of religious group ranked as “very attractive” Jewish teens ranked on top.  (Friends/Quaker, National Baptist, Hindu, Baha’i, Christian Science teens were numerically too small in this sample to rank).

When looked at by percent of religious group rated “very attractive”:

1. Jewish-Conservative/Reform/Orthodox/Reconstructionist
2. Episcopal
3. Islam/Moslem/Muslim
4. Unitarian
5. Jehovah’s Witness
6. Other religion
7. Adventist
8. Eastern Orthodox
9. Presbyterian
10. AME/AME Zion/CME
11. Catholic
12. other Protestant
13. Methodist
14. Baptist
15. Later Day Saints (Mormon)
16. Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
17. Pentecostal
18. Lutheran
19. None as Religion
20. Assemblies of God
21. United Church of Christ
22. Buddhist
23. Holiness
24. Congregational

Interestingly, when looked at by gender and percent of religious group rated “very attractive,” Jewish females ranked 18th out of 24 religious categories and Jewish males ranked number 1.  It seems that very attractive Jewish males are what put Jews on top, though when only the “attractive” rating is looked at, Jewish females are the highest ranked among females for all the religious categories, so Jewish female teens are keeping up the standards.

Pini Herman, PhD. has served as Asst. Research Professor at the University of Southern California Dept. of Geography,  Adjunct Lecturer at the USC School of Social Work,  Research Director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles following Bruce Phillips, PhD. in that position (and author of the “most recent” 15 year old study of the LA Jewish population which was the third most downloaded study from Berman Jewish Policy Archives in 2011) and is immediate past President of the Movable Minyan a lay-lead independent congregation in the 3rd Street area. Currently he is a principal of Phillips and Herman Demographic Research. To email Pini: pini00003@gmail.com To follow Pini on Twitter: Follow @pinih