Patrick Swayze: Sheygets par excellence

Writing in Tablet, Marjorie Ingall mourns the passing of Partick Swayze, says he was the perfect distillation of goyish masculinity and reflects on the death of the sheygets:

Patrick Swayze, who died [Sept. 14] at the age of 57, was many things — an actor, a heartthrob — but, as embodied by his character in Dirty Dancing, he was also something else: a sheygets par excellence. As the perfect distillation of goyish masculinity, Swayze’s character could dance and throw a punch! He rode a motorcycle! He was built like a brick house! Best of all, of course, he infuriated Daddy. Have movies ever offered the Jewish girl a more delicious slice of forbidden fruit?

But whither the hot sheygets today? (His sister, the bubbly blonde shiksa, is doing fine.) Dirty Dancing was set in the summer of 1963, and it seems that the assimilationist ’50s and ’60s were the sheygets’s heyday. Does this character have a place in today’s hyphenated America? Or is the role Swayze played in Dirty Dancing — the tantalizing, non-Hebraic Other — now a thing of the past?

I believe it is. The plot of Dirty Dancing — driven by Swayze’s Johnny Castle, the noble, working-class goy who is more authentic than the med-school-bound, proto-Yuppie, entitled Jewish boys of the Catskills — is drenched in the fear of intermarriage and wariness of class difference; for better or worse, those aren’t major concerns of young Jewish filmgoers. (Indeed, I use the word sheygets in this piece only to illustrate that the character of Johnny Castle is as much a relic of a bygone time as the phonograph records the characters bump and grind to — the word, once in wide use among Jews, is now rightfully seen as a slur: it literally means bug, unclean thing. Once, most Jews knew this. Today, not so much.) …

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