Spectator - How Sweet She Is

By Naomi Pfefferman
Published on June 16, 2005

At the beginning of her risqué comic monologue, "Sugar Happens," Rachel Bailit struts onstage wearing a tight black corset, a skimpy skirt, garters, thigh-highs and an attitude.

"I know what you're thinking: Big boobs ... big lips. Bimbo. Starlet. Slut," she says. "But don't judge me; you don't really know me. I'm just a nice Jewish girl from Needham, Mass."

While laundering her costume at her rent-controlled Santa Monica apartment recently, the cheery actress says she intends her introduction to confront the bimbo stereotype and to declare, "I'm a lot more than that."

Even Maidelehs Don Pasties

By Keren Engelberg
Published on February 24, 2005

Jewish girl stereotypes get tossed -- including one you might have heard about them being prudes -- when "Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad" makes its West Coast debut this Thursday night at Tangier.

As creator and emcee Susannah Perlman describes it, the variety show features comedy, spoken word, music and burlesque acts that speak to the Jewish condition, performed by women who have appeared on Comedy Central, HBO, MTV and late night television.

Your Dime or Mine?

By Carin Davis
Published on March 20, 2003

The Real Gidget

By Mike Levy
Published on August 22, 2002

In June 1956, a Jewish 15-year-old girl named Kathy Kohner began tagging along with some of the neighborhood boys and driving out from her Brentwood home to the beach in Malibu. The sport of surfing intrigued her, and she convinced the boys to teach her. Because she was young, slight and a girl, the surfer dudes took to calling her "Gidget," short for "girl midget."

When she told her screenwriter dad, Frederick Kohner, a Czech-born refugee who fled from the Nazis, about the goings on, he wrote the 1957 novel, "Gidget," featuring the lingo and subculture she brought home from the beach.