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NEW JEWS Jason Schwartzman, Jerry Seinfeld, Jake Gyllenhaal (Photo: Getty Images)

Any single shiksa with her eyes on the prize will tell you that new Jew stock is rising and Jewish husbands are looking more attractive than ever. After his wife Jessica's many More conspicuous than halvah, more practical than gefilte fish, Bamba is the shiksa's answer to inappropriate cleavage or a lower-back tattoorecent blunders (probable plagiarism, Oprah payola), Jerry Seinfeld went on a rampage, calling people "wacko" and demonstrating the kind of blind, unwarranted support that every girl deserves. Sure, it may have been a bad career move, and sure, he and the wife have been sued since the outburst, but seriously, what a guy. Unfortunately, finding a lower-case Jew like Jerry is as difficult as nabbing a nonmaterialistic i-banker, or a hard-body who doesn't expect you to work out.

Maybe because he was getting ready to leave the country again, Abitbol graciously agreed to help me find Jewish love. Abitbol thought that I should focus on embedding myself in target-rich environments, with one caveat. "The one place you should never go is singles parties. You'll never meet anyone there. The dynamic is too Jewy. It's okay to hang out at a bar where 98 percent of the people are Jewish, but a Jewish party is only going to attract people who are looking for other Jews."

The abundance of Jewish markets, delis, and knisheries in New York City, however, is not only fair game, but also a necessity in scheming a chance encounter with an unwitting Jewish man. Case in point: the Bamba. Bamba is a not entirely undelicious snack food (imagine peanut-flavored cheese puffs that melt in your mouth) manufactured in Israel. I had never heard of it before Abitbol pointed it out to me as a popular Jewish nosh, but the hideous cartoon toddler printed on a metallic blue bag serves as rather effective cultural bait. Even the clerk at the market asked, flirtatiously, "You know the Bamba?" More conspicuous than halvah, more practical than gefilte fish, Bamba is the shiksa's answer to inappropriate cleavage or a lower-back tattoo. Even if she isn't passably Jewish in appearance, a bag of Bamba shines like a beacon to Jews in a sea of no-account WASPs.

'If you seek hell on earth, if your life is going smoothly and you want to disrupt that, then marry a Jew,' said Rabbi Issac SchoenfeldOf course, there are no guarantees. Josh Neuman, new Jew and Heeb magazine editor asked, in all earnestness, "What's Bamba?" But it is the rough equivalent of the perennial women's magazine advice to "smile at men you see on the street or around the gym to make yourself look more approachable! Wear a little lipstick" Walking around the city, particularly in areas concentrated with Jews, with a bag of Bamba in hand garners a significant jump in solicitations from Jewish men.

It doesn't hurt to ingratiate one's self to the culture to a minimal extent, either. There are plenty of Jewish social events that aren't explicitly the singles markets Abitbol had warned me against. Heeb contributor David Kelsey escorted me to a Cholent for former Orthodox Jews at a synagogue on the Lower East Side. A blogger hanging around outside (who personally "wouldn't be interested in marrying anyone who believed in Jesus") said, on the condition of anonymity, "This is a psycho factory. Lots of people here used to be Hasidic. It attracts a lot of freaks in every sense of the term."

LA BAMBA Armed with a delightful Israeli treat and Heeb Magazine, is there anything a shiksa can't do?

Inspired by this man's honesty, I admitted to Rabbi Isaac Schoenfeld that I was there in hopes of finding a Jewish husband. "If you seek hell on earth, if your life is going smoothly and you want to disrupt that, then marry a Jew," he said. That fit the bill, so when an accountant came over and started chatting me up, I asked him if he'd marry me ... in theory.

"My dream in life is to marry a shiksa!" He said. "Well, my dream in life is to be able to marry anybody I want, including shiksas. To narrow it down to your own little community makes it exponentially more difficult. But I tend to not date non-Jews because of my family. I could deal with it, but because my family is so entrenched in religious dogma they would not be able to handle it and I would not be able to handle that they could not handle it." Sadly, we would have no future together. Feeling unjustly alienated by the accountant's prohibitive family, I sought commiseration from Val Geffner, musician and, according to Kelsey, "major downtown character."

"Soul to soul, not general to general, you know," she said. Kind of. "If there's like a 'shiksa' that is vibrating in a soul-level, twin-flame way with a person, the basic truth is that souls are beyond religion and that bodies are costumes. And that I, even though I was born in a Jewish body, I'm fucking beyond gender, I'm beyond religion, because I'm a soul, I'm a point of light, like you are."

From what I could translate, Geffner was right.