When the hottest German is a Jew

So Guy de Maupassant and Paul Bourget not only share space in my dissertation, but also had the same Russian-Jewish lover. The rest of the afternoon will be spent reading the entire book someone has written about Maupassant's apparently vibrant and Judeo-centric love life. From the other reading I've done on this topic, I'm picturing something like "Portnoy's Complaint," but the other way around.

Well, Germany's having its own belle Juive moment. Jezebel cries sexism, which is on the one hand fair, and on the other, there's a bit more to this story, perhaps? It's kind of amazing, given that less than a century ago, a somewhat influential political party in Germany hosted a genocide largely based on the idea that Jews were hideous, that a Jewish woman - and a Jewish woman who does not look like Bar Refaeli, but like half the girls I went to high school with - is winning a desirability contest there among female politicians. Not sure what to conclude from this, so we're going to stick with "kind of amazing."