#4 The US Senate Class II Seat from Minnesota

During the 1960s, the term "Jewish seat" was widely used to describe the second associate justice seat on the US Supreme Court. The four men who held the seat from 1932 to 1969 were all Jewish: Benjamin Cardozo (1932-1938), Felix Frankfurter (1938-1962), Arthur Goldberg (1962-1965), and Abe Fortas (1965-1969).

With Al Franken's election to the US Senate, Minnesota's Class II seat can safely be called the "Jewish seat." Although only 1% of Minnesota's population is Jewish, four of the last five Senators holding this seat have been Jewish.

Republican Rudy Boschwitz served from 1978 to 1991, during which time he was known as the "rabbi of the Senate." In 1990 he lost his bid for reelection to Democrat Paul Wellstone, a liberal political science professor whose original family name was Wexelstein.

Shortly before that election, Boschwitz sent a memo to "Friends in the Minnesota Jewish Community" in which he accused Wellstone of having "no connection whatsoever with the Jewish community" because he had married a shiksa and their "children were brought up as non-Jews." Wellstone responded by accusing Boschwitz of having a problem with Christians. In a state where over 95% of the population is Christian, this charge proved to be devastating for Boschwitz's re-election hopes.

Boschwitz ran against Wellstone again in 1996, and was defeated a second time. He now devotes much of his time to various Jewish political organizations. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and is an AIPAC Board Member.

Wellstone was killed in a tragic plane crash just 11 days before the 2002 election. Republican Norm Coleman - who, like Wellstone, has a shiksa wife - narrowly defeated Walter Mondale, who was brought in to replace Wellstone on the ballot at the last minute.

Coleman, who has said he grew up in a "liberal Jewish Democratic family from Brooklyn," was elected mayor of St. Paul in 1993 as a Democrat. He changed his registration to the Republican Party in 1996.

The 2008 election again featured two Jewish candidates, as Coleman was challenged by comedian and political commentator Al Franken. During the campaign, the GOP attacked Franken for a column he had penned in Playboy in 2000 called "Porn-O-Rama!" in which the former Saturday Night Live comedian wrote about visiting a made-up sex institute where he takes part in sexual acts with humans and machines.

The election was extremely close, and after months of recounts and court challenges, Franken was declared the winner. He assumed office July 7, 2009. Coleman now works as an advisor to the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Since 1978, the lone gentile to serve in Minnesota's Class II Senate seat was a Lutheran named Dean Barkley. Barkley was appointed by Governor Jesse Ventura following the death of Paul Wellstone, and served only a matter of weeks.

Ventura had initially declined to appoint a replacement for Wellstone, but after being disgusted by the overtly political tone of Wellstone's memorial service he decided to stick it to the two established political parties by appointing Barkley - a perennial fringe candidate who finished in a distant third place in the 1996 election on the Reform Party ticket.

#3 Haggling

In 2008, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane signed a $100 million contract with 20th Century Fox, making him the highest paid writer-producer in television. Shortly after inking the deal, MacFarlane purchased a 5,152 square-foot Beverly Hills mansion for $13.5 million. As the Los Angeles Times noted at the time, MacFarlane seems to have "money oozing from his every pore."

MacFarlane hasn't always been financially stable. In fact, when he first moved to Los Angeles, he couldn't afford to purchase even a simple amenity such as a coffee maker without making sure he was getting the best possible price. To ensure he got the best deal, MacFarlane would enlist the help of his Jewish friends.

As MacFarlane told Maxim magazine in 2003:
"I have a lot of Jewish friends, and when I first came out here [to Los Angeles], they would not allow me to make purchases on my own. So I'd go to buy a fax machine and my friend Steve, who's Jewish, would say, 'You're not going to do this by yourself, are you?' And I'd say, 'Well, yeah — I was going to.' And he'd say, 'No, no, no — you need to take a Jew with you.' So he would go with me and haggle with this guy, and it actually got to the point where I was calling him and saying, 'Steve, it's Seth. I'm going to buy a coffee maker. Would you come with me, please, and make sure that I don't get rooked?'"

This sort of haggling, which is anathema to most white gentiles, comes naturally to Jews.

Hillary Fields, a blogger on the website Jewcy, considers bargaining to be a distinctively Jewish trait. When she shops at a market or a store, Fields expects a little leeway in what she pays: "I don't expect the price to be, you know... the price"

Her compulsory haggling, whether it's over the cost of a new toaster or fresh organic produce, mortifies her gentile husband. Fields quips that her blond, blue-eyed, strapping "goy-boy" just wasn't born with the "haggling chutzpah" that she possesses: "Must be those WASP genes."

#2 Shiksas

Before the dawn of the Reform movement in the early nineteenth-century, the Jews were renowned for their ability to maintain cultural and genetic segregation from their non-Jewish host populations. Even while living in the midst of other peoples for extended periods of time, Jews remained separate from their non-Jewish neighbors.

Despite strict proscriptions against marrying outside the faith, Jewish men often found themselves captivated by the beauty and grace of gentile women. To combat these natural urges, Jewish religious writings emphasized the danger in associating with non-Jewish women. These writings often depicted cunning gentile women who used deception and bribery in order to seduce unwitting Jewish men into betraying their faith, with tragic results for the entire Jewish community.

A more plausible explanation of Jewish men's attraction to gentile women is the fact that, on average, non-Jewish women are more pulchritudinous than Jewish women. Nevertheless, the conceptualization of the wily, immoral gentile woman intent on seducing Jewish men away from their family and religion has survived into modern times in the concept of the shiksa.

Shiksa, derived from the Hebrew term sheketz, which means "abomination", "impure," or "object of loathing," is a term used by Jews to refer to non-Jewish women. Traditionally a derogatory term, in American Jewish culture the word has taken on a mock-pejorative usage and is often used in Jewish comedy in a light-hearted way.

Perhaps the most well-known example of this modern usage of the word shiksa comes from Seinfeld. In the episode The Serenity Now, every Jewish male Elaine Benes (played by actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus) comes into contact with is captivated by her "shiksa appeal" and feels compelled to make aggressive and inappropriate sexual advances toward her.

#1 Rhinoplasty

In a 2007 appearance on The Tonight Show, actress Halle Berry shared pictures of herself that had been distorted with Mac’s Photo Booth program. As she showed the audience a picture of herself with a ludicrously big nose, she commented, “Here’s where I look like my Jewish cousin!”

This common ethnic stereotype of the large Jewish nose does have a basis in fact.

In the 1974 book Race, University of Oxford physical anthropologist John Baker devoted several pages to the topic of the Jewish nose and how it can be distinguished from the nose of other Europeans. Baker wrote that the Jewish nose "is large in all dimensions... It is wide at all levels."

In the quest for Aryan beauty, legions of Jewish men and women have turned to nose jobs, or rhinoplasty.

Cosmetic rhinoplasty was pioneered in the late 19th century by Jacques Joseph, a German-Jewish surgeon who wanted to help those who "suffered from a Jewish nose." Joseph performed free nose jobs for fellow Jews who didn’t want to stand out in German society.

Rhinoplasty has also been a common procedure among American Jews, who wanted to fit inconspicuously into the WASP mainstream. According to plastic surgeon Dr. H George Brennan, the 1960s and early 1970s were the heyday of Jewish nose jobs. Back then, a nose job was "a benchmark in a young [Jewish] girl's life ... You had your bat mitzvah and you got your nose done.''

As WASP dominance has waned and Jewish ethnic pride has risen, the number of Jews opting to have nose jobs has fallen in recent decades. But even today, many young Jews, including those who have high levels of ethnic pride, still wrestle with the question of whether to undergo rhinoplasty.

As Melvin Konner opined on the website Jewcy earlier this year, there remains "a fine line between wanting your beak bobbed and wanting to look less Jewish, and where you draw it depends on whether you think there's an abstract standard of beauty independent of culture. I... don't blame anyone for wanting to do it. And it's not going away."