I remember stifling a laugh despite my considerable discomfort during the third mile of the Highland Road Park cross-country course. My mom was standing at the bottom of a hill, cheering, “We’re Jews, we’re tough!” This catchphrase has been in my family since my grandfather coined it in response to my complaints about the heat while working one summer in his garden. I relayed the message to my brother during a particularly brutal game of one-on-one basketball, and it soon became a family favorite. This phrase also got me thinking: What does it mean to be masculine in Jewish-American culture?

The 21st-century Jewish male has plenty of different masculine role models: Woody Allen, Einstein, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schnerson, Moses, Sandy Koufax-the list goes on. But is there one universal ideal Jewish male? Our only certainty is that we must grow up to be mensches, because nobody wants to be known as a no-goodnik around Grandma’s assisted-living facility. Secular Zionists rejected this “religious” mode of masculinity in the early 20^th century for the settlers’ new ideal of masculinity: the hardy man of principle and conviction who knows how to farm, fix machinery, build homes and speak Hebrew.

Early Zionists, motivated by what Swarthmore College history professor Robert Weinberg calls the “internalization of the gentile critique” of Jewish masculinity and general productivity in society, incorporated elements of gentile masculine traits like physical strength and practical knowledge into their own ideas about manhood. In doing so, they created the new Israeli male ideal, rejecting the lifestyle of the yeshiva-bocher for that of the kibbutznik. These kibbutznikim are stereotyped through a famous early kibbutz recruitment poster of sickly yeshiva students gazing out the window of their Beis Midrash at strong, olive-skinned kibbutzniks working in the fields, urging European Jews to “come to Palestine and be a man.”

Native Israelis are often called sabras after a species of prickly pear native to Israel that, according to legend, early settlers had to learn to peel quickly to prove they belonged in Zionist society. To American Jews, Israelis are way tough. The Israeli staff at my Jewish summer camp were fresh out of the army with golden tans and bulks of muscles, intimately in touch with nature. Let’s face it—they were damn sexy. This goes for both the men and women. In my childhood mind, Israel was a land of tall, tanned nature freaks who all wore capri pants and sang Hatikva at the flagpole every morning.

Just as many American Jews support pro-Israel organizations because they feel guilty about not being Torah-following, Mitzvot-keeping or knowledgeable, secular Jewish-American men may suffer from a diminished sense of masculinity in comparison to their sabra brothers. These men are neither Torah- Talmud scholars who lead rigorously religious lives nor hyper-macho Israel he-men like Barak, my Israeli counselor in seventh grade who was an officer on an Israeli Intel submarine and regularly ran marathons.

While my fellow American secular Jewish brethren and I have grown up with more expendable income, better public schools and generally more freedom of choice and luxury than our Israeli counterparts, our brothers in the Middle-East are undoubtedly tougher than us. We feel guilty that they made the desert bloom, speak Hebrew and defend their country with unwavering devotion, while we play high school sports, join Jewish frats and go to law school in order to feel like men.

So, we’ve come to invent our own paradigm of Jewish masculinity: the man of social, civic, financial, familial and intellectual success, such as Senator Joe Lieberman. Jewish men in America have benefited from all that this country offers its citizens: freedom, upward social mobility, education and the ability to make money. The number of Jews prominent in business, law, politics, academia and art is a testament to the fact that Jewish-American men are lucky folks. Yet somehow, we may still be unsatisfied with our manhood. The Jewish man’s identification with quirky characters like Neil Klugman in Roth’s classic Goodbye, Columbus, comedian/actor-director/cultural icon Woody Allen and the Ba’al Teshuva reggae artist Matisyahu speaks to the array of solutions we have for our inferiority complex. We can choose whether we want to be the neurotic, athletic, wealthy, smart or religious type.

When I started playing club rugby in college, I was delighted to find so many other Jewish guys on the team. There were so many, in fact, that we had to forfeit a match held on Rosh Hashanah during the fall of my freshman year. Currently, our entire team leadership save one is Jewish. Who would have thought that at one of the country’s dorkiest colleges, Swarthmore, Jewish boys would be busting heads and chugging brewskies with their broskies, taking part in a game traditionally played in this country by WASP-y New Englander yacht-club types and angry Catholics from large families?

The most obvious solution to deficiency in masculinity is intelligence and achievement. And in a culture in which Ivy League admissions are sought after like the Holy Grail, everyone knows that a Jewish fella is supposed to hit the books and become an expert in his respective field. This might be caused not only by our traditional emphasis on education, but also by our self-consciousness about lacking knowledge that even Tevye the milkman had back in the shtetl. Whatever our subconscious motivations, our endeavors for learning and intelligence coupled with our diverse interests have certainly served us well in America.

Samuel GREENE