I read Anne Frank's diary just before I was bat-mitzvahed. I was not yet thirteen years old. I remember the book-report I wrote, and the cover-art I created with all its burning hearts and swastikas. I hole-punched the pages and bow-tied them together with bright green yarn. My Hebrew school teacher never graded nor returned my project. I think it stood in a glass case in our synagogue with a few other works of juvenile art -- a Lincoln Log menorah, maybe a hand-painted mezuzah or two -- but I can't be sure. I took so much Dramamine back then, to stomach those long, Sunday car trips to Temple Emanuel, that even my memory is a bit nauseous.

What I do recall is camping out in my home, in a cedar closet beneath the basement staircase, trying to simulate Anne's persecution. I made three visits to the site before going into hiding: first I delivered the provisions; next, my homework and a flashlight; and, finally, my cat. I think I lasted about one hour, and that probably included one trip to the bathroom and another to the refrigerator. Out of respect for Anne, though, I tried to be quiet and think about how lucky I was to be alive and well-fed and Jewish and American and in school with all my friends. But soon my imagination took over, and I found myself fantasizing about Prince Charming coming to my brave rescue and transporting me to a better, brighter place -- a place not unlike the Israel that Jews in Anne's time would dream of.

I am not a religious person, and I do not believe in God. If asked about my beliefs, I often fall back on the same sound-byte I've employed well before I sang my haftorahs in a lime-green, Empire-waisted Ralph Lauren dress: "Being Jewish is about family and history and matzoh ball soup." Mine is a typical, American-bred brand of Judaism that involves two Holy Days off from work in September, a Passover seder come April, and a schmear of weddings, funerals, and other ark-opening activities per calendar year. I am the shameful result of my ancestors' suffering. I am Zionism's greatest foe.

I am also a thirty-year-old female looking for love in New York City, which means that being Jewish is something that I "am," even if I'd never choose to call it out in a personals ad, and even though I've never placed, or responded to, a personals ad in my entire life. That said, there are many of me out there -- SJFs who don't go shopping for brand-name religious labels; SJMs seeking a soulmate, race/relig. unimpnt. (but pls. send foto!!!) -- and we're either too Jewish or too not-Jewish, too white-bred or too ethnic, too Billy Joel or too Beastie Boy. How, then, are we ever supposed to find kismet when kinship keeps getting in our way?

I wish I knew.

Religious affiliation is about as important to me as blood type is to a shark, and my appetite for new flesh is far from being satisfied. So I keep on swimming, hoping, bobbing for a bite out of the juicy Big Apple in which I live. Sometimes, I get lucky: a boy with a like-minded attitude about religion and politics and Britney Spears comes along, and I am buoyed for a while, sated. But more often than not I'm going about the daily business of urban life -- being polite, being cynical, being late, working overtime, smoking overmuch, hanging out with an expanding circle of friends-of-friends... all the while trying to see that forest and those trees, reaching out for the one ripe apple among the rest in the rotten bunch.

Things have changed a lot since Anne Frank was holed up in her Secret Annex, stealing brief glimpses of the outside world from a broken window pane in the attic, wondering when the war against her people -- my people -- would end, and literally dying to have a boyfriend. She knew that there were more important, more miserable conditions beyond the confines of her own barren heart. "I know my (romantic) ideals seem absurd and impractical," she wrote at age fifteen. "Still, I'm sentimental, I know. I'm despondent and foolish, I know that too. Oh, help me!"

Our circumstances were vastly different, but as a teenager I identified with Anne's oppression and longing all the same. I too believed that I lived in a cruel, anti-Semitic world; and I was convinced that my being Jewish automatically disqualified me from ever falling in love.

Maybe it was the long, bumped slope beneath my brow. Or my frizzy hair that I tied up in tight, silk scarves every night, praying it would be straight by morning. It could have been my thirteen-letter last name, or the absent father to whom it was attributed. All of these things -- these disgraceful, non-Aryan characteristics that kept me in the girls' bathroom during recess to ward off the guerilla Darwinism of the schoolyard -- contributed to a nascent preoccupation with my Jewishness. Indeed, it seemed as conspicuous to the male species as Hester Prynne's A, or Anne's six-pointed star safety-pinned to the lapel of her winter coat.

To this day I am uncomfortable at sports events, or in bars, or in any one place or another where testosterone runs rampant. Part of me may forever fear the onslaught of insults and antics, nose gags and bra-strap pulling. It always amazes me when a man finds me attractive, and even then I must fight myself from trying to convince him otherwise. For the young Jewish girl of my past brews inside of me, begging for attention; she's in hiding on the dark side of the mirror, looking back at me with beady, berating eyes, reminding me that I will never appear, or be perceived, as "normal."

Why did I attribute all the angst of adolescence to my being Jewish? My mother certainly has her reasons, as do a host of psychologists, anthropologists, rabbis, and plastic surgeons around the globe. Maybe it's because Jews have always been scapegoats, from Shylock to Lewinsky, and it only seemed fair to chastise myself for my own suffering. (I am a Gemini, after all.) This shame, this textbook Jewish guilt, has shadowed me all the way into adulthood, alas. I am still wont to fall back on my Jewishness as an excuse for my romantic dissatisfaction, and I continue to rack up enough evidence to support my theories.

I'll call him David.

We all know this David, this creative-guy-behind-the-suit who walks the walk but falls flat on his face once the curtain's down. He's also Jewish, which raises the self-loathing bar to dangerous, seratonin-strained levels. David develops a fun-loving, movie-watching, e-mail-writing relationship with me, the "one who really understands [him]," only to reserve his romantic interest for a girl we'll call Blake Cheever. This Blake is, to be expected, something out of a Brett Easton Ellis novel, replete with trust fund, magazine job, and a propensity to speak in quiet, question-marked sentences? When I overheard them talking in a bar the first night they met the subject was The New Twenty Dollar Bill, which turned into The High Cost of Rent, followed by I Could Never Handle the Commute from Brooklyn and, so the story goes, she became the girlfriend and I remained the friend.

Why did David, I asked him once, want to be "just friends" with me? "I don't have just friends," he answered, in consolation. "I have real friends." In other words, I am real. I am familiar. I am family. I am Esther, Rachel, Aunt Sylvia, Cousin Meredith, the red-haired roommate on Will & Grace.

I am a Jew.

Of course, for every David there's an Amir, who could never take me seriously because he kept kosher and I did not, and his family spoke Farsi at the Sabbath table while mine swore in Yiddish when the pepperoni pizza was delivered cold. And for every Amir there's a James, whose Irish Catholic mother refused to let him bring me home for Easter; or Raphael, who told his sister, in Spanish, in front of me, that I was his writing tutor (even though I was).

There are lessons to be learned, to be sure. I've been kicked to the curb enough times to know that religion matters in a relationship, even when it doesn't to an individual. I have not come to any great conclusions about Modern Romance, nor am I equipped to write the treatise on Jewish Goddess for the Godless: How Post-Holocaust, Jewish Females Face the Trials and Tribulations of Seeking a Mate in a World in Which Love, Like G-d, is a Mere Illusion. What I am apt to do is tell my stories, just like Anne did. She may never have experienced a "happily ever after," but I still hope for that ending. Until then, I shall study my words like scripture, and pray for the day when I can grasp their meaning.