In the spring of 2023, “Jewish Matchmaking” showed the world the complexity and the beauty of finding your Jewish bashert — your soul mate. While none of the couples featured on the Netflix dating show wound up finding their happy ever after, they gained valuable insight into how to go about looking for love, and some of them even wound up getting engaged and married not long after the show to people they met on their own.
That was all thanks to the matchmaker at the helm of the show, Aleeza Ben Shalom, an Orthodox Philadelphia transplant that lives with her family in Israel. And while season two of “Jewish Matchmaking” seems to be on hold, Ben Shalom and her desire to help others find romance isn’t. Earlier this month, she released “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” a tome full of the delightful dating anecdotes that viewers learned to love in “Jewish Matchmaking,” flanked with her pearls of wisdom and advice. Some will be familiar, like her “date ’em till you hate ’em” principal, while others are new exciting tricks to add to the toolbox of anyone who is dating or has a loved one who is.
“It’s not written for Jewish readers,” Ben Shalom tells Kveller, or at least, not only Jewish readers, adding that the target audience for her book is “marriage-minded singles who want to find a loved one, or for anybody who wants to play matchmaker.” Jewish wisdom does weave itself into the book, and attuned readers will notice that some of the characters in the anecdotes she shares are Jewish or Israeli, like the story of Ron, a veteran amputee and one of Ben Shalom’s clients who she describes as a “high quality human,” the kind of person one should be on the lookout for when searching for a potential spouse.
Ben Shalom’s advice in the book also feels, to me, as someone who isn’t looking to matchmake and has been happily married for over a decade, as solid advice for how to be human in the world. The concept of a “high quality human” can also apply to the platonic relationships you want to foster. Anyone can be a high quality human, she says, “you just have to work really hard at it.”
Ben Shalom herself is a delight, and she brings her vibrant, positive spirit to the book. It’s the love and the dating stories that take center stage here, and Aleeza takes liberties painting them in vivid detail so that they come alive to the reader. Instead of the prescriptive “do this, don’t do this” found in other dating manuals, she aimed to include content that is relatable to anyone who’s had a hand at modern dating. “You read it and you’re like, ‘Oh my, I’ve been there. That happened to my friend, that happened to my co-worker… you can see it because it’s detailed out,” she says.
When it comes to the concept of “bashert,” Ben Shalom acknowledges that there’s “a lot of pressure on that word,” with people often believing that if something’s “meant to be” it means that “everything should just always work.”
“Being your soulmate, being your bashert, being meant for each other, does not equal perfect relationship, no problems ever,” she explains. “It’s like they’re perfectly imperfect for you. That’s what bashert is. They’re exactly what you need and what you don’t need. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have no issues in life.” Ben Shalom wants daters to ask themselves, “Who do you want to walk to the hospital with? Who do you want to go to a funeral with? Who do you want to deal with debt or challenges or losses? That’s the person that you want to pick.”
Luck, in her eyes, has nothing to do with it. “I don’t really believe in luck. I believe in destiny. I believe in meant to be. I think it’s our destiny to find our partner and to build a life together, and it just takes work and effort to get there. I believe in God, so I believe that there’s a plan. And luck doesn’t sound to me like there’s an organizer of the plan involved.”
When I ask if there’s a plan for a second season of “Jewish Matchmaking,” she tells me right now it isn’t in the cards.
“The world and the Jewish world is so complicated. There’s war. You can’t film when there’s a war. So there’s [no talk of season two] in this moment,” Ben Shalom says.
But she is still in touch with some people from the first season, like Harmonie and Dani. She also continued to help some of the people look for love, including helping getting one person to the chuppah.
“I made a match that people don’t know about. Not one of the main people, but somebody that I had set up with one of my daters, which I can’t tell you who, because they want to be anonymous,” she reveals. “But I set him up after the show, and he just got married in September. It was such a win.”
Ben Shalom has seen her work vastly shift since October 7. “So many more people are very intentional about wanting to date Jewish,” she says. “People who said, ‘I date anybody, it doesn’t matter’ are [now] like, ‘No, I need to marry somebody Jewish. There’s a lot more going on in the Jewish world, and I don’t feel like somebody will understand me if they’re not Jewish.’ And they’re right, they won’t fully understand them. So there’s been a lot more of a buzz for Jewish singles to date only Jewish matches. I would say that people are also feeling like, ‘Oh my gosh, the whole world is in crisis, the world is falling down and everything’s unstable. I need a partner now!’ So people have been really highly motivated to find somebody.”
Ben Shalom’s own motivational level around her work has also spiked. “As much of a dedication and a commitment as I felt to my work, it multiplied after October 7. Because we, and not just Jewish people, but we need a healthier world. We need a healthier, happier world, and that starts by building families. And if you build families, then you can build communities, and if you build communities, then you can change the world. And at the root of it is a couple coming together. To me, that’s the most important thing in the world. So I just felt very motivated and deeply committed to the process.”
Still, her daily life hasn’t changed much, calling her neighborhood “a quiet spot.”
“The kids mostly had school and everything was normal-ish,” she says of life post-October 7. “I almost felt guilty for living in a place that was so beautiful and OK. You know, the country is burning and everything’s crazy and everything’s horrible. It wasn’t horrible here, and we were supposed to go on with our lives and be normal people.”
Ben Shalom is hoping that people pick up matchmaking in the same way they pick up her book. “I want to make sure that people know this is not just for singles. This is for anybody who wants to be matched, or anybody who wants to help match. And you don’t need to be a matchmaker. Anyone can make a match. I think that’s what I would want somebody to know: Anyone can make a match. Here are incredible tools and stories that you can learn to set yourself up, set up a friend, help this one and help that one.”
Whether it’s on a Netflix show, in a book, or just talking to her TV screen at home, Aleeza Ben Shalom can’t stop giving that love advice. At the end of our conversation, I ask her about a Jewish matchmaking show that recently made waves in Israel, “Vort,” which follows matchmaking attempts in the Orthodox Jewish community. Ben Shalom loved it, but as a seasoned matchmaker, she’s also watching it with a critical mind. “I’m so mad at some of those people. I have advice. I want to talk to you!”
Get “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” on Amazon, Bookshop.org or wherever else you find your books.
