Claiming Amy Winehouse

by Sala Levin The shocking, but not surprising, news of British singer Amy Winehouse's death at the cursed age of 27 on Saturday seems to have touched an often-untapped nerve. The sad predictability of her death, the tragic sense it made in the context of her life is almost too much to bear. Behold, Amy Winehouse: the Jewish girl who went awry. Winehouse's notorious drug and alcohol addictions, her bizarre public behavior, the strange unsexiness of her hyper-sexualized persona—all of it made her everything a Jewish girl isn't supposed to be. That sinewy woman with the overdone makeup and the gap between her front teeth singing about "F*ck Me Pumps"? She couldn't be Jewish. Jews famously love to claim members of the tribe. Alumni of my Jewish day school proudly boast that Natalie Portman—the Jewish girl du jour—briefly...

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