As most American Jews are well aware—Israel isn’t just hummus, trance music and bulldozers, it’s also got hot chicks, really hot chicks. I should know because I was once on a teen tour in which I had the chance to leer at them mercilessly from afar–and once even to graze against the arm of one while pushing my way onto a bus, but I digress.
Israeli chicks are so hot right now that it seems like half of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue consists of women from that itsy bitsy strip of land—as we were reminded in Hebrew School—that is smaller than New Jersey.
Even before Bar Refaeli graced the cover of the SI Swimsuit Issue, she posed for the cover of the first-ever Jewish swimsuit issue created by Heeb. Over the years, we’ve also featured other hot Israeli women like Adi Neumann, Esti Ginsberg, Moran Atias, Neta Bell-Silver, Noa Tishby and Gal Gadot. Perhaps it’s some sort of divine recognition for our years of devoted service promoting Israeli pulchritude, but we were recently invited to Israel to conduct a model search for “the new face of Hazorfim,” a silver company that is one of the most respected brands in all of Israel.
What does Israeli beauty look like? Should our winning model look blonde and blue-eyed like the early Zionist propaganda postcards of the early Twentieth Century? Or should she look like an olive-complexioned sabra right out of Leon Uris’ Exodus? Or perhaps she should look like a hot, gun-toting babe from a Maxim spread? Or, someone Leonardo DiCaprio might bring home to his mother?
Our winner, simultaneously resists over-simplified notions of “Israeli looks” and manages to capture something true about Israel today in the process. Yulia Plotkin is the perfect face for Hazorfim because of the diverse aesthetic elements she combines: pale-complexioned with rosy-cheeks and lips like a classical painting out of Northern Italy; “exotic” Belorussian eyes; slim and long like a Parisian catwalker; yes, more than a faint trace of Barbra in her face; not to mention, the greatest Jewfro you will ever feast your eyes upon. At the end of our two-day shoot, I asked her how all of these traits somehow manage to reconcile themselves in perfect unity? She thinks about it for a moment and laughs. “I am the way that I am because of this city [Tel Aviv],” she tells me.
Visit Hazorfim.com to learn more about the company’s line of hand-crafted silver products.
Photos by Adi Orni
Video by Sherri Barclay
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