Shiksa

Not to be confused with Shiksha.
Josef Budko's woodcut depiction of the shiksa in Hayim Nahman Bialik's Behind the Fence

Shiksa (Yiddish: שיקסע, romanized: shikse) is an often disparaging[1] term for a gentile[a] woman or girl. The word, which is of Yiddish origin, has moved into English usage and some Hebrew usage (as well as Polish and German), mostly in North American Jewish culture.

Among Orthodox Jews, the term may be used to describe a Jewish girl or woman who fails to follow Orthodox religious precepts.

The equivalent term for a non-Jewish male, used less frequently, is shegetz.[2] Because of Jewish matrilineal descent, there is often less of a taboo associated with non-Jewish men.[3][4][5]

  1. ^ "shiksa". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved May 22, 2016.
  2. ^ Kaiser, Menachem (March 6, 2013). "Anti-non-Semitism: An Investigation of the Shiksa". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved May 22, 2016.
  3. ^ Jaher, Frederic Cople (1983). "The Quest for the Ultimate Shiksa". American Quarterly. 35 (5): 518–542. doi:10.2307/2712814. JSTOR 2712814.
  4. ^ Cuddihy, John Murray (1976). The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ISBN 9780807036099.
  5. ^ "The Jewish fear of intermarriage". BBC News. 7 February 2014.


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