What’s a Jewish matchmaker to do when a client tells her ‘I won’t date East of Broad’?

Leslie Davidson arrived at her matchmaking intake session on a recent Tuesday with a feeling of cautious hope.

She was looking for love. More specifically, she was looking for a man with a consistent job, friends, hobbies, and community; 5′6″ at the shortest. No Trump supporters and no cigarette smokers (weed was okay). Jewish would be nice. Someone interested in a healthy lifestyle, because Davidson, 35, is vegan and practices yoga and meditation every day. And a pet lover, because she has 3 cats.

The two matchmakers peppering her with intimate questions exclaimed a little too emphatically on that last point.

“Three cats! Oh my gosh!” said Danielle Selber, 38, an in-house matchmaker for the Jewish nonprofit Tribe 12 who also takes clients of her own.

“There are men who are cat lovers, they’re just harder to find,” said Michal Naisteter, 39, who runs her own matchmaking company, Michal Matches.

“It only takes one,” Selber reasoned.

» READ MORE: From 2019: Inside the mind of a Philly matchmaker, whose business flourishes when ‘dating app fatigue’ sets in

Selber and Naisteter are both Philly-based Jewish matchmakers, a rare job experiencing a moment in the spotlight because of Netflix’s new reality show Jewish Matchmaking. (Naisteter also matches non-Jewish clients). The series, a spin-off of the popular Indian Matchmaking, follows matchmaker Aleeza Ben Shalom as she pairs potential Jewish couples around the world. Originally from Bryn Mawr, Ben Shalom works with the two Philly matchmakers, and hosts a podcast with them called The Yentas, the Yiddish word for “busybody.” True to the stereotype, their intake meetings feel like therapy session, conversation with nosy aunt, and first date rolled into one.

At a moment of widespread dating app fatigue, old-fashioned matchmaking is having a renaissance. Dating is lonely; a matchmaker makes it less so. Hiring a matchmaker also does away with the paralyzing problem of too many choices.

Through much of human history, marriage was primarily an economic institution. But today, people aspire for a partnership with someone who will be best friend, lover, intellectual equal, and career confidant all in one. We search for these mythic beings in a process couples therapist Esther Perel has called “romantic consumerism.”

Selber tries to disrupt that dynamic as much as she can, though Philly presents its own special challenges, she said. Clients tell her they won’t cross Broad for a date, or venture north of Market or south of South; they refuse to cross the bridge to Cherry Hill.

“I try not to be pushy, but I’m like, ‘Look, maybe your person is not within 10 city blocks of you. It’s possible,’” said Selber, who lives in Lower Merion and traces her matchmaking to her grandparents’ experience in a small village in Morocco.

“They were — I was going to say ‘victim to’, but that’s a little intense — they were part of the matchmaking process in their village,” she said. When her grandfather, the son of a prominent Jewish family, was ready to find a wife, all the women of marriageable age lined up in the center of the village. He walked down the line and picked her grandmother.

Aged 12 at the time, she packed up her life and never saw her family again.

» READ MORE: Dating advice from the Philly Bartenders who have witnessed it all

In graduate school, Selber studied contemporary Jewish dating as it related to the long history of Jewish matchmaking. While conducting research, she spoke with dozens of Jewish Philadelphians about their dating lives, in what became an “unofficial social experiment that just kept rolling.” In 2017, she started a matchmaking initiative at Tribe 12, an organization focused on creating community for young Philly Jews.

Selber begins each matchmaking journey with an hourlong intake session, during which she asks roughly 75 questions, ranging from the practical to the highly personal. Do you experience sexual attraction, and if so, with whom? How would your worst enemy describe you? Have you been tested for any Jewish genetic diseases?

At any given time she has in mind about 300 singles who have signed up to be matched, among them queer people and those in polyamorous relationships. She focuses on Jewish singles, but their level of observance and their backgrounds range widely, as it does on the show. Her strictest rule for her clients is no ghosting.

After being married for 10 years, Selber has recently gingerly re-entered the dating pool. Her partner came out two years ago as a trans woman, and the two are no longer romantically involved, though they still co-parent and live together. Selber, always the matchmaker, has been advising her wife on how to find a partner.

“I’m critiquing her profile and swiping for her,” she said, laughing.

Selber, Naisteter, and Ben Shalom all became friends in Philly, which Naisteter likened to a “shtetl,” the Yiddish word for village. They help each other make matches when one of them gets stumped. They all have slightly different styles; Naisteter, who lives in East Passyunk, likes to coach and style her clients, sometimes sending them to outside consultants, such as a matchmaker in Miami who “focuses on teaching men to flirt.”

“He’ll look over client’s text messaging styles, help them figure out what they did wrong,” she said. She tends to work with men, finding them more rewarding to transform into date-able people and signs them on for 3-to 6-month packages.

Part of the matchmaker’s work, in Naisteter’s view, is maintaining hope, even in the face of client’s fear and skepticism.

“You can’t help sometimes but experience a little bit of self doubt,” Naisteter said. But, she added, “a good matchmaker works with a belief that there are soulmates, and lids for every pot.”