by Ron Kaplan
NJJN Features Editor

August 21, 2008

Judging by the pictures in his new book, Max Gross could be Seth Rogen’s brother. “I’ve had people come up to me on the street and tell me they loved me in Knocked Up,” said the author of From Schlub to Stud: How To Embrace Your Inner Mensch and Conquer the Big City (Skyhorse Press).

For those not up on current movie trends, Rogen is the poster boy for “schlub nation,” those members of society who are, as Gross describes, “a little unkempt, a little graceless, a little hapless.” (During his years at The Forward, Gross penned a column titled “The Hapless Jewish Writer.”)

Gross, 29, welcomes the comparison. “I certainly have no complaints about it. Looking like Seth Rogen has gotten me so much in life. It got me this book, to a certain extent.”

Now a staff reporter for the New York Post, Gross has taken advantage of Rogen’s popularity to reach out to others.

In a telephone interview with NJ Jewish News, Gross said that while there is an inherent negative connotation to the Rogen/schlub comparison, “there shouldn’t be. I think a lot of these qualities can be useful in life, being a little bit untucked and unkempt. There are women out there who love a project, to find a guy who is just a little bit off that they can mold into their Prince Charming.”

So the object of his book is not to cure schlubiness; he claims it’s not necessary or even desirable to lose that aspect of one’s personality. He merely wants to help his fellow schlubs channel their schlubiness “into more studlike results.”

Like Levy’s rye bread, you don’t have to be Jewish to be a schlub. “It helps…but it’s certainly not a prerequisite,” he said, going on to cite some of the most famous members of that fraternity: the musician Fats Waller, Kaiser Wilhelm II, author Ivan Goncharov, Herbert Hoover, and celebrity chef Mario Batali.

And don’t worry, ladies. You, too, can be schlubs (or “schlubettes,” as Gross calls them, including even Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on his list). The author recalled a female friend who read the checklist of characteristics in his book (see sidebar). “There are a lot of those things that apply to me,” she told him.

Like many young people, it took Gross a while to realize who he was. He attended a “hippie” high school in Brooklyn: no grades, no class rankings, lots of artsy people. There, he said, he was “just one oddball in a whole school of oddballs. Not schlubs necessarily, but they were all a little off in their way.” Once he entered Dartmouth, he understood.

“College is a very schlubby place to a large extent simply because a lot of schlub qualities are sort of forgiven, accepted, and widespread,” he said.

Gross described his religious upbringing as “very Woody Allen.”

“My father felt it was very Jewish of him if he ate a bagel and lox on Yom Kippur,” he said. “We were really, really obsessed with Jewish topics. There’s a library of Israel, the Holocaust, World War II, Philip Roth, I.B. Singer…all these things were there. When it came to the actual religion part, it was very absent.”

Gross said he was the one in his family pushing for more ritual, including his bar mitzva. “It was a rush job; my Hebrew skills were so bad.”

At Dartmouth (“a very WASPy school”), Gross “ratcheted it up a notch,” seeking out the company of other Jews at Hillel and attending services more frequently. After graduation, he lived in Israel for a year, where, he said, he was “living la vida Orthodox” for awhile. Now that he’s back in the States, he attends synagogue “two or three times a year.”

“I couldn’t deal with two sets of dishes,” he said. “Too much work.”

Spoken like a true schlub.

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