A gallery of potential "Jewboos"

The guilt that a Jewish mother imposes on her own children can knot up your stomach worse than fasting on Yom Kippur. And nothing brings out that motherly nag like the institution of marriage, specifically their matronly desire for Jew on Jew marriage--the holiest of holies.

Luckily there's now Yenta, a location based dating app for young Jewish singles, straight or gay. Upon starting up it tells you to "find your Jewboo." It's like Jdate on wheels, or Grindr in synagogue. Tara Palmeri from The New York Post put the app to the test on Thursday. However, as a gay Jew with an iPhone, who’s ready to meet the culturally Jewish husband of his mother’s dreams, we feel better qualified to assess the neuroses that happen when two Jews connect. The app doesn't expressly promise that it will get you hitched, but we've decided to include that as a factor since it's the endgame for all Jewish singles--or so their yentas hope.

The sign up process for Yenta is really easy. Post a picture of yourself and choose a username and you're ready to go. The app also asks you to answer three things: "What's your shtick?," "What will impress my mother?," and to pick a position on a sliding scale of how Jewish you really are.

Other similar apps, like Grindr or Scruff, ask users to submit a wealth of details like age, height, weight, location, interests, what they're looking for, and even in some cases, what category of "gay" they are (i.e. bears, twinks, muscle, etc.) Part of Yenta's problem is the lack of information that's displayed on a user's profile. Most users skipped answering the only two real questions, so the only viewable details on most profiles are a username, a picture, and how Jewish they are. Not sure that looking at a gallery of punams is the best way to find a guy to bring under the chupah.

We downloaded the app yesterday and spent a day flirting around. The app is pretty buggy, often saying that it couldn't find our location or that users were not available (to be fair, yesterday was launch day). This reporter answered that our shtick was "whiskey" and that "being any part Jewish at all" would be the thing that could impress our mom. We moved the "Jew meter" as close to "Just Jewish" as possible--sorry, mom.

Overnight we were finally messaged! Our Jewish prince had arrived and he was beardy, young looking, and only two miles away! "Matt" is his username which made us wonder if he's a Matt Rubenstein or Matt Goldstein, or possibly something even more Jew-y. He even called us "cute" in his introductory message. But uh-oh, big snag. On his "mom question," Matt admits that he's a gentile and "maternal guilt doesn't work" on him. Oh to be fetishized, what a disappointment!

Users should have to show their bar mitzvah certificates to get an account or else this Jews-only country club is going to be rendered completely useless.

"Push" his "buttons." (Photo: Badoo)

Badoo--which you might recognize from the aggressive New York ad campaign--is a "social meeting site" with 150 million-plus members. It's intimately tied up with mobile: You log on and immediately see a list of people in the area you might want to meet, many of them young and relatively attractive. According to VentureBeat, the social network's sweet spot is single users 24 to 28, especially in France, Spain and Latin America.

Now, what's the first use case that comes to mind? If you said anything other than hookups, your pants are on fire.

However, founder Andrey Andreev will not have you reducing his service down to the smoosh: 

“Think of it like it’s a nightclub! It’s not just about sex,” says Andreev, slightly ruffled at my suggestion that it sounded like a Grindr for straight hookups. “Some people use the service in this way, but … If you own a nightclub – you have a space, you have music, drinks, lights – you bring people together and then it’s up to them to figure out what they want to do.”

That having been said, he added that, "we’re not a dating site. A dating site is a place where you are looking to find someone to live with forever, you know, 14 pages of profile questionnaire.” Mmmhmm, we know how it is. Not looking for Mister Right, just Mister Right Now, amirite?

He whips out his iPhone – “So what we have here, is just random people who are around. We’re a meeting network. People come here for a quick chat, a quick meet, a quick… whatever.”

Just meeting, for, you know, whatever happens when two strangers meet. Watch a movie, grab a coffee, talk about teaching Sunday school.

When the apocalypse comes, you may or may not need this book. (flickr.com/jronaldlee)

Sometimes it seems like the eligible pool of people on dating sites like OkCupid and Match.com just don't understand how close the apocalypse looms. Some of us are more interested in gathering wood than sexting pictures of it, if ya know what we mean. A dickpic isn't going to keep us from freezing to death come the End Times.

Luckily, for rapture rooters and those convinced economic collapse is nigh, you don't have to face the apocalypse alone. Survivalist Singles, an online dating site for "preppers"--a subculture of people preparing for future large-scale disasters--is here to find you a similarly minded partner with whom you can face the future. Because nothing says "I love you" like a garage full of water bottles and plant-friendly manure created with your own shit.

According to CNN, membership on Survivalist Singles has quadrupled since the site's inception in 2010. As of this writing, the site statistics boast 1,680 members, almost 70% of whom are male. Survivalist Singles is basically a jackpot for ladies pining for someone to complete their paranoid pair, a slick gunslinger with a talent for zombie hunting and tying Boy Scout-approved knots. And FYI ladies, if you're wearing a backpack in your photo, some guys think you're "an automatic 10."

Survivalist Singles is just one segment of the blossoming "preppers" set, a group of people who spend their free time hunting, scavenging and practicing survival tricks so that they'll be prepared when the apocalypse strikes. We may have laughed at those rapture rascals, but even National Geographic is hopping on the survivalist bandwagon. Next week, they'll debut a new show called "Doomsdayers," that gives us a peek into the lives of this "secretive American subculture."

There are tons of niche dating sites out there, of which Survivalist Singles is just one. But it's definitely one of the most entertaining ones we've seen in a while. If hoarding canned goods is your thing, be sure to join the site before its owner introduces a $5 fee, perhaps with the accompanying slogan, "Find love for less than the price of a box of bullets."

So romantic.

For five dollars, customers got the chance to answer hundreds of questions where they offered their like, dislike and philosophies of life. Men got to choose their favorite hairstyle, women their favorite scene of a man at work. These answer were transferred to punch cards and fed into an I.B.M. 1400 Series. It got 5,000 subscribers in the first year.

It expanded from the Upper East Side, at the time a hotbed of sexual daring, to cover the entire city. The stigma associated with online dating was present from the beginning. "Some people think computer dating services attract only losers," reads some TACT ad copy Mr. Paumgarten sampled. "This loser happens to be a talented fashion illustrator for one of New York's largest advertising agencies. She makes Quiche Lorraine, plays chess, and like me she loves to ski. Some loser!"

Mr. Ross ended up meeting his wife, a reporter for 1010 WINS, on a story about TACT. Years later Paumgarten went on one of the only two dates in his life with the daughter of this union. They took in a Broadway play and went out for Chinese food. He ordered a tequila sunrise. Things didn't work out.