Jenna Jameson Israeli Leaving Us
By: Gram Ponante
Oh, sweet, wandering Jenna Jameson.
This month Jenna Jameson, our most famous porn performer, announced both her engagement and her intent to convert to Judaism, and the world went: “Ohhhhhkay?”
We have been through the struggle with Jenna Jameson. We have seen her meteoric rise through Wicked Pictures and Vivid Video, her stardom and launch of ClubJenna (with its eventual 6-figure sale to Playboy, making Jameson the entrepreneurial gold standard for up and coming pornstresses), her perch atop the New York Times bestseller list with “How To Make Love like A Porn Star” (which pretty much defined the ceiling of mainstream legitimacy for adult performers), her 2007 retirement and relationship with MMA celebrity Tito Ortiz and, well, a slow public unraveling.
However commonplace any of Jameson’s problems were or are, a porn star falls from grace faster than anyone, aided by the same media that got her to the top. It’s not ours to judge, especially since so many people go through the same thing without having to deal with the additional burden of TMZ goons lurking around. But now Jameson is getting married again (I believe this is the third time) and certain people are asking “Is it good for the Jews?”
And now she’s getting married to an Israeli diamond merchant with a recent red-handed history of insurance fraud.
In 2010 Lior Britton went to Israel to sell a diamond that he had previously reported stolen in California. He collected cash both from the insurance company and from his new customer. When the customer registered the diamond with a diamond registry (I don’t travel in those circles so the existence of such a thing as a “diamond registry” was news to me), he found that the very man who sold it to him had, less than a month before, reported it stolen by thugs.
Britton paid $99,000 and got four years’ probation.
I mention this because it is Jameson whose Jewish bona fides are being examined and discussed, having been raised an I-talian Cath-o-lic and having relatively recently expressed a strong belief that, yup, we already met the Messiah about 2,000 years ago. Now she is instagramming pictures of glorious Jewish Shabbat feasts and tweeting in Hebrew, with some internet commenters calling her The Whore of Babylon, others pointing out that the prostitute Rahab was instrumental in winning Jericho for Joshua (meaning, as in the case of Mary Magdalene, that her past “sins” are forgiven considering what she’s doing now), and few others simply wishing her well.
But why isn’t anyone asking if Lior Britton is bad for the Jews, or bad for Jenna? If this has to be discussed at all, why are we focusing on the porn star rather than the guy who was actually convicted of a major crime? We want Jenna to be happy. We are concerned about her.
In the past couple of years, amid an alarming and often sordid custody battle with Ortiz over her twin boys, some slurring and incoherent public appearances (including the XBiz Awards and a tour to promote her new literary romance trilogy), and a return to porn — sort of — in the form of webcamming, Jameson seems alternately on fire with publicity and a cautionary tale. But we only need her to be rehabilitated from whatever substances played a part in those public meltdowns — not a rehab from being a premier sex worker. Similarly, we’d like to hope that Britton has rehabilitated himself, because we only want the best for Jenna (and the Jews), because she’s a survivor.
