Our time is limited today, so instead of riffing on Britney’s spiritual feng shui attack, we’ll focus on the person who blogged it first: Ms. Esther Kustanowitz. A resident of the Upper West Side, Esther graciously agreed to indulge our hankering for bagels-and-lox at Zabar’s (just so’s we could tell Bubbe we did it) while we tried to get a handle on whom we consider to be the queen of the Jewish blogosphere. We’re probably not the first to call her the Jewish Carrie Bradshaw—without the slutty quality, of course; she may have a wicked sense of humor, but she’s the kind of woman a man would be proud to introduce to his mother, if you know what we mean.

Esther writes a singles column, First Person Singular, for the New York Jewish Week, a monthly column for Generation J, contributes daily to her own blogs My Urban Kvetch and Jdaters Anonymous as well as to Jewlicious and still has time to dabble in improv comedy. We’ve been reading her all over and linking to her for over year now and we kept wondering why is this smart, sassy, very funny girl still single?

So we expected her maybe not to be as charming in person as she is in writing, to be afficted with Asperger’s syndrome or maybe Tourette’s, or maybe the reason for her singleness would be something obvious, like a double nose wart. Then this adorable girl swept in the door and we understood that as spot-on about dating and Judaism and pop culture as she is, Esther suffers from the same simple dilemma that afflicts all Jewish singles: She hasn’t found her beshert yet. But she gets to make a living at traversing the pitfalls of dating within a small community (like having to duck around the corner at Zabar’s to avoid making small talk with a past unsuccessful blind date—He’s a lawyer. He said he was funny. He wasn’t.) while she “waits and dates.” Lucky for us.

Anyway, Esther gave us a quick tour of the neighborhood and led us into Central Park before dashing off to her improv class, but not before we began a conversation about why Jews, especially the not-particularly observant ones, want to marry other Jews and how Judaism informs all aspects of life and relationships. At Jmerica where we make up in soul what some of us might lack in formality, and we find Esther’s more observant perspective interesting enough to keep the conversation going, so stay tuned.