How I learned to stop worrying and love The Nanny.

In a recent episode of the popular CBS comedy series The Nanny, nanny Fran, played by the nasal yenta Fran Drescher, is asked by her boss, the daft English millionaire Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy), to discourage a budding relationship between his college-age daughter and her philosophy professor.

The nanny, dressed, as ever, in polyurethane, visits the professor, played by Harry Hamlin (which answers the trivia question "Whatever happened to Harry Hamlin?"). Hamlin's philosophy professor falls immediately for the nanny, but the nanny is torn--she is in love with Sheffield, who unfortunately fears commitment. This is one of the show's running jokes.

Nanny Fine waves off the professor's requests for a date, but he persists. He suggests a Saturday date but suddenly withdraws the offer, reminding himself aloud that he must attend his nephew's bar mitzvah that day. The nanny, heretofore resistant to the professor's approaches, swoons and collapses with joy into a chair. The professor's name is Steve Goldberg.

This is a breakthrough moment for the Jewish people. It is not on par with the rebirth of the state of Israel or the discovery that Robert De Niro is half-Jewish, but it is a breakthrough all the same. There is no shortage of identifiably Jewish characters on television today, but few, if any, are romantically entangled, or shown to be interested in romantic entanglements, with their fellow Jews.

This has been a great source of concern to me as an agitator against intermarriage. I recognize that opposition to intermarriage is, to the lifestyle elite, morally distasteful. (The lifestyle elite is, of course, 62 percent Jewish, but put that issue aside for the moment.) Such opposition is, however, vital to the survival of my endangered tribe in its American exile, and so I fortify myself against the insults of the intermarried with thoughts of Bar Kochba and the Maccabees and of an America in the year 2100 in which every second Jew is not a Hasid.

I t was with great joy, then, that I watched Drescher's character express unmistakable interest in finding a Jew to marry. This, however, caused me a certain amount of internal conflict (a Jewish spécialité de la maison) because, in addition to being an opponent of intermarriage, I am also an official Defender of My People's Image on Television (self-appointed). And I have long thought that The Nanny was not Good for the Jews.

Drescher's character is a crudely drawn stereotype, a conniving, overeating, materialistic, hypersexualized fashion nightmare with a not-insignificant schnoz. Her mother, played by Renee Taylor, is even more broadly drawn: a grasping, ugly, gastrointestinally obsessed woman from the ethnic swamps of Queens. (Her grandmother, played by Ann Guilbert, is a far more sympathetic presence, which is a complicating factor, as we will soon see.)

One reason The Nanny has struck me as unhealthy for Jewish women is that it exists in a vacuum. There are few female Jewish characters on television today, at least as compared with male Jewish characters. And when female Jewish characters do appear, they are portrayed, generally, as scheming princesses. By contrast, the image of Jewish men has undergone a renovation in recent years. Nebbishness has alchemized into sensitivity. Take the Paul Reiser character on Mad About You. He's whiny and feminized, but women tell me they find him doting and caring (me, I just see the whiny, feminized part).

I believe there is an explanation for the denigration of Jewish women and the elevation of Jewish men: The Jews who dominate Hollywood (there, I said it) are, by and large, male and, by and large, avowedly assimilationist in all matters but gastronomic. There is a type of Jewish male who equates acceptance into the broader American culture with the acquisition of a blond, or at least obviously shiksa, wife (evidence: thirtysomething, Seinfeld's on-air dating patterns, and Philip Roth's American Pastoral). As a further means of cutting himself off from his ethnic roots, he scapegoats Jewish women by attributing to them all the negative stereotypes traditionally associated with Jews of both sexes, and then casts those Jewish women interested in marrying Jewish men out into the desert of New York magazine personal ads and singles weekends at Grossinger's.

According to Sylvia Barack Fishman, a Brandeis University scholar who studies popular images of Jewish women, a recent survey found that Jewish women who marry non-Jewish men get married a full three years later on average than Jewish women who marry Jewish men. Meaning, obviously, that many Jewish women marry outside the faith only when the pool of Jewish men has been drained of everyone but veterans of the plastic pocket-guard set.