Angelyne is a Jewish Woman

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http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/angelyne-la-billboard-diva-30-years-1025678

http://archive.is/zWrEc

"This one," he said, pointing at a 1967 Monroe Senior High School sophomore from the San Fernando Valley, third from right, "is Angelyne." A schoolgirl with hooded eyes and long center-parted locks, in a button-down white shirt and tie, stared out across half a century. "Also known as Renee Goldberg."

Jews had assimilated in the postwar period. Surnames Anglicized, religious observance ebbed, kosher compliance curtailed — both to better conform to their American homeland and, often, as a conscious or unconscious departure from the trauma of their European pasts. They'd arrived and imagined themselves anew.

Yet Goldberg becoming Angelyne: That would be a feat far more radical, a leap far more extreme, out of a grim and drab past into a realm of complete fantasy. How fitting it would be for such an act to take place amid the New World shtetl of Hollywood, defined by metamorphosis and make-believe.

To many Jews, Angelyne reads distinctly gentile, the quintessential shiksa, whether by accident or intent. Her taste and status cues exist in a goyish Bermuda Triangle somewhere between Dolly Parton, Loni Anderson and Traci Lords.

But once I floated the idea of Goldberg as Angelyne to friends and colleagues who had been fascinated by her over the years and occasionally had had their own fleeting curbside run-ins, the surprisingly unsurprised reaction (particularly from the Jewish ones) was consensus and instantaneous: That makes sense. The stereotypical old-school shmatte-selling, the hardnosed negotiations, the pure all-purpose chutzpah — "I've known that woman," one happily told me, as if welcoming home a long-lost relative, "all my life."