When Lox Club burst onto the dating app scene in 2020 as the app "for Jews with ridiculously high standards," I was intrigued. Like other "exclusive" dating apps such as Raya and The League, Lox Club requires an application to get in. It boasted a 20,000 person waitlist earlier this year, according to a spokesperson at the time.
Lox Club lured me in a way that other membership-based apps or Jewish dating apps like JDate and JSwipe didn't. This was partly for the promise of matches with similar life and cultural experiences (the name instantly reminded me of my mom topping her schmeared bagels with lox). But let's be real: It was also the chic branding and the "ridiculously high standards" attitude.
Perhaps those latter reasons, too, are why non-Jewish people are applying — and why Lox Club has paid at least one non-Jewish influencer to promote it.
Either way, Lox Club appears to be using its branding as both Jewish and exclusive to draw people in. But that tagline? Flimsy at best, disingenuous at worst.
Non-Jewish #sponcon
Katy Bellotte, a lifestyle influencer, isn't Jewish, but she first heard about Lox Club through Jewish friends. She was under the impression that only Jews could apply until recently.
"It made me want to join even more," Bellotte told Mashable, due to the air of mystery and exclusivity.
Then she started hearing "rumors" that it was "opening up" to non-Jews.
Friends of friends who worked with the app connected her with the team, and she realized that she could indeed sign up. Lox Club has always allowed non-Jewish members, but Bellotte didn't realize until that time because, well, look at the branding.
She started using the app, and Lox Club reached out to her to produce a paid Instagram ad. In the promo, she encouraged her more than 170,000 followers to apply to attend Lox Club's New York Fashion Week party and try out the service.
Bellotte was met with the obvious question from her followers: Is Lox Club not for Jewish people? She clarified that you don't need to be Jewish to apply.
The religious dating app landscape
Religion-based apps are nothing new. JDate has been pairing Jewish singles for 20 years and Christian Mingle has done the same for Christians. Newer apps like Upward for Christians and Muzmatch for Muslims are keeping the trend alive.
There's no stopping a non-religious person from signing up for these apps. As an Upward spokesperson told me, anyone can join — but if they're not Christian, they likely won't have much luck.
What actually seems to set Lox Club apart is that its founder and CEO, Austin Kevitch, who declined to speak with me for this piece, didn't actually set out to create a Jewish dating app — because he apparently didn't set out to create anything at all. In a recent interview with E!, he said he made the initial Lox Club site as a parody of other social clubs and dating apps he found cringey.
Despite it being a joke, people were interested. "I wake up [a day or two later] and over 1,000 people had applied on this website for an app that didn't even exist," he told E!
Kevitch then hired a team and launched Lox Club last fall. From the start, the app wasn't just for Jews. As he told the New York Times, Lox Club is "like a deli: culturally Jewish, but anyone can enjoy it." The site's FAQ uses the same line.
Except for the name, there's not much that's "culturally Jewish" about the app beyond some profile questions, like one that asks users to state their Bar/Bat Mitzvah theme. Dubious comparison aside (can a dating app be like a deli, really? Is dating a Jewish person like eating at Katz?), though, it's understandable to want to expand the app's clientele. Less than three percent of American adults say they're Jewish, compared to 65 percent who identify as Christian. Plenty of American Jews consider themselves culturally Jewish, as in they don't tend to attend religious services but enjoy eating Jewish foods and celebrating some holiday traditions. But whether a dating app itself can be culturally Jewish raises questions about who Lox Club is for and whether folks who aim to meet Jewish partners will get what they expect out of the paid service.
The app is only for people who are single and want to date. Combine that with the fact that you need to apply, then pay for the service (it's around $36 for three months), and the pool of potential users shrinks. As it was, when I was using Lox Club earlier in 2021, I'd rarely come across fellow New Yorkers or even users on the East Coast.
Nothing is worse than a dating app with paltry numbers — except maybe an actual party with too-few attendees. This is where influencer marketing comes in: Lox Club paid Bellotte to drum up buzz and RSVPs for fashion week.
Of the actual party, Bellotte said she connected with all sorts of people from different corners of the city. "They're not looking for one kind of person to join their app and promote them," she said. "It's for everybody."
For whom with ridiculously high standards now?
We have to ask, then: Why is Lox Club called Lox Club in the first place? Why is it "for Jews with ridiculously high standards," even thought it's actually not? What exactly are we paying $36 for? JSwipe, meanwhile, can be used for free, while JDate is a paid membership that costs about $30 for six months after a free trial.
Bellotte guessed that Lox Club took this route to stand out in the increasingly large heap of dating apps. "There's so many different apps out there now," she said. "They need to have something that makes them different."
I wonder, too, if Kevitch knows the answers to these questions himself. Given that he started Lox Club as a joke, that might explain why its "mission" doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.
"They need to have something that makes them different."
Now, over a year since its inception, Lox Club continues to be in this murky Jewish-but-not-really territory. Rappers Lil Yachty (not Jewish) and Bhad Bhabie (half-Jewish, as am I) signed on as investors, with their manager Adam Kluger blasting other Jewish dating apps: "JDate screams desperation," he told Rolling Stone in June. "JSwipe is just a piece of shit."
"There’s a real gap in the marketplace," Kluger added, but exactly what gap is Lox Club filling for Jewish daters? The simple act of mingling in a members-only space?
"I haven't been on Lox Club for a week yet and I've already liked more people than my three years on Bumble, Hinge, The League, etc," a testimonial on the website claims. Based on my experience, I don't see how that's possible, unless you don't mind liking people in LA or Toronto.
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Bellotte told me she loves Lox Club for its unique look and elevated feel, but beyond that it's not clear what non-Jewish people get out of the experience, either — except, of course, being able to say they got in.
Long story short? I canceled my Lox Club subscription. Maybe my standards are too ridiculously high.
