What do you do when your drama teacher makes you wear a tree costume that is really uncomfortable? If you’re an elementary school student at the anarchist Stelton Colony in New Jersey, you go on strike.

You always remember your first. Mine was on a boat in the Hudson River. It was dark, and the wind across the top deck was cold. Some of the savvier kids were drinking a bottle of something expensive that they had grabbed from the bar while the bartender was looking the other way. Downstairs, everyone danced to “I’m a Barbie Girl.” I took a deep breath. Yes, it was my first absurdly extravagant Bar Mitzvah.

“The two leading lusts of the Jew’s life are lechery and money.” So wrote the improbably named Telemachus Thomas Timayenis in his 1883 anti-Semitic opus The American Jew: An Expos\xc3\xa9 of His Career. As Forward editorial director J.J. Goldberg says in his interview in this issue, stereotypes are frequently unfair, but very rarely unfounded. It seems improper, then, that seventeen years on this magazine has dedicated at least two of its covers to sex and none to money.

You know the type. They drank Mocha Lattes at the Starbucks after high school, wore shoes at 16 that would have looked extravagant on a 30-year-old, and drank martinis when you were still working on your rum and Coke. Now, with a Blackberry in one hand and Pinkberry in the other, they rule the Quad, the sorority, and the local dive. We got a real live Jewish American Princess to answer some questions about the culture. Her name is withheld, but she’s for real.