{"id":15612,"date":"2021-04-12T12:47:10","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T16:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prose.com\/?p=15612"},"modified":"2022-02-07T12:20:37","modified_gmt":"2022-02-07T17:20:37","slug":"breaking-stereotypes-jewish-hair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prose.com\/blog\/breaking-stereotypes-jewish-hair","title":{"rendered":"Detangling Stereotypes Surrounding Jewish Hair"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n

I always found stereotypes about Jewish hair especially troubling, in part because they\u2019re so alienating. I\u2019m Jew-ish <\/i>(proud, but secular), and my hair is straight-ish<\/i> (thick, with a nice wave). It\u2019s light brown and blonde in places. It\u2019s actually somewhat blue at the moment<\/a>, but that\u2019s beside the point. I have what your Bubbe might call a shiksa-lob. But does that somehow make me less a part of the tribe? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jewish stereotypes aren\u2019t new. They\u2019ve been employed by white supremacists to justify genocide and discrimination for centuries. Jewish historian Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi links the history of anti-Semitism to the concept of Jewish appearance in his 1982 treatise \u201cAssimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Models.\u201d He writes: \u201cThe more vulgar forms of medieval anti-Semitism did express themselves more than occasionally in sheer physical terms\u2014the notion \u2026 [that] Jewish descendants of each of the tribes of ancient Israel are born with physical defects.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what is \u201cJewish hair,\u201d according to the stereotype? Curly, frizzy, perhaps even unruly<\/i>. Dark. The dreaded \u201cJew Fro.\u201d Ooooo, spooky. Some speculate that the characterization of big, unruly Jewish hair is rooted in a misreading of the Hebrew Bible, which was interpreted by non-Jews to mean that Jews have horns\u2014an image most often proliferated in art from the Middle Ages. In an article about antisemitism and the Jewish body<\/a> for My Jewish Learning<\/i>, writer Ophir Yarden explains that \u201cMoses was often depicted with two horns on his head as a result of the Latin mis-rendering of the verb \u2018sent forth beams\u2019 (karan) in Exodus 34:35 as \u2018grew horns.\u2019 (A horn is a keren.)\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stereotype of Jewish hair, like most others, crumbles under closer examination. As Amy Abrahams writes in a recent essay<\/a> for Vogue UK, \u201cAntisemitism thrives on presenting Jews as a homogeneous entity.\u201d The idea of \u201clooking Jewish\u201d and of having \u201cJewish hair\u201d only goes so far as our conception of Jews as a people. Jews are not all from eastern Europe; we are not all Ashkenazi, the most visible Jewish ethnic group. I myself have Ashkenazi and Sephardi ancestors who hailed from Poland, Hungary, and Spain. There are Mizrahi Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. There is the Bene Israel tribe of Jews from Mumbai. And the diaspora has scattered Jews to every corner of the world, from Montreal to Shanghai, San Francisco to Buenos Aires, Cape Town to Melbourne. \u201cJewish hair\u201d could just as soon be kinky afros or sleek blonde tresses as a head full of dark ringlets. The diversity of Jews is simply too great for there to be a single version of our people with any single hair type. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Jewish hair stereotype is one that is rooted in Eurocentric beauty as it assumes all Jews are European; but the vilifying of Jewish hair, too\u2014the accepted narrative that Jewish hair is ugly or undesirable\u2014is also a product of white supremacy, and those beauty standards that exclude Jews and people of color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it can\u2019t be ignored that my curly-haired friends from childhood always wished for straight hair. Given the power of European beauty standards, stereotypically Jewish hair is often met with shame, even within our own community. Similar in ways that echo the emotional and physical violence leveled by Europeans against African hair throughout history, but predominantly less severe. In a JWeekly essay<\/a> about curly Jewish hair, authors Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield and Maital Friedman outline why they\u2019re proud of their natural hair in response to being targeted by a virtual white supremacist campaign about their supposed ugliness. Separately, an article published in Tablet, titled \u201cThe War of the Curls,\u201d<\/a> explains how, in Israel, women with power and visibility\u2014news anchors, politicians\u2014are expected to straighten their naturally curly hair. The article describes the creation of Israeli Facebook group Metultalot<\/a> (which translates to \u201ccurly women,\u201d in Hebrew) created four years ago by Orian Paz: \u201cWith daily discussions on anything from self-acceptance and curl maintenance to raising curly daughters, the Facebook group is challenging Israel\u2019s mainstream perception of beautiful hair.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The irony is that I\u2019ve always wished for curly hair. I spent an awful lot of time as a teenager spritzing myself with bogus salt sprays and half-heartedly wrapping my head in curlers before bed that would leave my hair a complete mess come morning. I\u2019ve always thought curly hair is beautiful, romantic; a symbol of vivacity, even femininity. But there\u2019s probably a part of me that desires to look \u201cmore Jewish\u201d\u2014to be read as Jewish, to feel more like I belong, like having a certain kind of hair would automatically connect me more deeply to my history. But I don\u2019t need to subscribe to stereotypes to know who I am. And now if you\u2019ll excuse me, my shiksa-lob and I are headed to the kitchen to make some matzo balls.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s no right or wrong. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":15619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[395,401],"tags":[266,268,479,264,267,265],"class_list":["post-15612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-category-inspiration","category-interviews","tag-curly","tag-frizzy","tag-new","tag-smooth","tag-very-curly","tag-wavy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEnding Stereotypes About Jewish Hair | At Length by Prose Hair<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"One straight-haired writer grapples with Jewish stereotypes from her past and discovers that Jewish hair is not limited to curly hair.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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