vinegarAs of October 7, 2023, I have decided to stop straightening my hair. For decades, I have used round brushes, straightening irons, smoothing oils, and spent what little money I had on keratin treatments and Brazilian blowouts to tame my frizz.
But swastikas have been splashed across public walls, bomb threats have hit synagogues, old conspiracy theories have been resurrected, and female lawmakers Tweeted “Anti-Semitism is wrong, but…” I thought back to all the things I’d done, trying not to look Jewish enough, trying to assimilate, maybe like my great-grandparents had, and for the first time I felt violence in that choice.
Jewish hair is not monolithic, but it has long been used against Jews. Nazi propaganda portrayed all Jews as having curly black hair, which led some to bleach their hair to appear Aryan. Other Jews survived the Holocaust because they didn’t naturally have curly black hair. Perhaps I inherited the urge to have straight hair. Hide who you are or die.
As a teenager, I hated my hair when it sprouted overnight like plants in a time-lapse video. On special occasions, I would wrap my wet hair in curlers the size of soup cans and cover it with what looked like a giant, white, plastic mushroom that was attached to a long coil that plugged into the wall and blew hot air onto my head. The device was one my mom had used as a teenager, and still uses.
After hours of washing my hair, I would take the curlers out and watch as my hair fell smoothly around my shoulders. But it wasn’t shiny. Shiny hair was as hard to come by as the skinny-strap tank tops that girls wore who didn’t need bras.
My encounters with anti-Semitism were minimal back then: A couple of guys yelled “Jews!” as they paddled past me during Shabbat services on the lake, and a few people made Holocaust jokes in my presence. In high school, everyone laughed when a girl said I looked like Fievel from An American Tail. (The memory of that criticism of my appearance still sends shivers of embarrassment through me.)
But most of the anti-Semitism I absorbed was subconscious and unnameable: a general message hanging in the air that Christian holidays were important while others were an affront to American values, that certain physical features were beautiful and others were ugly.
After my foray into Orthodox Judaism in college, I decided to drop out unless I planned to devote my whole life to religious ritual. (I did.) But being God-centered is just part of being Jewish. As the saying goes, the Nazis didn’t care who was religious or not. A Jew is a Jew. And I’ve never wanted to stop being Jewish. I love my family, our seders, and the richness of Jewish history.
And yet I don’t want to look like myself. That’s also my belief.
In recent years, many Jewish women, black women, white-haired women, Alopecia And many people who can’t cram their heads into the narrow confines of traditional beauty standards choose to go natural. resistance.
Perhaps I too am resisting this attempt at self-love, but I am also seeking love from the world with a new intention: to love me, not some polished, acceptable, past-the-Mayflower iteration of myself.
It’s summer, so my hair is frizzier than usual, but I’m okay with that. I can’t say I’m enlightened enough to see myself as beautiful. I can’t say I’m empowered. I can’t say I can resist the temptations of keratin forever. But when I look in the mirror, I see the child I was before I started micromanaging my appearance, before I blamed the frizz of my hair and my identity. As Jews learn all too often, what does it mean to hate a part of yourself? With all the hate we’ve received lately, I can’t afford it anymore.
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Diana Specler is an author and essayist. She writes the newsletter Travel Report
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