(Jewish Group) Wearing your natural curls is an act of Jewish resistance
For centuries, anti-Semites have fetishized Jewish appearance. Using tedious racist tropes — be it smell, hooked noses, curly hair or traditional garb — anti-Semites label Jews as grotesque and have constructed a particular Jewish appearance in an attempt to otherize and oppress Jews.
An all-too-personal reminder of this demonization occurred this summer when we received notification that Maital was among a slew of Jewish professionals, mostly women, pictured on a white nationalist, anti-Semitic website mocking how Jews look and calling them ugly.
The website featured many Jewish professionals who do not wear Jewishly identifiable garb but had ethnic features that have been coded as “Jewish.” One trait that many of the women had in common — Maital included — was their dark, curly hair.
The prominent historian Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi traces the history of anti-Semitism linked to the perceived physical appearance of Jews in “Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Models.”
“The more vulgar forms of medieval anti-Semitism did express themselves more than occasionally in sheer physical terms – the notion of a distinct Jewish odor … [or that] Jewish descendants of each of the tribes of ancient Israel are born with physical defects,” he wrote.
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