Jewish Choices Jewish Voices

To honor her body, the writer visits a Tel Aviv tattoo parlor

Cross-posted from Tablet Magazine by Jo-Ann Mort.

Mort’s black rose. CREDIT: Audrey Thweatt

I remember a moment from my first trip to Israel 29 years ago. I was waiting for a friend at the entrance to Beit Hatfutsot, a museum on the Tel Aviv University campus. It was during a conference convened for Holocaust survivors, and as I watched older survivors flow out of the building, I glanced at the occasional uncovered arm to see the tattooed numbers there, remnants of their Holocaust experience. It was a powerful vision for a first-time visitor to Israel, one that underscored triumph over adversity and the human will to survive along with the need for the country as a safe haven for the Jews.

But now, as a regular visitor to Israel, I see a different country, especially in Tel Aviv, a city that has pioneered a free-flowing hedonistic lifestyle that promotes free expression in art and fashion. The campus of Tel Aviv University offers a parade of inked bodies. Which is partly why, though I’m not an Israeli, I decided to join Israel’s tattooed ranks during a visit this summer. But, unlike the bulk of Tel Aviv’s inked masses, I’d recently survived a harrowing ordeal, and a tattoo seemed as good a way as any to mark it.

The Jewish taboo against tattooing is culled from a verse in Leviticus: “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.” There is a great deal of additional rabbinical commentary supporting this prohibition, including the notion that the human body is created in the image of God and, thus, to tamper with it is a kind of blasphemy. In recent times, the taboo has become more rooted in contemporary history than in biblical injunction—linked as it is to memory of the Holocaust. The sight of survivors’ tattoos traumatized a nation and a people, as it should have. A friend of mine whose grandparents perished in Auschwitz nearly threw his oldest son out of the house on their kibbutz when the son came home with a tattoo.

After making an appointment at Kipod on King George and Allenby Streets, I had to choose a design. Until I entered the tattoo studio, I had little sense of the final marking. But I knew where I wanted it to be (my upper right shoulder), and I knew that I wanted something that had a somewhat generic elegance to it, since it and I would grow old together.

I came equipped with pictures of lotuses and roses, different shapes and colors, but it wasn’t until I sat down in the studio and looked through the picture books that I decided on a final design: a rose with a sense of movement that makes it look like it is budding right on my back. And I chose the color black; Tel Aviv women may not dress in black from head to toe, but me and my fellow New Yorkers are persistently robed in it, and so it seemed to make sense to me to have my tattoo match the rest of my wardrobe.

The operative word in the previous sentence, though, is “chose.” As it turns out, my new rose is the third tattoo on my body—but the only one I asked for. Sixteen years ago, I was diagnosed with treatable breast cancer, and I had to go through a six-month radiation treatment. Prior to this treatment, the doctors outlined the area to be radiated with two tiny tattoos. Some women get these removed after their treatment, though it’s advisable to keep them in case you have a recurrence so that a doctor will see these telltale signs when considering further treatment.

Sometimes, I stare in the mirror and try to smudge away the unsmudgeable—these navy blue dots that appear intermixed with my natural body markings. These tattoos were not by choice; they mark an attack on my body and on my life by a deadly disease. As fixtures on my chest, they are reminders of the disease and of my triumph over it; but either way, they are reminders of a time in my life when I was out of control.

My new tattoo is something I did for me. It has no political or religious significance for me, nor does it show disrespect for my body, as the Leviticus passage implies. Rather it is a sign of respect for my body—and for me—to create a unique design on my skin that is not harmful. It doesn’t connote something dark or destructive. It’s about my own personal choice, making a decision for which I was fully in control. It’s playful and distinctive, like the city where I had it done, born from the past but not wedded to it, influenced by its own people’s history but not fated to relive it.

Jo-Ann Mort writes frequently about Israel for a variety of publications.

Cross-posted from Tablet Magazine.

How’s your weight? Is today a thin day or a fat one? Oh my God, I ate so much last night, I’m such a cow! Moo!

I exchange these comments with a select group of friends: Jewish ones. Weight—and food—is just not something my non-Jewish friends and I get into. Not that they aren’t as crazy about their bodies as we are—they are, even those who are 5-foot-8 with legs that span the Empire State Building. The difference is that they’re not as vocal about their neuroses. My non-Jewish friends don’t take great pleasure in re-hashing the minute details of the meal they just inhaled, or the hors d’oeuvres that were served at the Shapiro shivah.

Nor do my non-Jewish friends beat themselves up—at least not publicly—for gaining a pound or seven or for no longer fitting into their goal jeans. They might feel the exact same self-loathing that we do, but they don’t believe the whole world needs to know about their troubles.

According to a September 2008 survey of 200 Jewish educators and social workers conducted by Jewish Women International, an advocacy group, respondents reported eating disorders as the number one destructive behavior among Jewish girls (bullying came in second), with a full 75% of respondents observing this behavior in girls ages 12-15, said Lori Weinstein, JWI executive director.

Based on my own experience, I’ll wager some reasons for this. We—or, more specifically, our parents—are perfectionists. The Jews I know are goal-oriented and driven, and quite tough on themselves. But we also want to fit in. Alas, assimilation can only go so far, at least physically. Most Jewish women will never, ever look like we’ve just stepped off the boat from Stockholm, no matter how many highlights we put in our hair. However, since Jews are overachievers, we give it the old college try—and then some. (Titles at a conference held on Jewish women, body image, and food included such gems as “Chopped Liver and Chicken Soup: Soothing Food for the Traumatized Soul and “Zaftig Women in a Barbie Doll Culture”).

What’s more, Jewish women have very few model paradigms out there. As Leslie Goldman, the author of The Locker Room Diaries: The Naked Truth About Women, Body Image, and Re-imagining the Perfect Body notes in an essay on the Huffington Post, while many fashion designers are Jews—Marc Jacobs, Cavin Klein, Zac Posen, and Ralph Lauren—it is almost impossible to find an actual long-limbed, runway-prancing specimen who is. There’s a reason Victoria’s Secret is epitomized by long, lean-limbed Germans and bedroom-eyed Frenchwomen, says Goldman. There’s not much of a demand to see Mayim Bialik in a thong bikini.

Some experts say that certain groups gravitate to specific addictions—the Irish and their Guinness, for example, or rock musicians and their heroin.

In my case, I grew up in a white, upper-middle-class Jewish household. Maybe it was pre-ordained that my drug of choice would be edible. I certainly can’t recall a time when I wasn’t conscious that fat was bad. My mother taped a picture onto the refrigerator of an obese woman rifling through a freezer: a warning of lurking danger. My older sister and I were constantly warned by my mother and her mother never to gain weight. In my mind, getting fat was a terrible tragedy, the worst fate to befall a person. Fat was ugly, undignified, a sign of weakness and failure. When I finally hit puberty and put on about 20 pounds—25 at my heaviest—I was made to feel like Orca.

Obviously, many ethnicities love food, and they all have secret tricks to slimness (it was a Frenchwoman, after all, who penned that book about subsisting on chocolate pastries and champagne and simply not getting fat). But it’s well known that Jews’ relationship with food is an especially charged one. Common wisdom has it that in the back of our minds we’re still terrified of being rounded up, herded off, and starved to death. Having food around combats the fear. As Valerie Frankel, author of the memoir Thin Is the New Happy, notes: The entire Jewish culture is based on, ‘We killed them, they killed us, let’s eat.’ We push food on each other to express our love, and our safety.

Frankel’s is hardly the only book about food and weight. Scroll around Amazon and you will find hundreds of books about food and weight. Not just diet, exercise, and self-help books, but novels and memoirs about losing weight, gaining it, thinking about it, or learning to accept yourself as you are. Many of these are written by Jews. In addition to Frankel’s work, there’s Jami Bernard’s The Incredible Shrinking Critic, Lori Gottlieb’s Stick Figure, Stephanie Klein’s Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp, and my own, Teenage Waistland, which tells the story of my six years at fat camp—though I was never that big. And those are just the nonfiction offerings. Among novels, you’ve got Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed and In Her Shoes, both featuring zaftig heroines, and Jillian Medoff’s Hunger Point, about two sisters coping with anorexia.

Of course, Jewish women are not the only ones to obsess about their bodies, as is evidenced by the throng of empowering women’s magazine articles featuring models with a body mass index of about seven.

Both Jen Lancaster’s Such a Pretty Fat and the late Judith Moore’s Fat Girl hit the New York Times bestseller list—although those books were not so much about losing weight as about accepting yourself as you are. I know of only two books in that category written by Jews: Wendy Shanker’s Fat Girls Guide to Life and Jessica Weiner’s A Very Hungry Girl: How I Filled Up on Life…and How You Can, Too! What this says to me, of course, is that Jewish women—for the most part—aren’t okay with being fat. Valerie Frankel gets straight to the point: I will never not want to be thin. I just won’t. I’m much happier when I’m thin.

But, given the fact that body image issues are a source of anxiety across cultures, why do Jewish writers in particular spill so much ink to address it?

Frankel, whose book was published this summer and who grew up in Short Hills, New Jersey, a well-heeled suburb, believes it has to do with the fact that we need outlets other than therapy for our emotional baggage. The Jewish mothers were more into their daughters putting up appearances than the gentiles, she says. I don’t know if that’s an insecurity about being Jewish, but Jewish mothers go that extra mile. They look good—and they want their kids to look good.

And the standards for good looks in Jewish households tend to be a little more abstruse. I got an email from someone saying it pissed her off to read a book by someone who wasn’t that huge—I was ‘only’ a size 14, says Frankel. The woman was obviously not Jewish, because a Jewish woman would say, ‘Oh, my god, she was a 14? What a cow!’

For some people, no amount of harassment about weight is too much (when I was 12, my own grandmother wouldn’t let me visit her in Florida unless I lost 10 pounds). Frankel recalls reading Frances Kuffel’s Passing for Thin, and the author describing how lovingly her parents treated her, despite her obesity. I’m reading this and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, if this were a Jewish family…!’ says Frankel with a laugh. My parents outright admit that it was about wanting to have beautiful children.

Then there’s the fact that we Jews are so hard on ourselves. Life is about suffering, and who wants to suffer in silence? Jewish women are raised in many ways to believe that endurance of hardship is a sign of strength, says Rivka Tadjer, the author of Two Weeks Under, a novel about eating disorders and identity theft. In general, Jewish women are brought up to be able to handle things, and stuff their emotions for the sake of others. It’s a badge of honor to be able to handle everything while delivering excellence all the time. Not being able to is not just a sign of weakness, but lack of intelligence.

This serves us well, but it is also treacherous emotionally and I can see how it manifests in eating disorder, she continues.

In Stephanie Klein’s Long Island household, controlling her weight made her feminine. It’s what made us women, she says. Women drink coffee, wear stockings, and go on diets. Especially during the holidays. I used Yom Kippur as an excuse to kick-start a fasting diet.

Didn’t we all.

Abby Ellin is a writer in New York City and the author of Teenage Waistland: A Former Fat Kid Weighs In on Living Large, Losing Weight, and How Parents Can (and Can’t) Help.

Cross-posted from JWA’s Jewesses With Attitude

Anyone who was charmed by Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off could not help but mourn the loss of Jennifer’s face after her nose job, (and other facial re-constructions).  What Grey thought to be “enhancements” only resulted in dried up acting gigs and disenchanted fans.

Some suggest that this might also be the fate of actress Ashley Tisdale, the latest rhinoplasty victim who unveiled her new nose last month claiming that surgery was needed to repair a “deviated septum.”  There have been others who’ve tried to keep their nose-jobs under the radar — Ashley and Mary Kate Olsen, for example — or Olympic gymnast Shannon Miller, whose new nose makes her face barely recognizable.  I suppose we have Jewish comedian Fanny Brice to thank for the decades-enduring flurry of new noses.  Brice, in 1923, became one of the first to have cosmetic surgery on her nose after deciding that her ethnic comedy was too limiting and prone to xenophobia.  Disappointed both with the results of the surgical procedure and the response to her attempts to take on more serious theater roles, Brice accepted the inevitable and returned to her signature ethnic comedy.

Although Jewish women’s nose jobs have seen their share of envy, secrecy, and disapproval, women’s obsessions with their noses — be they beautiful or embarrassing — just haven’t ever gone away.  A new 13 minute film called My Nose, by Gayle Kirschenbaum is a testament to this.  At fifteen years old, Kirschenbaum’s mother had pushed her to have a nose job, insisting that if she didn’t have her nose fixed she’d never be happily married.  Kirschenbaum spent more than 25 years warding off her mother’s criticisms, but finally decided to toy with the possibility of actually going through with the surgery.  She made a film documenting the absurdities of her mother’s preoccupation, the opinions of perfect strangers, and the bizarre process of plastic surgery consultations surrounding the “bump” on her nose bridge that is considered, by some, to be her primary barrier for life-long romance.

In 13 minutes, the film barely scratches the surface of how race, ethnicity, and assimilation play into Jewish women’s cosmetic choices, but it does catalyze discussion about body image, self-esteem, and mother/daughter relationships.  Kirschenbaum does a fine job of exposing these issues in the raw, in part because she manages to capture multiple perspectives without weighing in with her own judgment.  But her film makes one thing perfectly clear: women’s insecurities about their own physical appearances are far more acute than men’s standards of beauty for women.  In Kirschenbaum’s casual, quirky interviews, the vast majority of women interviewees said: “Do it! Get the nose job! You need it, and it’ll change your life!” while the majority of men said: “What’s wrong with your nose?  It’s fine. You’re beautiful. You don’t need surgery at all.”  There’s certainly something both disturbing and ironic about all of this, and something that suggests what little progress has been made in strengthening Jewish women’s self-image.  With the women’s lib movement, and several permutations of feminism, one would think that all American women — and Jewish women in particular — would be capable of celebrating who they are, and valuing authenticity rather than playing into an assimilated ideal that just seems so passé.  I’ve never really taken any personal or sociological interest in plastic surgery… and I certainly haven’t ever attributed any importance to my nose, other than its ability to help me breathe.  I would suspect that most women of my generation feel similarly, but perhaps this is just reflective of the social circles in which I travel.

So, is the recent surge of attention surrounding nose jobs harkening back to an obsession of the past, or is this something that still feels alive and real?  Will the age of plastic surgery age and die out with older generations, or should we expect that nose jobs — and other jobs — are here to stay?  How do Jewish women’s evolving identities fit into all of this?

-Jordan