Is there more to Jewish food than bagels and Manischewitz? The new Jewish Food Movement, a loose confederation of farmers, religious leaders, health and nutrition buffs, organizers, philosophers, activists, and consumers, says yes. Drawing on deep Jewish religious traditions and values, the movement is inspiring a new generation of Jews to lead lives of faith, justice, environmentalism, and community through their food.

For thousands of years, food has been center stage in the drama of Jewish spiritual and communal life. Ancient offerings in the temple, called korbanot (from the Hebrew karov, “to be close”) were eaten to bring oneself closer to God. Shechita, ritual slaughter necessary to make meat kosher, heightened the Jewish people’s sensitivity to the suffering of animals. Jewish law demands that sections of private fields be left open for the poor.

But how do we apply those principles today, in our complicated, industrialized food world? Over this three-part series we’ll explore how the movement draws on ancient wisdom to promote social justice, spirituality, and environmental sustainability through food. Each part of the series will explore one of these areas. We’ll begin this series on the Jewish Food Movement with social justice, looking specifically at how the movement addresses the rights of food workers and the fight against hunger and access to food.

Keep reading here.

My first lesson in dealing with money took place on one of those long double buses with a stretchy accordion middle. I must have been six or seven years old at the time and was holding a shiny new coin. While this doesn’t sound like much, it was enough to buy a delicious, carbonated, syrupy drink, and I was looking forward to having one that day.

For a six-year-old, those long buses held incredible allure as the middle rotated while the bus took turns.

“You should put that away,” I remember my father telling me, pointing to the coin held loosely in my fingers.

But did I listen?

Keep reading here.

Read more posts from Issue #11: Money, Greed, & Guilt.

Shmuel and Chava, a religious Jewish couple from France, are not able to have a child naturally. Chava was born with a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome; she has no uterus but does have ovaries that produce eggs. Chava’s doctor has advised her that gestational surrogacy would enable her and her husband to have a baby that is genetically related to them. This is a process in which an egg, removed from Chava’s body, would be fertilized with Shmuel’s sperm in a lab through in-vitro-fertilization (IVF). The resultant embryo would then be implanted in the womb of a gestational surrogate who would carry the baby to term and then relinquish it into Shmuel and Chava’s custody.

As orthodox Jews, Shmuel and Chava spoke right away with their rabbi in order to find out if this practice is “kosher.” Their rabbi advised that gestational surrogacy could be an option for them as long as two conditions were met. First, the woman carrying the baby should be Jewish, because Judaism has historically been conferred through the womb (at least until recently, when rabbinical authorities in Israel announced that Judaism is also conferred through the egg). Second, the surrogate should not be married, because if a married woman were to become pregnant with the child of a married man who is not her husband, the child would be a “mamzer.”

Since surrogacy is prohibited in France and in many other European countries, Shmuel and Chava assessed their options. They read about the booming surrogacy industry in India, where the costs of surrogacy are far less expensive than elsewhere, but they realized right away that there would be zero chance of finding a Jewish surrogate there. Then they did some research on surrogacy in the United States, where the cost is far higher. Even if they could gather up all of the money for the IVF, they learned that it was extremely rare to find a Jewish surrogate in the United States. Where could they find a Jewish surrogate and be able to afford the process? Deeply committed to becoming parents through surrogacy, Shmuel and Chava decided to move to Israel.

While many reproductive technologies and gestational surrogacy in particular are restricted or prohibitively expensive in many countries, Israel has made these technologies widely accessible to its citizens. Israel’s National Insurance Law ensures that all types of reproductive technologies are fully paid for as part of the standard health insurance package. This includes unlimited rounds of IVF for up to two live births. The result of this policy is that Israel now reportedly has the highest number of fertility clinics per capita of any other country in the world. For Shmuel and Chava, this means that as soon as they become Israeli citizens, Chava will be entitled to have all of the fertility treatments necessary for the surrogacy process paid for.

Since 1996, Israel has also legalized gestational surrogacy arrangements between Israeli citizens and permanent residents. Thus, unlike the international surrogacy arrangements one might find in India and in the United States, Israel does not permit foreigners to contract an Israeli surrogate, or for Israelis to contract foreign surrogates within the country. To do surrogacy in Israel, Shmuel and Chava will have to make aliya and meet the very strict criteria outlined in the Israeli surrogacy law. For more than a decade, a committee appointed by the Israeli government has overseen each and every surrogacy arrangement carried out in Israel. This public committee makes sure that all contracts signed between surrogates and couples meet the law’s criteria.

Some of these criteria include the requirement that all surrogates and couples are citizens of Israel and share the same religion (only Jewish surrogates can carry the babies of Jewish couples). Surrogates have to be single, divorced or widowed (to avoid the Halakhic problems that Shmuel and Chava’s rabbi mentioned), and only legally paired man/woman couples can hire a surrogate (leaving out single individuals and gay couples from hiring a surrogate). Surrogates and couples cannot be related to one another (a sister or cousin cannot volunteer to be their relative’s surrogate), and the surrogate cannot provide her own eggs (she cannot be the genetic and gestational mother of the baby). The intended father must be genetically related to the baby (no sperm donors allowed). And surrogacy is reserved only as a last resort for couples with no children (or one previous child) who have exhausted all other options for genetic parenthood. Shmuel and Chava are perfect candidates in this respect because they have documented medical proof that Chava cannot carry a baby in her body.

On the one hand, Israel’s surrogacy law should be noted for its success in regulating gestational surrogacy arrangements. At a time when lack of surrogacy regulation in many places has resulted in complicated legal entanglements, the Israeli surrogacy law has ensured that all surrogacy arrangements are grounded in formal contracts, valid in court, and protect the surrogate and the couple in many ways. The law requires intense psychological screening of surrogates and intended parents, as well as physical screening of the surrogates, preventing many of the complications that might occur in private, unregulated surrogacy arrangements.

On the other hand, the Israeli surrogacy law has room for improvement. It is ironic that only single women can become surrogates for married couples, but that the law prevents single women from contracting a surrogate. It is troubling that married, heterosexual couples like Shmuel and Chava are making aliya in order to contract for surrogacy in Israel, but homosexual couples are not eligible for Israel’s surrogacy program. Finally, while women like Chava can easily prove to the surrogacy committee that they have no other option for genetic parenthood, those women who have unexplained infertility must prove they have tried all other available technologies before turning to surrogacy. In a country where women can do unlimited IVF attempts, this means at least eight IVF attempts or a similar number of miscarriages in order to be candidates for contracting a surrogate. As anyone who has known someone who has gone through even one round of IVF can vouch for, this is not an easy process emotionally or physically.

For more on Jewish fertility issues:

• Halachic Issues in Infertility Treatment (Nishmat: The Jerusalem Center for Advanced Jewish Study for Women)
• A T.I.M.E. (A Torah Infertility Medium of Exchange)
• PUAH Institute
• RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association
• MRKH Syndrome

Elly Teman is a cultural and medical anthropologist at the Penn Center for Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of a recent book about the personal experiences of surrogates and intended mothers involved in Israeli surrogacy arrangements, Birthing a Mother: the Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self, which was published by the University of California Press in March 2010. The book has recently been featured in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, the Jewish Review and the Jerusalem Post.

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.

There are a lot of organizations out there that try to motivate Jewish communities to be more eco-friendly. The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) works to show the connection between Jewish law and environmentalism. Wondering why is conservation a Jewish issue? Bal tashchit teaches us not to waste. The modern applications of this include driving low emission vehicles (so as not to waste resources, including gas money), and reusing household items like grocery bags and take-out containers. Shiluach ha-keyn, chasing away the mother bird, can remind us to protect all species from endangerment and extinction.

Being environmentally responsible doesn’t mean you have to go live on a commune, and it isn’t hard. Start by adding a few eco-friendly items to your household. Reusable shopping bags are cheap and easy, and can pay for themselves pretty quickly (most grocery stores give you a few cents back for every reusable bag you bring). Another great choice for the environment that also saves you money is a reusable water bottle. You can get aluminum or plastic bottles made mostly from recycled materials, and then you’ll never have to buy and toss an overpriced bottle of water! If you’re a soda drinker, just get into the habit of buying 2 liter bottles and filling up whenever you leave the house.

If you’re interested in helping with the response to the Gulf oil spill, there are a lot of options you can look into online. For information about volunteering labor or donating to support the effort, check out these handy “How to Help” guides from National Wildlife Foundation and the National Audubon Society.

If you’re low on time or cash, you can also donate hair (yes, hair). Those “booms” everyone talks about on the news can be made out of pantyhose and hair clippings, and throwing them into the oil is the fastest way to absorb and remove it. Read the following instruction guide to find out how to donate and pass the info along to any salons or pet groomers you know!

If you’ve never considered yourself to be much of an environmentalist, maybe now is a good time to start. Protecting the planet truly is a Jewish issue, and it deserves your attention!

The people at the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) are turning one of the arguments for the Hyde Amendment back on itself in an exciting video campaign with one of my favorite video bloggers, Jay Smooth. Hyde supporters have argued that federal dollars should not fund something a large percentage of the population considers immoral. The CRR is asking: what do you wish the government wouldn’t spend your tax dollars on?  And if you don’t get to pick and choose, why should the Pro-Lifers?

Broadening the morality issue beyond the abortion debate, as this campaign does, has interesting implications for Tikkun Olam, the Jewish charge to repair the world. The Hyde Amendment sets the precedent that citizens should have control of their tax dollars when morality is in question. The CRR’s campaign sheds light on the number of groups, projects and programs sponsored by our government that any number of people consider immoral.

Should there be similar amendments to prohibit federal dollars from going to the war on drugs? To abstinence-only education? To war? To Israel? Should American citizens have the right to pick and choose on every issue? And is there room for tolerance when one group’s moral imperative restricts another’s freedom, or right to health care?

It is common practice for the Anti-Abortion, or Pro-Life, movement to compare the struggle against abortion to the struggle against slavery.  In a few days we will celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and it’s interesting to consider the CRR’s campaign in this context. The slavery analogy is a popular way to frame the political position against abortion as a moral certainty on which there can be no compromise. The analogy is effective for their purposes because, while we are divided on abortion, Americans agree that slavery is immoral and unacceptable.

Looking back on our legacy of slavery, Americans understand that if one witnesses a social evil, one is responsible to put an end to it.  Even though I personally support a woman’s right to choose, I can understand the Pro-Life point of view in this context.  If I believed that abortion was genocide, I too would consider the Pro-Choice solution morally unacceptable. (Of course, I don’t consider abortion to be anything remotely resembling genocide, but the Pro-Life sense of moral responsibility remains valid, even honorable, in that light.)  If one understands something to be wrong — just as the abolitionists understood slavery to be wrong — one is morally charged with the task of ending that practice. In my mind, this is part of Tikkun Olam, our charge to repair the world.

We understand slavery to be wrong because it is obvious that all people, of all colors, are human beings with a legal right to personhood. When it comes to the personhood of a fetus, things are not so clear. Each of us must determine our own answer to that question.  Many of us look to religion to guide us, and the U.S. has become a great deal more diverse in religious belief and practice than it was in 1860.  As Jewish women with a strong legacy of social justice activism, how do we negotiate conflicting interpretations of morality?

It stinks that we all must contribute our tax dollars to causes we consider immoral. On the other hand, a system that prohibits federal dollars going to any issue that could be considered immoral is unrealistic and probably not a good idea.  What the CRR campaign shows us, however, that one group’s moral imperative should not receive special treatment.  I commend the Pro-Lifers on their determination to repair the world in a way that makes sense to them (even as I abhor some of their methods), but since there is no universal understanding that abortion is wrong, the restriction of the nation’s federal tax dollars is simply not acceptable.

I’ve been thinking a lot about pornography recently. In the past, I’ve had a laissez-faire attitude about porn. It doesn’t do anything for me, but I’ve never been particularly bothered by it. I believe in free speech, and much as Playboy makes me roll my eyes, I figured it was ultimately harmless. Certainly an improvement over oversexed guys going out there and raping girls, I thought.

Playboy: kind of makes me gag now

But then, in the past few months, someone I know pretty well, someone from a very observant background who is, as far as I know, still shomeret Shabbat and kashrut, began making pornography. And I’m not talking a few scantily clad pictures, I’m talking a significant library of photos and videos available online of her doing a variety of things with a variety of partners of both genders. This is a girl who has a degree in biology from a top-notch university (something she touts on one of her websites), who spent time learning in a seminary in Israel, and who plans to teach Judaica. In one of the pictures someone sent to me she lies naked on a kitchen counter, her head hanging off of the edge and her naked breasts framing her face from above. The captions names her a naughty housewife.

Suddenly, my ‘whatever works for you’ attitude seems horribly naïve. Because I’m now paying little attention to the consumers of this porn, and instead considering seriously what gets a girl to the point where she feels it’s necessary or ultimately beneficial for her to have sex with someone for money. And beyond that, I’m thinking about the ramifications this must have on her family and her community. It is hard to imagine what, specifically, the ladies of the Sisterhood might have to say to the mother of a girl like this, but one can safely assume it would be brutal and sharp.

I have suddenly become an anti-porn crusader, and I hate it. I would prefer never to agree with Pat Robertson. I have no interest in sharing common ground with the Moral Majority. I wish I could throw my arms around all porn stars and tell them I think the work they do is great and important and not psychologically problematic at all, but I can’t, and I’m frankly horrified that I ever could.

Jesus May Love Pornstars: But Moses doesn't

In thinking about all this I did some research about halacha, Judaism and pornography. There’s a lot of information available online, which is good, because I have no interest in discussing this face to face with a rabbi. What I found was that, at least in terms of what’s online, no one in the Jewish world has anything really positive to say about pornography. Even the most liberal sources come down hard on pornography. No one in the Reform, Reconstructionist, or Renewal crowds is cheering publicly for porn stars. The only thing close to good that any Jewish source could bring themselves to say about Jews and porn was that at least these days Jews aren’t considered too unattractive to be in porn. And while I suppose it’s nice to know that the general public no longer considers Jewish girls prudish and frigid, I can’t say I’m overjoyed that the stereotype is now that Jewish girls are more in touch with their sexuality than gentiles. As Anne Roiphe writes in the column I just linked to, “With all our personal variety, we are probably no more or less sexy than anyone else. All the rest, negatives or positives, form a tall tale–and a slightly toxic one, at that.”

Amazingly, the discourse on pornography seen through a Jewish lens is really intelligent, and uniformly condemning. The condemnation is usually not angry fire-and-brimstone ‘God will/should strike pornographers with lightening’ (the exception coming, shockingly, from a Reform rabbi’s commencement address at Liberty University, of all places). Instead, Jewish leaders and intellectuals have clearly struggled with the various ways pornography has affected and is affecting the world and the Jewish community.

The discussion goes as far back as the Talmud, where a story is told of a man who’s so infatuated with a woman next door that he becomes deathly ill, and his doctors think the only way to make him better is for him to have sex with the neighbor in question. But the rabbis forbid it, and forbid anything even approaching it. They won’t even permit her to speak to him from behind a wall. Why? Because, the rabbis say, it’s better that he die than defame her dignity. (See Sanhedrin 75a, Rashi’s commentary).

Though one might expect the Orthodox world to be devoid of porn problem, that’s hardly the case. A chabad rabbi on askmoses.com discusses how to stop a porn addiction. A cover story from the Jewish Journal tells of an Orthodox rabbi caught in a porn addiction, and his work to try to stop it. Last year Arutz Sheva featured an anonymously written article about a porn addict in the frum community. This has prompted a number of castigatory responses, all of which address porn viewing exclusively. The idea that a member of the Orthodox world could be involved in making porn is well beyond the imagination of most of the rabbis choosing to deal with the issue.

Lindsey Vuolo: Hot Jewish Chick who thinks she's a bad person

Even outside the Orthodox spectrum, though, the reaction to Jewish pornography is pretty icy. Bitch magazine, has an article about Playboy’s first Jewish centerfold, and what it means for Jewish girls (in short: nothing good). Over at Slate there’s an awesome conversation between Wendy Shalit, Laura Kipnis and Meghan O’Rourke about the effects on porn on American culture. Though the three disagree in a lot of areas, none of them can bring themselves to say anything really positive, or even anything not-negative, about porn. Google books took me to a page from a book called How Do I Decide?: A Contemporary Jewish Approach to What’s Right and What’s Wrong By Roland Bertram Gittelsohn. Though the book seems pretty liberal, it comes right out and calls pornography “wrong.” Beliefnet is actually home to some of the most interesting discussion of porn and religion. They have a fantastic conversation between Shmuley Boteach of Kosher Sex fame, and Lindsey Vuolo, the Jewish Playboy centerfold discussed in the Bitch article. Go read the conversation now. Though Vuolo comes off as intelligent and generally well-spoken, Boteach’s arguments clearly get to her, and by the end of the interview she actually says, “I mean, you definitely made me think and now you’ve made me think I’m a bad person—.” It’s pretty incredible. Equally fascinating is a response to that interview by Bradley Hirschfield, Vice President of The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL) and a modern orthodox rabbi. Hirschfield basically says that people shouldn’t be getting up in arms about the fact that Vuolo is Jewish. It’s not a problem exclusive to Jews, and he says Jews need to deal with it in the same way as Christians, Muslims and the rest of the world. The best line from his article is “I want to be very clear. If Jews have a problem with this, it ought to be a problem with Playboy, not with her as a Jewish girl. That is, their discomfort should be coming from the fact that a magazine is paying women to get naked for a camera.”

Joanna Angel: Someone should tell her that adding bagels doesn't make porn kosher

There is simply no justification for pornography in any facet of the Jewishly engaged world. No one is saying it’s okay. Of course, that hasn’t kept Jews out of the business. Ron Jeremy and Nina Hartley are Jewish, and here at Jewcy we’ve brought you interviews with Jewish porn star and producer Joanna Angel, as well as an interview with her distraught Jewish mother. You can even find an academic article on Jews in the porn industry over at the Jewish Quarterly. But no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any publication, organization or blog willing to rave about how Jews in porn is a good or even acceptable thing.

When I finished reading through all of these discussions and articles it occurred to me that what I’d been looking for was something that would let my friend off the hook. I wanted some rabbi somewhere to be giving away free heters to porn stars. But there doesn’t appear to be any such rabbi. And the more I think of that, the more I’m okay with it, even proud of it. I’ve written before about how important I think it is for us to provide realistic sex education and information to the frum community, but I’m relieved to find that even I have clear boundaries. And pornography is way out of bounds.

Tamar Fox is an associate editor at MyJewishLearning.com. She has an MFA in fiction writing from Vanderbilt University, and a BA from the University of Iowa. She has worked as the editor of the religion blog at Jewcy.com, and is on the Editorial Board at The Jew and the Carrot. She spent a summer as a fellow at Yeshivat Hadar, and was a Senior Apprentice Artist for four years at Gallery 37 in Chicago.

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.

Several years ago, an acquaintance stole my identity and opened several credit cards in my name. I learned of the theft only when she ceased to be able to pay even the minimum amount due, and I became the unhappy recipient of several daily calls from menacing collection agents.

In the process of sorting out the resultant mess, I learned more than I wanted to know about the dangers of credit cards. I discovered how quickly fees add up when bills are not paid, and how eager credit card companies are to raise rates for delinquent customers. From one company’s diligent and helpful inspector, I heard unfortunate stories about financially-desperate parents who take out credit cards in the name of a minor, only to learn later that they have inadvertently ruined their child’s credit rating. From reading the credit card bills attributed to me, I was reminded how quickly small and necessary expenses—such as food and gas—can add up to unmanageable debt. In the end, I did not press charges against my acquaintance, both because I did not want to send one more person into our broken criminal justice system, and because I recognized her act as a desperate attempt to care for her family on an insufficient income. The fact that she would spend several years paying back the credit card companies seemed punishment enough.

Most people who get into credit card trouble are not doing anything illegal. And, while some use credit cards to buy luxuries that they can ill afford, many others rely on credit cards to buy food, pay medical bills, and manage other daily expenses when there is little cash on hand.

Even I, who am always careful to pay my credit card bills in full and on time each month, am mystified by much of the small print on the back of my statements, and the periodic letters I receive informing me that some obscure condition or another has changed in a way that only an accountant could understand. I was shocked, for instance, earlier this year to learn from a financial advisor that the company that issues one of my credit cards had begun imposing an annual fee; though I had read every one of the letters I received from this company, I had missed this crucial detail buried somewhere in the legalese.

In Jewish law, there is a category of prohibition known as g’neivat da’at — literally, stealing someone’s knowledge. This prohibition describes cases in which one person knowingly tricks another — say, by selling a lemon without revealing the car’s flaws. Technically, credit card companies that institute arcane policies are not guilty of g’neivat da’at, as these companies always fulfill the legal requirement to inform customers of changes to the account. However, when even a person with a graduate school education cannot always understand the descriptions of these changes, one wonders whether the credit card companies intend to inform or confuse. If the intention is the latter, then we might find the companies guilty of g’neivat da’at, and not hold the consumer liable for mistakes made as a result of this confusion.

The Torah famously forbids charging interest on loans. This prohibition becomes a bit more complicated in later law, as the establishment of banks and other financial systems requires that individuals and institutions be able to take interest from one another. Today, observant Jews are able to use, work in, and operate banks because of a legal accommodation, known as heter iska (permission to do business) that skirts the blanket biblical prohibition on interest.

Still, rabbinic discussions of interest shed light on some of the problems of the credit card industry. One rabbinic text notes that the word “neshekh” “interest” comes from the word “to bite,” and compares interest to a snake bite, which may not hurt at first, but eventually becomes unbearable as the venom begins to have its effect. (Sh’mot Rabbah 31:5)

I am thrilled that President Obama has taken on the issue of ensuring transparency in credit card rules, and of eliminating some of the more insidious fees and penalties.

Credit cards are not all bad. Credit cards allow for easy tracking of expenses, help people to get by until pay day, and offer frequent flyer miles and even money toward college tuition. And individuals should be held responsible for the irresponsible use of credit cards. But for the vast majority of Americans who try to be responsible credit card customers, who pay at least the minimum bill on time, credit card companies should be held accountable for providing easy-to-understand information and for avoiding excess fees that slowly “bite.”

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