Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

Embracing the Jew-fro
Lessons on beauty from the Story of Esther

I recently spoke to a friend who mentioned that after a lifetime of dyeing her hair and straightening it, she had decided to go grey and leave her hair curly. This was a big deal for her as it involved deviating from some invisible (or rather, highly visible), code of beauty norms and standards. For women of any age, beauty remains one of the hidden tyrannies of our time and Jewish women have their own sub-set of challenges to grapple with.  

As we prepare for the festive, fun and frolicsome holiday of Purim coming up next week Monday night and Tuesday, people might be unaware that the story is as much about gender oppression as it is about antisemitism. One of the prevalent themes in the story is the question of beauty. Our first encounter with women in the story is with the complex character Vashti who is invited to the feast of her husband, the Persian King, Achashverosh, wearing “her royal crown”. The Rabbis in the Talmud comment, “with her crown, and nothing else”: Vashti is invited to the feast without clothes to slavishly please the gaze of a horde of drunken men. Vashti understandably refuses this which ruffles the King and his advisors. Vashti is dismissed (some say put to death) and a totalitarian edict against ALL women goes out to the entire Persian empire (foreshadowing the edict against the Jewish people): men must rule their homes and women must speak the language of their husbands.

In the very next chapter, Achashverosh seeks a new wife! This chapter describes an ancient beauty pageant, which takes place in a royal harem where women anxiously and laboriously prepare their bodies to be gazed at and evaluated by the King. Guided by the King’s eunuchs, the women are subjected to a rigorous beauty regime, which puts even Gwyneth Paltrow’s beauty rigors to shame; “six months with oil of myrrh and six months with perfumes and women’s cosmetics”. Only when they are deemed ready, are they called before the King, so that he can gaze at each woman and determine whether she is beautiful enough to become Queen. The reader is invited to see this rigorous beauty pageant as a pendulum swing against the disobedient Vashti. In Chapter 1, she refused to be looked at by the King and his friends. In Chapter 2, Achashverosh makes the point that he can look at any woman he chooses and more, women will dedicate their every hour to preparing for the very moment when he will cast his gaze on them. Esther, a young Jewish woman is forcefully taken into this demeaning, finishing school for would-be queens, and has to navigate a double oppression; the fear of anti-semitism and her subjection to the gaze and beauty standards of a harsh patriarchy. How does she navigate this space?  

When each woman was called before the King, we are told “whatever she asked for, would be given her to take with her from the harem to the King’s palace”. One imagines each woman going laden with bags of beauty adornments and cosmetics, nervous for her night with the King. Yet, when Esther is called before the King, we are presented with calm antithesis: “she did not ask for anything but what Hegai, the King’s eunuch, guardian of the women advised”. Esther adopts a minimalist approach to her beauty routine. Forsaking the intense use of accoutrements, Esther seems to go ‘au naturelle’. Yet we are told, Esther won the admiration of all who saw her. The text subtly suggests that Esther holds onto and preserves her dignity in these undignified circumstances. On the one hand, she conceals her core Jewish self, yet in refusing the tyranny of this beauty regime, it is possible that she does not disguise her Jewish features. We are many centuries away from the story of Purim, yet we might easily recognise ourselves in this beauty pageant. From botox to diets to tummy tucks to high fashion; are we not also somehow bound by our “six months of myrrh and six months of cosmetics?”.

A few years ago a video circulated on YouTube called Be a Lady they said. The video critiques the pressures women are under to meet the beauty standards of Western culture. From being told that too much is wrong and then being told that too little is wrong, the video explores the ways in which the dictates around women’s bodies and women’s appearance in our culture are not that different from the harem of Achashverosh. Indeed, these beauty ideals can be even more crushing for minority groups whose stereotypical features do not conform to the dominant group culture. I am thinking now of Jewish women!

Marc Oppenheimer and Stephanie Butnick, hosts of the popular Jewish podcast Unorthodox, reflect on ways in which Jewish women can visibly display their Jewishness. Traditionally, men have the option of a kippah. While women today certainly have the option of wearing a kippah, Oppenheimer and Butnick reflected that women do not have straightforward ways of publicly displaying their Jewishness. At the end of the discussion, Marc came up with some unexpected words of advice: “How about if you have really, really curly hair and you are always straightening it or blowing it dry, then just stop, just look more semitic….If you are somebody who is in some way toning down semitic features, stop, just stop.…I am putting it out there….let your Jewfro fly”.

In Marc’s candid and perhaps somewhat controversial manner, he was drawing an irony which could cut deep for many Jewish women. We might aspire to wear Jewish symbols to celebrate our Jewishness, yet our beauty routines suggest an aspiration to ‘”remove the Jew” from our look, whether it is by getting rid of our curls or straightening our noses. We might not express it this way, but our beauty ideals sometimes reflect a stripping away of Semitic features.

Marc’s comment reminded me of a story my mother told me. She attended a government school in Johannesburg in the 60s and she described how she was teased mercilessly by girls with their perfect, straight, blonde hair, because her hair was dark, frizzy and ‘Jewish looking’. One can imagine Esther entering into a very similar kind of world in this Persian beauty contest. Yet we are told by the text, “she didn’t ask for a thing” (of beauty improvement). Is it possible that Esther might have opted for her semitic features, even though she dared not say she was Jewish? In a world where dominant beauty standards are fought with important slogans such as ‘black is beautiful’, one wonders what would it look like to really celebrate and embrace the beauty of a Jewish woman.

I cannot say for sure, but I want to believe that Esther was somehow able to do what Marc advises Jewish women. She couldn’t tell anyone that she was Jewish, yet she took pains not to disguise her Jewish features. Perhaps, she flounced her fro. Thus, the Megillah of Esther is a Jewish feel-good story in more ways than one. The anti-Semitic Haman and his gang are thwarted and the King falls in love with a Jewish girl who actually looks Jewish!

In reading about Esther this Purim, we might want to reflect on beauty, the standards we subtly impose on ourselves and that we subtly transmit to our children. Purim’s message is certainly that beauty is about an internal sense of values, about acting with courage and authenticity.

An additional message might be that the externals of beauty are more about appearing as ourselves than minimising our Jewish features. Isn’t it time to step out of the Western beauty pageant and celebrate our semitic inheritance, to ‘let our Jew-fro fly’?!