'The Beauty Industry Condemns Antisemitism' — But How?
To truly counter antisemitism, brands must rethink the products, procedures, and standards they sell.
Antisemitic incidents in the United States reached an all-time high in 2021, according to the Anti-Defamation League — but it wasn’t until Ye’s most recent anti-Jewish rant (and the violence it inspired) that the Jewish community saw a swell of support from social media users, celebrities, and consumer-facing corporations. Influencers posted about supporting their “Jewish friends.” Kim Kardashian denounced hate speech. Fashion companies cut ties with Ye (formerly known as Kanye West).
In the midst of it all, Cosmetic Business reported that the beauty industry was “speaking out” against antisemitism. But how? By posting a black-and-blue square to Instagram Stories and going back to business as usual? And what material impact could “speaking out” possibly have when the majority of popular beauty brands still promote white supremacist, Anglo-centric, homogenous beauty ideals — whether through the utility of the products they manufacture; or the heritage of the models they hire; or the curl-straightening, nose-shrinking tutorials they share? If the beauty industry were truly committed to countering antisemitism, it would need to rethink the products, procedures, and standards of physical “beauty” it sells.
To address this topic with all the insight, experience, and nuance it deserves, I asked one of my favorite essayists,
of the newsletter I Couldn't Possibly! , to write a guest essay for The Unpublishable. As she puts it, “We don’t need Kanye West to remind us of the antisemitism that exists in the world. We only need to look to the economy of beauty.”Please read Lyndsey’s brilliant piece below, and subscribe to her newsletter here.
A Nose For Syphilis
by
I wonder if the beauty industry knows what it means when it says it condemns antisemitism.
I wonder if the media knows what it means when it says it condemns antisemitism.
I wonder if my friends know what they mean when they say they condemn antisemitism.
I wonder if I know what I mean when I say I condemn antisemitism.
—
Like any good daughter of the American ‘80s, I grew up with blonde Barbies and tiny waists, with fair-haired Disney princesses singing songs about finding true love, and with all of the Kellys — Taylor, Kapowski, and Bundy. The Kellys, with their long straight hair, their bodies built specifically for leotards, and their noses so small you wonder if they can smell anything. The Kellys, who serve as a foil to their less-beloved, more ethnically-ambiguous counterparts. These are my heroes; icons impossible for me, a chubby little Jewish girl with no waist, to ever emulate.
I wonder if the beauty brands whose tools are used to paint the faces of the Kellys considered the word “inclusion” before 2020.
The only Jewish women I remember seeing on my television as a child are Shari Lewis (though often overshadowed by Lambchop), Rhea Pearlman (who played a Catholic, but wasn’t fooling anyone) and Fran Drescher, who not only played the part of, but created the character of Fran Fine on The Nanny. We watch The Nanny religiously when I am a child. I am mesmerized by her hair, her outfits, her chutzpah — but also by how comfortable it all feels. The Chinese food, the yiddish, the plastic sofa covers. I know this woman, I know her mother, I know what it’s like to look the same but completely different. Fran Fine's iconography is iconography I understand.
In later interviews, Drescher will say that she had to fight to keep Fran Fine Jewish. They want the character to be Italian, a more palatable shade of white for American audiences and for advertisers. Jews are polarizing, people won’t watch. The Nanny becomes one of the top sitcoms of the 1990s.
I wonder how switching Italian for Jewish, one ethnic white for another, feels to the network decision-makers now.
Fran Fine sits in a strange era of Jews and Jew-adjacents on primetime television. Rachel Green, the Jewish American Princess, and Monica Geller, the overbearing clean freak set free by post-highschool weight loss, are played by two non-Jews. There’s Elaine Benes, flanked by Jewish men intrigued by her “Shiksa Appeal.” Then there’s Dharma, the free spirited manic pixie blonde Jew, played by a Scientologist.
I wonder how it is possible that twenty years later, we’re having the same conversation often enough to write a verse in “We Didn’t Start The Fire” (which was written by a Jew) about it.
But this is not a story about Fran Fine or Fran Drescher or the cultural obsession with the hairstyle of a non-Jew playing a Jew on TV. This is a story about beauty and Jewish womanhood and storytelling and all that we hold to be true and all that those who tell stories about us hold to be true.
Jewish womanhood is hard to digest. On a screen, even if we are as pretty as the blonde protagonist, the context suggests society disagrees. On a screen, we are self-involved, overly precious, and desexualized. On a screen, we talk about nose jobs, about cottage cheese, about Boca Raton. We tell Jewish stories, but we refine them and make them easier to swallow. We make the stories beautiful so the stories make money. We don’t need Kanye West to remind us of the antisemitism that exists in the world. We only need to look to the economy of beauty.
I wonder what it’s like to wake up after a nose job and know the world demands you pay money to break your bones before it will find you beautiful.
Beauty is a proxy for wealth. The wealthier you are, the easier it is to fit the standard, and the more you fit the standard, the easier it is for you to build wealth. Beauty has always been currency, your bone structure and waistline determining how you move through life. But to call beauty and the power it holds “skin deep” is lazy.
I wonder how I’m ever going to take over the world if I keep spending my money on products that promise to make my hair, feral and frizzy and fatigued, look naturally shiny and satiny and sleek.
I wonder how I’m ever going to take over the world if I keep spending my money on products that promise to make my hair, feral and frizzy and fatigued, look naturally shiny and satiny and sleek.
For Jews, the way we look, our adherence to societal expectations of beauty, has been a matter of life and death. With plain-clothed Nazis everywhere, many German Jews chose to assimilate. They hid in plain sight, unable to flee, with new Aryan-sounding identities — new documents, new hair color, new clothing, a new home full of new recipes, new scents, new noises. In the 1940s in Germany, beauty is self-preservation, but self-preservation requires resources.
I wonder what it’s like to cut off your nose to spite your face.
—
People have a hard time placing my face — even my ex-mother in law who, after knowing me for nearly a decade, says to me over dinner, “You don’t look Jewish. You’re lucky you look much more Spanish,” as if these two things are somehow mutually exclusive, as if I should thank Hashem that my fully Eastern European Ashkenazi features read as Western European instead.
I wonder if I should thank Hashem that my Ashkenazi blood can pass for something else?
This is not the first time someone questions my identity. “You don’t look Jewish” means I don’t look like Barbara Streisand. In America, when we talk about looking Jewish, we center it on the whitest-presenting Jews and we refer to Ashkenormative features. In America, we talk about big curly hair, we talk about hooked noses and child bearing hips. In America, we don’t consider Sephardic Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Jews of Color, Jews by Choice, we only consider the stereotypes that perpetuate Jews as a monolith. In America, we still nearly always refuse to let Jewish actresses play Jewish characters on screen. In America, we still don’t understand that assuming all Jews look like Barbara Streisand is like assuming all Midwestern women look like Cindy Crawford. The American Dream is a dream of taming my hair, my nose, my cortisol-laden lack of a waistline.
I wonder if my nose looks more like the noses drawn on Jews before hooked nose propaganda pervaded society — small noses, meant to suggest decay by syphilis and thus confirm our status as immoral, as filthy, as the devil.
My grandmother, an artist who lives to be 103 and ¾, tells me often that I remind her of a John Singer Sargeant portrait and gestures wildly with her wrinkled, manicured hands as if she is painting me. It is one of the things I miss most about her. In the 1890s, Sergeant was known as the painter of the Jews — some surmise that he is homosexual and thus feels a kinship with the “otherness” of Jewish women in English society. Even so, Sergeant paints his Jewish clients with the faint taint of La Belle Juive, or The Beautiful Jewess, a historical conceit of art and literature created by the Beholder, certainly not the Beholden.
In my estimation, the Beholder presents La Belle Juive as cruel and vicious and in need of taming. She is olive skinned, almond eyed, languidly exotic, and oversexed. She is a beautiful young Jewess with an absent father, in need of a Christian man’s love to cleanse her of all her sins, whether she knows it or not; a beautiful young Jewess who either finds a savior in total domination by a Christian or the release of finality, of death at his hands. Though her early being is physical, this beautiful young Jewess conceit quietly represents all that Hitler ultimately decides Jews are responsible for: spread of disease, cultural decline, capitalism, injustice.
I wonder if the beauty industry knows what lies beneath its lies?
I am 33 years old in America when I start dating for the first time in my adult life, newly separated from the man whose mother tells me I am lucky I don’t look more Jewish. Overnight, my hair gets straighter and shinier, my cheeks and nose more contoured, my eyebrows more manicured, and my clavicle visible. Even as I advertise myself as an ideal Jewish mate, I try as hard as I can to slough away all of the features that make me me. I know exactly what to do and I also know better. In this moment, I refute the trauma and triumph of the generations of blood that run through me because I want to be loved. As he undresses me, a man tells me that Jewish girls have a vast and underappreciated eroticism to them. You don’t look Jewish and you are beautiful and I am beautiful and I look Jewish become gray.
I wonder if the beauty industry knows what lies beneath its lies like I do?
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, behold the Jewish ideal of beauty: it’s connected to the forever, to the eternal, to the ability to endure.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, behold the Jewish ideal of beauty: disconnected from the fleeting beauty that the Western world holds in such high regard, it’s connected to the forever, to the eternal, to the ability to endure. It’s about persistence. Instead of youth, Judaism implores us to ascribe beauty to an old face — Ve’hadarta p’nei zakein — to honor the face of the old person. Instead of the flower that blossoms quietly and quickly, Judaism implores us to find beauty in the Etrog tree, beautiful because it not only dwells continuously all year long, it produces fruit through all the seasons. Our beauty is the face of our ancestors, of our struggle, of our triumph, of our self preservation. It is L’dor V’dor — a ripple effect of every Jew that’s come before us. There are no trends in our beauty, it is all upward facing, even when we lose. There is permanence to its presence. It’s life over death, even when life looks like death.
I wonder if the beauty industry knows what it means when it says it condemns antisemitism.
Further Reading:
“La Belle Juive,” Tingis Magazine
“John Singer Sargent: Mrs. Carl Meyer & Her Children,” The Jewish Museum
“Why Won’t Hollywood let Jewish Actresses play Jewish Women?,” Inside Hook
“The Invisibles Reveals how some Jews survived Nazi Germany by Hiding in Plain Sight,” NPR
“Beauty & The Etrog,” Orthodox Union
“Which Part of a Woman’s body is Jewish and is it modest enough?,” Haaretz
Oh, this is just breathtaking. Thank you so much for sharing.
loved this article by Lyndsey Fox! I feel seen