Embracing the Jew-fro: lessons on beauty from Esther

ADINA ROTH

Our first encounter with women in the story is with the complex character, Vashti, who is invited to the feast of Achashverosh “with her royal crown”. Our rabbis 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. By saying no, Vashti ruffles the king and his advisors. She is dismissed, and a totalitarian edict 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 wants 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 our visits to Sorbet 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 one, she refused to be looked at by the king and his friends. In chapter two, Achashverosh makes the point that he can look at any woman he chooses and more, and 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 about 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, she seems to go au naturelle. Yet, we are told, Esther won the admiration of all who saw her. The text subtly suggests that Esther 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’s possible that she doesn’t 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, aren’t we also somehow bound by our “six months of myrrh and six months of cosmetics?”

In the past few weeks, a video has been doing the rounds called Be A Lady They Said. The video critiques the pressure 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 aren’t that different from the harem of Achashverosh. Indeed, these beauty ideals can be even more crushing for minority groups whose stereotypical features don’t conform to the dominant group culture. I’m thinking now of Jewish women.

Marc Oppenheimer and Stephanie Butnick, the hosts of the popular Jewish podcast, Unorthodox, reflected recently on the ways in which Jewish women can display their Jewishness visibly. Traditionally, men have the option of a kippah, but women don’t have straightforward ways of displaying their Jewishness publicly. A hair covering denotes marriage. A long skirt denotes religiosity. But what of a woman who wants to simply show her Jewishness? At the end of the discussion, Oppenheimer 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’m putting it out there – let your Jewfro fly.”

In Oppenheimer’s candid and clever manner, he was drawing on 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’s by getting rid of our curls or straightening our noses. We aspire to look somewhat more, well, Scandinavian.

Oppenheimer’s comment reminded me of a story my mother told me. She attended a government school in Johannesburg in the 1960s, 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 the 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 black women fight dominant beauty standards with the notion of “black is beautiful”, one wonders what would it look like to really celebrate and embrace the beauty of a Jewish woman.

I can’t say for sure, but I want to believe that Esther was somehow able to do what Oppenheimer advises Jewish women to do. She couldn’t tell anyone 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 modern Jewish women might want to reflect on beauty. Purim’s message is certainly that beauty is about an internal sense of values, about acting with courage and authenticity. But an additional message might be that the externals of beauty are more about appearing as ourselves than minimising our Jewish features. For Jewish women, isn’t it time to step out of the Western beauty pageant, and celebrate our Semitic inheritance, to “let our Jew-fro fly”?

• Adina Roth runs B’tocham Education in Johannesburg, teaching courses to B’neimitzvah and Tanach and Midrash to adults. She is also a Melton educator, and a clinical psychologist in private practice. She is currently the national chairperson of Limmud SA.