I spent decades straightening my ‘Jewish hair’ – until I realised I was hiding my true self

Sometime after 7 October 2023, I decided to stop straightening my hair. For decades, I had employed round brushes and flat irons and smoothing oils in service of wrangling the Jew frizz, spending money I barely had on keratin treatments and Brazilian blowouts.

But as swastikas splattered public walls, as bomb threats blasted synagogues, as ancient conspiracy theories rose from the dead, as a congresswoman tweeted “Antisemitism is wrong, but …”, I examined what I’d been doing: trying to look less Jewish; trying, as perhaps my great-grandparents did, to assimilate. For the first time, I felt the violence in that choice.

Jewish hair is not a monolith, but it has long been held against us. In response to the Nazi propaganda that all Jews had dark curls, some tried to pass as Aryan by bleaching their hair. Other Jews survived the Holocaust by not having dark curls in the first place. Perhaps I inherited the urge to straighten: hide what you are or die.

I started to hate my hair when I was going through puberty and it sprouted overnight like a plant in a time-lapse video. For special occasions, I’d roll it wet into curlers the size of soup cans and cover it with something that looked like a giant white plastic mushroom, which attached to a long coil plugged into the wall that would blast my head with hot air. The contraption was my mother’s from her teen years and she still used it, too.

After cooking my hair for hours, I’d unwind the curlers, and watch my hair fall smooth around my shoulders. I never achieved shine, though. Shiny hair was as elusive as the skinny-strapped tank tops the girls who didn’t need bras got to wear.

Back then, my exposure to antisemitism was minimal: during a lakeside Shabbat service, a couple of guys paddled by in a canoe and yelled “Kikes!”, and a handful of people told Holocaust jokes in my presence. In high school, when a girl said I looked like Fievel from An American Tail, everyone laughed. (The memory of that one, a critique of my appearance, still zaps me with shame.)

But mostly, the antisemitism I absorbed was subliminal, unnameable – a general message in the ether that Christian holidays mattered, while others were an affront to American values; that certain physical features were beautiful, the rest ugly.

After dipping my toe into Orthodox Judaism in college, I decided that unless I was going to dedicate my whole life to religious observance, I would opt out. (I opted out.) Centring God, however, is only part of what it means to be Jewish. As the common wisdom goes, the Nazis didn’t care who was religious and who wasn’t; a Jew is a Jew. And I’ve never wished to stop being a Jew. I love my family, our seders, the richness of Jewish history.

And yet: I’d rather not look like myself. That, too, has been my religion.

In recent years, a number of Jewish women, as well as Black women and grey-haired women and women with alopecia and many other people who can’t cram their heads into the narrow confines of conventional beauty standards, have written about going natural as an act of resistance.

Maybe I’m resisting, too, by taking this stab at self-love. But I’m also still soliciting love from the world, just with a new intention: love me. Not a sleek, acceptable, Mayflower-descendant-passing iteration of me.

It’s summer, so my hair is extra frizzy at the moment, and I’m going with it. I can’t say I’m so enlightened that I feel beautiful. I can’t say I feel empowered. I can’t even say that I’ll forever resist the siren song of keratin. But in the mirror, I see the child I was, before I started micro-managing my appearance, before anyone condemned the kinks – in my hair or my identity. What does it mean to hate a part of myself, as Jews too often learn to do? With all the hate we are fielding these days, we no longer have that luxury.

• Diana Spechler is an author and essayist. She writes the newsletter Dispatches from the Road

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