A Girl of her People

There’s a little blowup right now in certain parts of the Jewish community, and what are minor barely religious holidays of small segments of the population for except airing those small segments’ dirty laundry for the rest of the world to see?

Anyway, the commotion is about the new American Girl doll, Rebecca Rubin, the Jewish doll.  According to segments of the Jewish community, she doesn’t look Jewish enough because of her light eyes and light wavy hair.


Judaism is an odd thing, being part religion, part community, and part ethnicity.  Just the other day, when a fellow Jew realized I was Jewish, she greeted me as a cousin, not just as a coreligionist.  And most people hold in their heads a picture of what Jews are supposed to look like.  For many people, including many jews who have internalized the stereotype, this picture includes dark curly hair, olive skin, dark eyes, and a big hooked nose.

I’m not about to deny the power of this picture. When I wanted to create a character for a novel who would be “Jewish” (I use the quotations because it’s a secondary world fantasy novel) I even invoked this deliberately, giving her dark curly hair, and a hooked nose.  Nor am I going to deny that aspects of this stereotype have been used to stigmatize Jews in the past.  The racialization of Judaism is an ugly thing.

However, while being Jewish is partly an ethnic determination, Jewishness isn’t one ethnicity but a group of them.  Even were I to set aside the Mizrahim and the Sephardim, Indian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Chinese Jews, the Teimanim, and a dozen or more other Jewish ethnicities (sorry guys) and focus only on the Ashkenazim, the European Jews, that both the common stereotype of Jewishness and Rebecca are supposed to represent, we’re nothing like as universal as the stereotype would suggest.

I’m blonde.  I have pale skin and grey-green eyes and wavy hair.  When I went to the synagogue on Friday night this week, I saw a lot of hair like mine, and a lot of eyes like mine.  In middle school, of the six Jews in my year, three of us had blond hair, one of us had dark brown hair, and two of us had light brown hair.  Four of us had light eyes, and only two of us had curly hair.  Are we less Jewish because we don’t fit the stereotype?

And the stereotype is an artifact of the racialization of Judaism done by anti-Semites.  Our evil was in the blood, and you could tell who we were by our looks.  I remember exactly what all of the Jews in my middle school class looked like the way I do because my teachers made a point of it.  While we studied the Holocaust, my teachers had all of the Jewish kids stand up to show how little we looked like the stereotype.  The fact that we as a people have internalized this stereotype to such a degree that we even, in whatever small way have come to measure our own Jewishness against it is outright sickening.

Rebecca’s hair is the same kind of hair my friend from high school who introduced me to French horn klezmer has (It’s a weird animal, French horn klezmer, but she played the French horn, so there you go).  Her skin is the same tone as an ex-boyfriend of mine who led the Seder dinner for me when I didn’t feel up to it after cooking all day.  And her eyes?  Those are mine.

This Hanukkah, I’m getting a miniature Rebecca doll.  It’s so rare to see a representation of Jewishness that looks like me, that I can see my face in.  I have the Ashkenazi features, the round eyes, thick eyebrows, and hooked nose, and still, they never look like me.  This time, one does, and all the Jews who got to look like the representations for so long are up in arms.  What they don’t realize is, when they say she doesn’t look Jewish enough, what they’re really saying is I’m not Jewish enough.

Hanukkah Sameach everybody.