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Some causes for pathological eating behavior can be found on the surface, in pressure surrounding outward appearances. Jewish women often consider their Semitic features ugly if they compare themselves (and they often do) to the average white American woman.
Because of their racial characteristics, Jewish women think they’re short and plump. This plumpness applies to buttocks, thighs, hips, stomachs, and breasts. They often consider themselves overweight, their muscles flabby, or other parts of their body structure too robust to be feminine. They see big noses, body hair, and abnormally dark eyes and hair. Their hair is usually curly, like mine, and that curl-iness is also seen as an unattractive element.
So in many ways Jewish women are the opposite of their Anglo-Saxon Protestant sisters with their ethnic tendencies toward being tall, athletic, slender, blue-eyed, and blonde.9 Although athleticism and slim figures are quickly disappearing in the face of fast food culture.
No one can do anything about being short, but the other Semitic characteristics I’ve mentioned are amenable to alteration. Nose jobs and hair straightening are very common in the Jewish community.10 The size of breasts, thighs, buttocks, and stomachs can be reshaped with muscle training and diet. Pelvis size can’t be changed since it’s bone.
Back when I wasn’t a skeleton, just terribly skinny, more than once I heard my Jewish friends say, as a compliment, “You have such a lovely gentile body!” I learned when I was a teenager that there was a word that meant non-Jewish. The most shocking thing is that this didn’t particularly shock me. You may have heard the phrase “self-hating Jew”. Many believe this phenomenon arose when the Jews were freed from the ghettos and allowed to assimilate with the general population.11 From living within one culture, the Jews moved to a border between two cultures, to a place where they could see in both directions: backward and forward, toward dreams, toward change.
My other features (big nose, curly hair, five foot four height) are typically Semitic. I’ve gotten along quite well with them, unlike my body, which has always had its own will separate from mine. African-American women have done better in this regard. Everyone knows the slogan “BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL”. One background factor for this racial self-esteem may be that, unlike Jews, black people have a significantly harder time changing their ethnic features.12 You can also change your name. I was born as Sheila because my parents didn’t want me to stand out too much from the crowd.
Nowadays Sheila is a very common Jewish name despite the fact that it comes from Irish. The name arrived in Ireland from the Latin Cecelia, which comes from the Latin word caecus, which means blind.
Shlomith without the final H is a rather rare name with roots in the Bible. Its base form is found in First Chronicles, chapter three, verse nineteen: And the sons of Pedaiah were, Zerubbabel, and Shimei: and the sons of Zerubbabel; Meshullam, and Hananiah, and Shelomith their sister.
I Hebraicized Sheila to Shlomith after I got married. I wanted to add the H at the end because it made the name more complete. It made it feel more rounded and soft in my mouth. The name remained even though we divorced and I left the kibbutz.
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Strict religious communities have always tried to protect themselves from outside influences. For example, Haredi Jews forbid their members from watching television. Isolation also feeds a culture of silence. Mental health problems, which anorexia is generally considered to be, are one of the greatest sources of shame among traditional Orthodox Jews. Knowledge of psychiatric treatment can even become an impediment to marriage.
I know of cases in which the parents of dangerously malnourished girls who were admitted to hospitals told the most stupefying lies to acquaintances and schools about their daughters’ conditions. One favorite explanation is the standard teenage illness, mononucleosis. What makes this comical is that mononucleosis, known in the vernacular as kissing disease, is acquired through touch or the exchange of bodily fluids like saliva or blood. Touching of any kind, but especially sexual contact, is subject to the most extreme regulation in ultra-Orthodox Jewish culture.
“But what does this have to do with you, Shlomith-Shkhina? You’ve never belonged to the religious Jewish community!” Yes, I hear very clearly the questions running through your minds. I can hear the murmurs in the auditorium. Your hushed voices grate in my ears because the thin layer of fat surrounding the lining of the nerve cells in my inner ear has almost completely disappeared.
It is true that my family looked askance at the Hasidim of Borough Park. We thought they were weird, freaks who represented the dark side of Judaism. Despite this, the Holy Book and the rabbinical Mishnah and Gemara that developed around it over the centuries always remain part of the shared foundation of Jewish culture and, ultimately, all of western civilization. The Holy Book is used in different ways in different Jewish communities, either freely and adaptively or dogmatically and inflexibly, but either way, the Book is there. It is in us. Jewish Law, Halakha, is an intertextual DNA strand we can no more escape than our own genes hidden in our chromosomes.
So for a moment longer let my body remain a laboratory in which deadly metaphors become concrete, in which contagious allegories and ravaging myths are tested!
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The first conference on Judaism and anorexia was organized in Philadelphia in 1998.13 I was there. That conference provided
