HOW MY JEWISH HERITAGE INFLUENCED MY LOVE OF BEAUTY
Words by Viola Levy, beauty editor and award-winning journalist
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On a recent episode of the BBC’s The Politics Show, a non-Jewish panel was asked to debate whether Jews should be considered an ethnic minority. During the debate, Labour life peer Lord Wood called into question whetherBritain’s only Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, was actually Jewish, due to the fact that he converted to Christianity. He did what a lot of people do – equate Jewishness with religion, effectively erasing secular Jewish experiences like mine. When you think of Jewishness, you might think of religion, of not eating pork or having a particular stance on the Middle East. You might not think of make-up, skincare and perfume.But there are different ways to be Jewish – and forme,mylove of beautyis one of them. Growing up, my family was not religious. We didn’t observe Shabbat, or go to synagogue regularly. We didn’t have in-depth theological debates over whether God existed, or lofty discussions about what being Jewish meant to us. The single mothers in my family were too busy trying to run a household to ponder what they thought or felt (not that anyone would have listened to them anyway). Instead, they were obsessed with anything beauty related. As a child, I lived with my mum and grandma. I remember them waking up early (Jews don’t generally “sleep in”) and spending several hours on their hair and make-up. With a whole day of working and looking after other people ahead of them,getting made up was theironlyopportunity for alone time. Radio on, cup of tea on the side – it almost had a kind of ritualistic element to it.
For Jewish women, beauty and glamour are forms of armour and self-respect, cultivated over centuries when we had none. It’s a show of defiance, a backlash against how we were almost systematically wiped off the face of the Earth,orelse made to feel “other”orunattractive, as most ethnic minorities are. There are too manyfamous glamorous Jewish women to name – from beauty-industry doyennes Estée Lauder, Helena Rubinstein and Terry de Gunzburg, to starlets Goldie Hawn, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Tracee Ellis Ross. Until recently, I’ve never thought that my career as a beauty writer and my Jewishness would intersect. Working on the beauty desks of magazines, listening to my colleagues mispronounce “schlepp”, it neveroccurred to me that my background could provide interesting writing material. But my love of beauty is definitely interwoven with Jewish heritage, appearance-related activities being the closest thing my secular family got to any kind of devout practice. Indeed, many Jewish women see our beauty regimes as synonymous with chutzpah (a kind of “cheeky confidence” we’ve had to cultivate over centuries in order to survive). I didn’t go to a Jewish school – in fact, there were no other families like mine in our area (we lived in the suburbs of Hertfordshire, not Hampstead). I was a shy nerd and the popular girls didn’t have anything to do with me, aside from the occasional bitchy comment as I walked past
“There are different ways to be Jewish – and for me, my love ofbeauty is one ofthem”
them. But that all changed one parents’ evening, when mymother arrived wearing a slim-fitting white suit that contrasted with her deep olive skin, her hair in its signature glossy bob, dyed a raisin mahogany, and sporting a red lipstick. I rememberone of these girls – all stripyhighlights and Juicy Tube lips – staring at her in awe and then at me and then back at her again, not quite believing the two of us were related. And as I grew older, I took up the mantle of my elders in my devotion to my hair and beauty practices – trying and testing so manyproducts that I eventually made a career out of writing about them. As someone who code-switches from being loud and argumentative indoors with my equally loud Jewish family to being more reserved and “English” when I’m out in public, the beautyworld is the one place I feel like I can truly be myself. So it’s only fitting that I’m finally writing more about my Jewishness in relation to beauty,afterkeeping schtum forso long.
