John in Woodbridge
August 28th, 2004, 08:55 AM
http://www.forward.com/issues/2002/02.11.01/fast1.html
Gabrielle Glaser has the blond hair and blue eyes you might expect of a woman who grew up on a farm in rural Oregon.
What she also has is a little more surprising: a fleshy, assertive proboscis — in short, a shnoz.
"My nose was absolutely my identifying characteristic," said Glaser, 38. "I was acutely aware that I looked different from other people. My nose was just an easy target. I would wander around, sort of stretching my nose, trying to make it look smaller in profile.... My dream was to save up for rhinoplasty."
But her nose not only set her apart from other children — it was an early hint of something she wasn't aware of as a child: that she was half-Jewish. "My mom wasn't Jewish, I didn't grow up around other Jews, but I still had this bizarre, parallel Long Island experience growing up in Oregon," she said.
Salvation came in the person of an Italian hairdresser who cut Glaser's hair during a family trip to Rome when she was 16. "He said to me that I had a beautiful nose," she said. "I was astonished. He said to me, 'don't touch your nose.' I took that to mean, oh, don't do plastic surgery. For some bizarre reason, having him tell me I was okay was enough to carry me over, thank God."
Now, Glaser is happily married to Stephen Engelberg, the former New York Times reporter who is managing editor of The Oregonian, whom, she said, "has a remarkable nose — I love it." And at least one of her three daughters, Glaser said, "definitely has my nose."
In her latest book, "The Nose: A Profile of Sex, Beauty and Survival" (Atria Books, 2002), Glaser traces mankind's intrigue and obsession over the nose and our sense of smell.
But as her own story indicates, it is a history with particularly pungent implications for Jews. Over the centuries, the "Jewish nose" has been inseparable from the history of antisemitism, stereotyping and the notion of the Jew as "the other." The Jewish nose has been described, as anthropologist Robert Knox said in 1850, as "a large, massive, club-shaped, hook nose." It's a notion that Jews themselves embraced — and sought to modify — starting with Dr. Jacques Joseph's popular cosmetic surgeries for Berlin Jews in the late 1800s, all the way through to the "designer noses" that suburban Jews got in time for their bat mitzvahs in the 1970s.
Given our increasingly multicultural society — and as the complex debate of "who is a Jew?" rages on — what, exactly, is the state of the Jewish nose today?
According to the experts, not much has changed. "The caricature of the Jewish nose has become something so commonplace," said Sander Gilman, author of "Written on the Body: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery" (Princeton University Press, 1999) and "The Jew's Body" (Routledge, 1991).
"What is most fascinating to me is that Jews internalize it," said Gilman, director of the Jewish studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Jews believe they look different from everyone else.... We have a fetish now of knowing who the Jews are in the room. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong."
And this is despite the wide geographic reach of the Diaspora, in which the notion of a Jewish "type" has lost much of its meaning, if it ever had one. Writer Teddy Weinberger makes the point in an essay in The Jewish Advocate: "There is probably not one 'traditional' Jewish nose amongst the entire Ethiopian Jewish population."
Nonetheless, the term "Jewish nose" continues to have currency — even in the medical world. As recently as 1996 a book on plastic surgery described the correction of "the Jewish nose" as necessitating a "classic rhinoplasty."
Dr. Dennis Berak, a plastic surgeon in Great Neck, N.Y., said he performs, on average, two nose jobs a week and estimates that roughly half of his clients at Millennium Plastic Surgery are Jewish. "Maybe 15 years ago, the grubby look, the ethnic look, was in," Berak said. "It was, 'be natural, be who you are.' That didn't last very long. A girl who is otherwise attractive but has a big, ugly nose, it draws your eye to it and detracts from her other features."
Still, Berak said his clients don't come in and say, "fix my Jewish nose." "There was a time, especially after World War II, when nose jobs became very popular," he said. "People wanted to lose their ethnic identities; they changed their names, they changed their noses, they voted Republican. Today, I say a small bump on a Jewish girl is not going to drive her into my office."
"There is a definite trend of Jewish women resisting nose jobs," Glaser said. In the course of researching her latest book she said, "I met so many women who had had their noses fixed. So many of them — with such obvious nose jobs — whispered to me, said, 'I don't want my daughter to know about it.'"
But even as ethnic diversity becomes more accepted, there are limits. According to Gilman, fears of looking "too Jewish" can still be heard.
Pop culture would seem to offer a strong case for keeping your strong nose. Actors such as Sarah Jessica Parker and Owen Wilson have shown that large, somewhat bent noses can be trendy, even sexy — while Jennifer Grey, on the other hand, famously lost work after a nose job left her unrecognizable to fans. Nevertheless, nose jobs, like most plastic surgeries, are increasingly popular — according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery there were 177,422 nose jobs in 2001, up from 137,053 in 1997.
Accepting a proud honker sometimes comes too late to some. Alison Newman — not her real name — a 26-year-old journalist in Manhattan, had her nose "fixed" 10 years ago, in a back-to-back operation with her best friend. "I look like my mother," the Long Island native said. "I inherited her nose; she fixed hers, so I guess the expectation in the family narrative was that I would, too."
It's a decision that she now regrets. "It was almost like I didn't have anything else to do that winter break," she said. "Looking back, I often wish I hadn't done it. When I look at pictures of myself then, it looks like my face; the more genuine look of who I was, how I was born. My mother-in-law says I have a great nose — but I think she would have said it even before my nose job. So what did I need it for?"
And even if you accept that Jews are beaky, what's wrong with that? "We, as people, make associations that somehow a strong nose is indicative of strength, character," Glaser said. "Think about elected officials, for example. Who had a small nose among American presidents? Kennedy was the only one I could think of. Nearly every other American president had a strong nose. Is this an outward sign of power? Probably."
Gilman, on the other hand, firmly rejects any stereotype about Jews and noses.... Well, except one: "In 35 years of working on this topic, I have never seen a Jew without a nose," he said.
Gabrielle Glaser has the blond hair and blue eyes you might expect of a woman who grew up on a farm in rural Oregon.
What she also has is a little more surprising: a fleshy, assertive proboscis — in short, a shnoz.
"My nose was absolutely my identifying characteristic," said Glaser, 38. "I was acutely aware that I looked different from other people. My nose was just an easy target. I would wander around, sort of stretching my nose, trying to make it look smaller in profile.... My dream was to save up for rhinoplasty."
But her nose not only set her apart from other children — it was an early hint of something she wasn't aware of as a child: that she was half-Jewish. "My mom wasn't Jewish, I didn't grow up around other Jews, but I still had this bizarre, parallel Long Island experience growing up in Oregon," she said.
Salvation came in the person of an Italian hairdresser who cut Glaser's hair during a family trip to Rome when she was 16. "He said to me that I had a beautiful nose," she said. "I was astonished. He said to me, 'don't touch your nose.' I took that to mean, oh, don't do plastic surgery. For some bizarre reason, having him tell me I was okay was enough to carry me over, thank God."
Now, Glaser is happily married to Stephen Engelberg, the former New York Times reporter who is managing editor of The Oregonian, whom, she said, "has a remarkable nose — I love it." And at least one of her three daughters, Glaser said, "definitely has my nose."
In her latest book, "The Nose: A Profile of Sex, Beauty and Survival" (Atria Books, 2002), Glaser traces mankind's intrigue and obsession over the nose and our sense of smell.
But as her own story indicates, it is a history with particularly pungent implications for Jews. Over the centuries, the "Jewish nose" has been inseparable from the history of antisemitism, stereotyping and the notion of the Jew as "the other." The Jewish nose has been described, as anthropologist Robert Knox said in 1850, as "a large, massive, club-shaped, hook nose." It's a notion that Jews themselves embraced — and sought to modify — starting with Dr. Jacques Joseph's popular cosmetic surgeries for Berlin Jews in the late 1800s, all the way through to the "designer noses" that suburban Jews got in time for their bat mitzvahs in the 1970s.
Given our increasingly multicultural society — and as the complex debate of "who is a Jew?" rages on — what, exactly, is the state of the Jewish nose today?
According to the experts, not much has changed. "The caricature of the Jewish nose has become something so commonplace," said Sander Gilman, author of "Written on the Body: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery" (Princeton University Press, 1999) and "The Jew's Body" (Routledge, 1991).
"What is most fascinating to me is that Jews internalize it," said Gilman, director of the Jewish studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Jews believe they look different from everyone else.... We have a fetish now of knowing who the Jews are in the room. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong."
And this is despite the wide geographic reach of the Diaspora, in which the notion of a Jewish "type" has lost much of its meaning, if it ever had one. Writer Teddy Weinberger makes the point in an essay in The Jewish Advocate: "There is probably not one 'traditional' Jewish nose amongst the entire Ethiopian Jewish population."
Nonetheless, the term "Jewish nose" continues to have currency — even in the medical world. As recently as 1996 a book on plastic surgery described the correction of "the Jewish nose" as necessitating a "classic rhinoplasty."
Dr. Dennis Berak, a plastic surgeon in Great Neck, N.Y., said he performs, on average, two nose jobs a week and estimates that roughly half of his clients at Millennium Plastic Surgery are Jewish. "Maybe 15 years ago, the grubby look, the ethnic look, was in," Berak said. "It was, 'be natural, be who you are.' That didn't last very long. A girl who is otherwise attractive but has a big, ugly nose, it draws your eye to it and detracts from her other features."
Still, Berak said his clients don't come in and say, "fix my Jewish nose." "There was a time, especially after World War II, when nose jobs became very popular," he said. "People wanted to lose their ethnic identities; they changed their names, they changed their noses, they voted Republican. Today, I say a small bump on a Jewish girl is not going to drive her into my office."
"There is a definite trend of Jewish women resisting nose jobs," Glaser said. In the course of researching her latest book she said, "I met so many women who had had their noses fixed. So many of them — with such obvious nose jobs — whispered to me, said, 'I don't want my daughter to know about it.'"
But even as ethnic diversity becomes more accepted, there are limits. According to Gilman, fears of looking "too Jewish" can still be heard.
Pop culture would seem to offer a strong case for keeping your strong nose. Actors such as Sarah Jessica Parker and Owen Wilson have shown that large, somewhat bent noses can be trendy, even sexy — while Jennifer Grey, on the other hand, famously lost work after a nose job left her unrecognizable to fans. Nevertheless, nose jobs, like most plastic surgeries, are increasingly popular — according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery there were 177,422 nose jobs in 2001, up from 137,053 in 1997.
Accepting a proud honker sometimes comes too late to some. Alison Newman — not her real name — a 26-year-old journalist in Manhattan, had her nose "fixed" 10 years ago, in a back-to-back operation with her best friend. "I look like my mother," the Long Island native said. "I inherited her nose; she fixed hers, so I guess the expectation in the family narrative was that I would, too."
It's a decision that she now regrets. "It was almost like I didn't have anything else to do that winter break," she said. "Looking back, I often wish I hadn't done it. When I look at pictures of myself then, it looks like my face; the more genuine look of who I was, how I was born. My mother-in-law says I have a great nose — but I think she would have said it even before my nose job. So what did I need it for?"
And even if you accept that Jews are beaky, what's wrong with that? "We, as people, make associations that somehow a strong nose is indicative of strength, character," Glaser said. "Think about elected officials, for example. Who had a small nose among American presidents? Kennedy was the only one I could think of. Nearly every other American president had a strong nose. Is this an outward sign of power? Probably."
Gilman, on the other hand, firmly rejects any stereotype about Jews and noses.... Well, except one: "In 35 years of working on this topic, I have never seen a Jew without a nose," he said.