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ABSTRACT
We trace our maternal line’s journey across four generations as they weave into and back out of (white) American diet culture, out of and back into observant Judaism. Using our memories, against the backdrop of larger social-historical forces, we put forth a method of “re-membering” ourselves: our bodies and our wholeness. The first Minna in our story, Minna Yorkowitz, arrived as an immigrant to New York in 1905. She was a large woman and an observant Jew. Her daughter Ida rejected everything having to do with Judaism and saw thinness as a way of fitting in. Ida’s daughter, Margaret, sought her own (re)connections with Judaism while struggling well into adulthood with restrictive eating and internalized fatphobia. Minna Bromberg, Margaret’s daughter, deepened her connection with Judaism, connected with the fat liberation movement and, as a rabbi, seeks to deploy Jewish text and tradition in liberatory ways. Our “Fat Torah” approach looks at how diet culture is idolatrous and guilty of undermining the inherent worth of every human being. We offer a “re-braiding” that allows us to bring together each of our lives into a new wholeness.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The idea that diet culture “breaks apart the body of God Godself” draws on two different Jewish theological traditions. One is that each human being is created in God’s image. From this perspective, the harm done by weight stigma has the potential to damage each individual’s divine image. Additionally, in the Jewish mystical tradition (See, for example, Matt Citation2004, 1), one name for the Shekhinah, God’s most immanent presence – often seen as the Divine Feminine – is Keneset Yisra’el (the Assembly of Israel). Our claim here is that the harm done by weight stigma – especially when it creates a barrier to bringing our full selves to our religious and spiritual lives – also threatens the wholeness of Keneset Yisra’el. It should be noted that we are not making any claim that Judaism is inherently fat liberatory. Jewish tradition – like many other religious traditions – can certainly be used to exacerbate fatphobia. However, our claim here is that it can (and should) also be deployed in liberatory ways.
2. A spirituality of dwelling emphasizes tradition and conformity, which many came to find too confining. By contrast, a spirituality of seeking focuses on spiritual freedom but is “characterized more often by dabbling than by depth” (Wuthnow Citation2005, 168). Practice-oriented spirituality aims to reclaim the depth and commitment of dwelling without losing the choice-based attributes of seeking.
3. On name changes, assimilation, and social mobility, see Kirsten Fermaglich (Citation2015), “’Too Long, Too Foreign … Too Jewish’: Jews, Name Changing, and Family Mobility in New York City, 1917–1942, “ Journal of American Ethnic History 34, no. 3: 34–57.
4. “Kosher” and “kashrut” refer to Jewish dietary law.
5. On scholarship on Jewish bodies, see Sharon Gillerman (Citation2005) “More than Skin Deep: Histories of the Modern Jewish Body,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 3: 470–78.
6. Ida was an iconoclast. She clearly wanted to be American, but at the same time had socialist critiques of American government and culture. Thinness was an important part of her gender expression, but she was not particularly interested in stereotypically feminine beauty per se. While she was, as we all are, unique, these views fit in quite well within her circle of artistic, left-leaning friends.
7. This prayer, the first said upon awakening, expresses gratitude to God for having returned one’s soul/consciousness after the night’s sleep. “Moyde Ani” is a particularly Ashkenazi/Yiddish pronunciation of the Hebrew “modeh ani.”
8. Much has been written about Sanger’s eugenics. See for example Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s eugenic legacy: the control of female fertility (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, Citation2005).
9. While kashrut draws on a biblical and rabbinic tradition of permitted and forbidden foods and mixtures of foods, as well as rules around slaughter – without moralizing or explaining why foods fit into the categories of “permitted” or “forbidden” – diet culture is deeply enmeshed in Protestant and American ideas about desire and sinfulness as both Strings (Citation2019) and Farrell (Citation2011) show.
10. As with ideas about what makes a “Jewish body,” it is important here to specify that we are referring to Ashkenazi foods.
11. Strings makes the case that “disease was increasingly linked to overweight in the medical literature after 1912” and that physician’s concerns were typically directed toward “immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and people of Jewish descent” (Citation2019, 195).
12. Yiddish/Hebrew for “pig,” an insult both because of the connotation, shared with English, of someone who eats a lot and greedily, and also because pigs are nonkosher animals.
13. The Seven Sisters are elite women’s colleges (some of which now admit students of all genders), so named for their association with Ivy League schools which were for men only. These schools – Barnard, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Radcliffe – were thought of at the time as bastions of the WASP upper class.
14. On the Jewishness of City College, see Philip Kay, “‘Guttersnipes’ and ‘Eliterates’: City College in the Popular Imagination,” PhD diss., (Columbia University, Citation2011).
15. Both fatness and Jewishness are constructed as barriers to assimilation into whiteness. As Brodkin notes “The struggle to control a body out of control, or one that always threatens to become so, is a struggle to contain one’s Jewishness so that it conforms to whiteness” (Citation1998, 166).
16. Synagogue.
17. Hanoar Hatzioni (literally “Zionist Youth”) was founded in 1926 and was one of a number Zionist youth movements founded in Europe between the world wars. One distinguishing feature of Hanoar Hatzioni was that it was that it was affiliated neither with a particular political party nor with a particular religious stream.
18. The Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Associations were Jewish versions of the more popular “Ys” the YM and YWCA (which began as a Christian youth organizations). The 92nd Street Y in Manhattan still serves as a Jewish community and cultural center.
19. For more on the involvement of Jewish women in the Civil Rights Movement, see Debra Schultz, Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, Citation2011).
20. A traditional Jewish wedding canopy under which the wedding ceremony is conducted.
21. Traditional Jewish head coverings which by some Jews are worn only in synagogue, while others wear them whenever they are in public. In some Jewish communities, only men wear yarmulkes while in others they can be worn by people of any gender.
22. Originally published in 1973, The Jewish Catalog: A Do-it-Yourself Kit was an important part of the founding of the Havurah movement, which focused on empowering Jews to grow a Judaism that was more home-based than synagogue-based, and that did not rely on rabbis and other Jewish “experts.” A sukkah is a temporary booth built for the holiday of sukkot (The Festival of Booths) in the autumn.
23. Homily.
24. I’ve written extensively about my dieting experience at https://fattorah.com/blog.
25. We are drawing here on the traditional practice of making new meaning from Torah as well as on the tradition of viewing mitzrayim as not only a place in Jewish mythical geography, but as a spiritual state of narrowness or stuckness.
26. Celebrated in the spring, Passover is a central holiday in the Jewish tradition– marked by themes of freedom from slavery, social justice struggles in our own day, the renewal of springtime, and the importance of remembering and telling the stories of our people. The main observance of Passover is a seder (literally “order”), a home-based festival meal which involves retelling the story of the exodus from Egypt. According to the Pew Research Center, 70% of American Jews report attending a Passover seder each year (Lugo Citation2013)(https://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/ accessed March 16, 2021). This finding shows the importance of Passover even in the lives of Jews who are otherwise unaffiliated with Jewish religious community. By contrast, the same study found that only 39% of respondents reported that “they live in a household where at least one person is a member of a synagogue.”
27. We would be remiss in not mentioning “My Dinner with Fat Jewish Dykes” (Nadel Citation1994) on whose shoulders we feel our article stands. In it Nadel writes, “Dieting is an especially violent form of forced assimilation” (Citation1994, 78).
28. This teaching of ultimate human worth comes from Talmud, the “Oral Torah” of the Jewish tradition (see Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 37a).
29. Wittig’s powerful novel, first published in 1969, imagines a tribe of warrior lesbians breaking free from patriarchy and ready to overthrow it.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Minna Bromberg
Founder and President of Fat Torah, Minna Bromberg, PhD is a rabbi and fat activist who lives in Jerusalem. She received her doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University and was ordained at Hebrew College. She is also a singer, songwriter, and voice teacher.
Margaret Bromberg
Margaret Bromberg, MSW is a retired social worker whose career included the fields of psychiatric social work, domestic violence intervention, and hospice care. She divides her time between Sag Harbor, NY and Jerusalem and has extensive “Bubbe” duties on both continents.