Tag: Jewishness

The Politics and Anxieties of Curly Hair, Part 2: What I learned (and didn’t) from my parents

November 12, 2021

The other day, a completely innocuous thing happened while I was at work: my coworker complemented my hairstyle. She and I have just about the same hair in color and texture, but that day we had opposite styles – hers was in full fabulous curl, and mine was braided down against the sides of my head. When she said she liked my hair, my first thought was to say “oh God no, I just did this out of practicality”. I had braided it while it was still wet the night before, since it’s growing longer and it keeps getting really tangled while I’m sleeping. But I stopped myself and just told her I liked hers too (which I really did). It is, after all, an accepted greeting among curly-haired women that we assess each other’s hair and then trade styling tips. In my usual manner of overthinking things, this interaction led me down a line of thought that wove together a few different things that have been on my mind lately, and so I thought it was time for a follow up to the last time I wrote about curly hair.

Read More

The Ornament of the World: Why we shouldn’t define people by religion

January 17, 2020
The Ornament of the World
Promotional image for the PBS documentary. The documentary is full of jerky animations in this style, which doesn’t do much to help bolster the scholarship.

If you are an avid PBS fan, you may have seen the premier of a new documentary titled Ornament of the World in the last month. It’s a piece about the interfaith world of medieval Spain, and given that I work on the very related field of cross-cultural contact in medieval Sicily, I should have been excited to see it, but, frankly, I was surprised and somewhat exhausted at the thought that this movie had been made. Because not only was its perspective on interreligious contact left behind by the field of medieval studies almost 20 years ago, but its entire approach to the question assumes that peoples of different religions should be inherently separate.

Read More