JEWISH WORD

The Jewfro Grows Up and Out

“I love your curly hair,” gushes Katherine Heigl’s heavily intoxicated character as she runs her fingers through Seth Rogen’s kinky ringlets in the hit movie Knocked Up. “Do you use product or anything?” Abashedly, he replies, “No…I use, uh, Jew it’s called.” At the butt of the joke lies the mass of thick, curly, unruly fluff Jews and non-Jews alike have come to know as the “Jewfro,” or Jewish Afro. Although Jewish tresses come in all manner of textures and colors, the stereotype of “Jewish” hair is rooted in a history of racial pseudo-science, radical self-empowerment and comic self-deprecation.

Jewish hair’s distinctive nature is mentioned as early as the Bible, which describes Hebrews’ hair as “black” and “thick,” characteristics considered beautiful, a sign of strength. Who could forget the Song of Songs enticement, “Thy hair is as a flock of goats”? But through the Middle Ages and Industrial Revolution, this same hair made Jews in Europe stand out from the crowd.

Jews didn’t fare well in 1735, when Carolus Linnaeus, the Swede whose botanical taxonomy built the modern biological classification system, began sorting humans along racial lines, kicking off a long, pernicious tradition of “scientific” racism. With their curly hair and Semitic features, Jews fit in neither with the Europeans’ “white, serious, strong” features, nor the “lazy, impassive” Africans and their “kinked” hair. Linnaeus was followed in 1881 by German ethnographer Richard Andree, who wrote of “less noble” Jews, who, unlike the more “graceful” specimens of their “race,” had big mouths, thick noses, “and often curly hair.” Six years later the Frenchmen Abel Hovelacque, an anthropologist, and Georges Hervé, a physician, characterized German Jews’ “round head, curly hair, large nose, thick lips” as lacking “any delicacy.” Interestingly, the stereotypical hue associated with Jewish curls was not black, but red, which ethnographers estimated was five times more prevalent among Jews.

That Jews as well as blacks were victims of racial prejudice was one of the shared bonds between these two peoples in 19th and 20th century America. So when, in the 1960s, African Americans began to rebel against societal conventions of beauty through the “Black Is Beautiful” movement by displaying their hair in all its natural glory, Jews, some of whom were closely allied with the civil rights movement, took notice. The “Afro” was pioneered by the Black Panthers, but quickly became all the rage. African American magazines like Ebony and Essence featured celebrities such as the Jackson Five and actress Pam Grier rocking the new style. “They figured out how to own their own hair,” says Shuly Rubin Schwartz, associate professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary. “Jewish women in turn thought, ‘Why are we sitting under the hair dryer?’” Thus, the Jewfro was born.
Picking up on the style, and perhaps empathizing with the black population’s struggle, prominent Jewish folk rockers sported frizzy ’fros. Art Garfunkel, with his puffy locks, dedicated the song He Was My Brother to his friend Andrew Goodman, a civil rights activist killed by the Ku Klux Klan. Bob Dylan, displaying a dark wiry ’do, became heavily involved in the civil rights movement; he based the melody of protest song Blowin’ in the Wind on the traditional slave song No More Auction Block. His hair seemed to be a natural extension of the cause.

It took a while, but eventually the media caught on, entrenching the term Jewfro. It wasn’t the first choice: In 1971, a New York Times article on Harvard University’s “hairy” basketball team characterized its captain’s unkempt hair as “a first cousin to the Afro.” But for the Jewish junior from Brooklyn, “the bushy dark hair that is piled high on his head has been called an Isro,” combining Israel and Afro. Novelist Judith Rossner was described in a 1977 Chicago Tribune profile as having “an open, oval face framed by a Jewish Afro.” The word was firmly ensconced by 1995 when Jewish Essence contributor Pamela Margoshes credited black political activist Angela Davis with helping her find “the courage to let my hair go to its natural form: an Afro. A Jew-Fro!”

Yet society continues to subtly perpetuate the idea that sleek and straight is beautiful, making the curly hair of both Jewfros and Afros contentious, particularly for women, says Shari Harbinger, director of education for the curly hair salon DevaCurl. She struggled with her curly hair growing up, choosing to blow dry it straight and even resorting to harsh Japanese relaxers. The curly-straight struggle haunts some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, as Sarah Jessica Parker confesses in the 2005 book Stars of David. “I always feel that people think that straight hair is pretty and curly hair is unruly and Jewish,” she says. When she receives excessive praise from men for straightening her hair for a part, she jokingly responds, “‘You’re an anti-Semite!’ Because I just feel it’s a little stab at the Jews.”

Men, on the other hand, seem to have taken their chaotic locks in stride, capitalizing on their comic appeal. The Jewfro is popular among new-wave comedians such as Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill, who have turned the style into a punch line. Of course, other funnymen—like Irish-descended Will Ferrell—wear Jewfros too. “Curls don’t discriminate,” says Harbinger. “People shouldn’t be defining it as a ‘Jewfro’ because it really does transcend race and religion.”