Sometime after 7 October 2023, I decided to stop straightening my hair. For decades, I had employed round brushes and flat irons and smoothing oils in service of wrangling the Jew frizz, spending money I barely had on keratin treatments and Brazilian blowouts.
But as swastikas splattered public walls, as bomb threats blasted synagogues, as ancient conspiracy theories rose from the dead, as a congresswoman tweeted “Antisemitism is wrong, but …”, I examined what I’d been doing: trying to look less Jewish; trying, as perhaps my great-grandparents did, to assimilate. For the first time, I felt the violence in that choice.
