“Zaftig”
Oriana M. Korin, George Washington University, Sophomore
It’s easy for me to recall the taste of challah French toast topped with fresh strawberries, powdered sugar, and thick maple syrup at the trendy, bustling, and appropriately named Zaftig’s restaurant. My memories of eating at Zaftig’s are from adolescence, a simpler time when being a zaftig Jewish girl was not only easy, but in some ways defined my identity. I wasn’t thin, I wasn’t athletic, and I wasn’t musical. Instead, I found my confidence in what I was: spirited, intelligent, and popular.
Before college, exercise had been a social activity, dieting had been intermittent and without real purpose, and eating had been a source of intense joy. Being heavy never mattered enough to deliberately do something about.
Then, the summer before college, I began exercising periodically because it felt pro-active and healthy. I rarely considered its effects on my body, because that seemed unchangeable to me. In college things changed drastically. Unintentionally at first, then compulsively, I began to exercise for three hours daily and subsist on a semi-starvation diet. Of course, I also began to lose weight. I am compulsive by nature, so blaming this severe routine on my obsessive ways was fantastically easy.
This desire and pressure to be thin were new to me. My all-female Jewish summer camp did not instill a thin Jewish standard within me. If anything, it did exactly the opposite. But at my college, being Jewish is second best to only one quality: being thin. There is an unspoken competition to appear to be both. And it doesn’t stop at that. A thin Jewish girl must also be rich, intelligent and basically perfect. Obviously, this is completely unachievable. The things about myself that I had once viewed as harmless now suddenly seemed to be life-damaging.
In my experience, Jewish mothers don’t know how to battle eating disorders because body image is such a non-existent part of the Jewish tradition. So, I sought help from Jews other than my mother because I felt they would be easier for me to confide in and would understand. I also assumed that Jewish advice would center around values similar to my own. But the challenge of food—when to eat, what to eat, how much to eat—is one that both my Jewish dietician and my Jewish social worker tell me I’ll never totally conquer.
In a vicious cycle, my family’s concern over my weight loss and consequential force-feeding led to my binge eating, which led to my purging. When I went home for Passover, in a moment of crazed hungry weakness, I consumed half of a kugel, then ran five miles in shame, wondering if family members were asking how such a good Jewish eater lost 50 pounds after all.
A year-and-a-half ago, I thought that nice Jewish girls didn’t have eating disorders. Loving families and a forgiving religion prevented this disease of insecurities. I now maintain that even Jewish girls have eating disorders. But the Jewish emphasis on learning and growing has taught me that I can get over mine.
I still feel enormous pressure in situations with food, but I’ve gained confidence in my ability to deal with the food demons in my life. When I eat at Zaftig’s now, it is not with the same comfort and ease that I used to. I don’t deprive myself of challah French toast, but I don’t eat a double portion, because being Jewish has taught me that in order to live well, I have to love myself and be healthy.
“The Meaning in the Matzoh Balls”
Amy Burghardt, Princeton University, Sophomore\t
After our spring break last March, a friend and I discussed our week at home. “I went to my grandparent’s house for dinner a couple of times,” she said. “All through the meals, my grandmother kept giving me food—more meat, more vegetables, more potatoes, and finally more cake. It was like she thought food was love or something!”
We both laughed. But last Passover I discovered that food can be love. It was my first Passover that I spent away from home and I decided that for the first time I wanted to stay strictly kosher. I resolved to stay away from bread and cookies and all those delightful things containing leavened wheat or corn syrup. It’s as if because there are relatively few Jews at school, I felt the desire to be an especially good representative of my people.
I went to my grandparents’ house for the second night’s seder. As we sat around the dining room table and read the Haggadah, I realized how blessed I am to have a warm and loving family in this unpredictable and often dangerous world.
After the meal, there was some matzah ball soup left over. Knowing that tasty snacks would be harder to come by at school, I asked my grandmother if I could take some soup back with me. Her face lit up. She was clearly delighted that I wanted to take back to campus the food that she had prepared. My grandmother happily gave me a container of soup to bring back, as well as a generous slice of her famous flourless Viennese chocolate cake. It was her way of saying that she loved me and wanted me to be happy, healthy, and most importantly, well-fed.
At times it seems absurd that our elders appear to care more about what we are eating than what we are thinking. But there is an undeniable social connection between Jewish people that is forged through food. I learned last Passover that food is about much more than filling your belly and pleasing your taste buds.
It’s about family. It’s about connections. It’s about love.
“The Kibbutz Experience”
Lianne Elias, Concordia University, Senior\t\t
I have issues with eating. I think of my weight too often, of my fat thighs and my poor exhausted stomach—eternally hidden under a layer of fat so thick it cannot be punctured by the shadow of muscular definition. But deep down I also know I look better than I think. I blame my mutilated self-perception on the paper-thin models who stare haughtily down from their fashionable perches on magazine shelves.
I have also not forgotten my Jewish heritage and its immemorial obsession with food. Wonderfully, my mother is not unreasonable or neurotic about food the way some of my friends’ Jewish mothers can be. I had a very healthy appetite as a child and food is valued in our household. I was also taught that food is something of great importance, that it helps build physical and psychological strength, and encourages joy in times of sorrow. Indeed, during a shiva (mourning ceremony), my house was so full of food and people that if felt like a celebration of life rather than of death.
But not all of my Jewish experiences with food have been positive. The dark days began two weeks after my 15th birthday when I spent a year on a kibbutz. Young and excited, I was ready to take on the world and mature into a real teenager. My kibbutz experience was truly marvelous in that it granted liberation and freedom to develop unhindered. Unfortunately, it was also during this exhilarating time that my negative body image was formulated.
The popular belief that female beauty is fundamentally defined by the narrowness of one’s behind, the sleekness of a girl’s thighs, and the sharpness of her protruding hip bones, has not escaped Israeli society, and especially not the kibbutz where I lived. There, the boys, who all drove Suzuki dirt bikes, expected us American girls to be beautiful, promiscuous, and skinny, of course. If you didn’t fit the criteria, you were ignored or else your physical flaws were publicly ridiculed and emphasized, just for fun.
And so, while still in the comfort of my Bubbe’s ample breasts it was easy to remain ignorant
of this unfair reality. When left alone to contemplate my experiences my mindset was reconstructed. And my notion that good, strong hips present the proper ingredients for a beautiful woman was left to fester in the food court of a long forgotten airport.
