There is no such thing as a Jewish nose. There are Jews, and they have noses, just like almost everyone else. Those noses are in no way remarkable or significantly different from the noses of the general population. The big (often hooked, frequently grotesque, generally repulsive, and highly caricatured) Jewish nose is a myth.
I don't say this as an act of self-hatred or a distancing from an important cultural or ethnic feature that I dislike and want to abandon. I'm not a nose-job seeking young woman (or her parent), and it's not 1988. I have nothing against big noses, on whomever they may be found. Which is pretty much everyone, everywhere, in roughly equal proportion. I say this, instead, as someone who has researched the history of physiognomy, the imagined connection between facial features and internal character, and how our commitment to that connection affects how we judge people. I'm a historian and theorist of the face and body, and I think a lot about what our faces mean … and what they don't.
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