The blood on my fat Jewish hands

In these polarized times, y’know what the vast majority of people across political and cultural divides seem to agree upon? Fat people are worthy of derision and fat jokes are legitimate weapons no matter what you’re fighting for. Even otherwise well-meaning people seem to forget that anti-fatness is always dehumanizing, always a sign that we have forgotten that every single body is created in the image of the Divine and is worthy of life and dignity.

Let’s check out just a few shining examples in this vast sea of near consensus. Forgive this list of links; I don’t want you to have to look at any of these unless you really want to. But I truly do believe:

• It’s not right to use anti-fatness against Trump.
• It’s not right to use anti-fatness against Ben Gvir (especially when you can just say FCK BNGVR instead).
• It’s not right to use anti-fatness against Jews and Israelis, like this guy who wants to “liberate my food” and send it to the Gazans I am “intentionally starving.”
• It’s not right to use anti-fatness against antizionists.
• It’s not even right to use anti-fatness against Hamas (see here too).

No matter the battle, the choices we make about which weapons to use matter. And let’s be clear: anti-fatness makes sense as a weapon because it is so effective, because fat people themselves, let alone billions of bystanders, are so unlikely to speak out in defense of our humanity. Anti-fatness is also a huge and successful business. And in this era of GLP-1 medications, for all the people who are genuinely in better health because of them, all the rest of us get to see how their ubiquity demonstrates our culture’s unbridled desire to eradicate fatness and fat people. The dehumanizing derision of fat people too often truly seems like one of the only things people across the political spectrum can all get behind together.

For thousands of years, making fun of fat people was a way of “punching up.” In antiquity, and really up until the 19th century, fatness represented wealth and power. On the rare occasions when fatness is made fun of in Tanach (the Hebrew Bible), for example, the anti-fatness deployed is in the service either of the underdog making fun of someone in power — as in the case of the fat Moabite king Eglon in Judges 3:13-25 — or concerns about wealth leading to complacency. So, when “Yeshurun grew fat and kicked” (Deuteronomy 32:15), the problem wasn’t the fatness itself. Fatness was a sign of abundant success. The concern was that this wealth and power would lead to indifference, to forgetting that all of that abundance came from God.

But once modern anti-fatness arises over the last two centuries and is inextricably linked to anti-Blackness, to the persecution of the poor and of immigrants, and to misogyny, any punching up that is accomplished in making fun of the fatness of powerful people is undermined by the collateral damage of reinforcing the dehumanization that all fat people face.

Some people, including some fat people, emphatically affirm that they believe this collateral damage is worth it. For example, when I questioned the approach of aiming anti-fatness at Ben Gvir, I was told (among lots of other things I was told) that Ben Gvir’s vileness makes the fat joke an acceptable response. I had fat people telling me that they themselves were “obese” but that because Ben Gvir was so despicable and dangerous (no argument there), it was fine with them if his fatness was made fun of.

Were I primarily concerned for the feelings of fat people in having to deal with fat jokes, I might be persuaded by this argument. What’s a few hurt feelings if the result can contribute to taking down a truly terrible person? But I am less concerned with fat people’s feelings and much much more concerned with dehumanization. Erasing the humanity of others is exactly what Ben Gvir is up to. Indeed, dehumanization seems to be a source of great joy for him and his ilk. And dehumanization has consequences beyond the hurt feelings of the dehumanized.

Our failure to see one another as created in the Divine image and equally and infinitely worthy of our own human lives is deadly. Anti-fatness is literally sickening in that it leads to worse health outcomes for fat people. Yes, fat jokes make individual fat people feel bad. But, more importantly, they reinforce the societal anti-fatness that leads to discrimination against fat people in employment, education, and healthcare. This is not a price that I am willing to pay in silence.

People like to erroneously describe anti-fat bias as “the last acceptable prejudice,” but this is ridiculous. Obviously as a society we still find all sorts of prejudices and biases “acceptable.” But I would argue that fatphobia is one of the most consensus-building forms of bias out there, thriving across the political spectrum, and rarely shouted down in any competent way.

Even anti-Jewishness is flavored differently in different parts of the political spectrum. But anti-fatness is basically homogenous everywhere. People of all stripes fear and hate fatness in themselves and in others.

I will admit that in one and only one instance, a recent mash-up of anti-fatness and anti-Jewishness actually did make me laugh. In honor of International No Diet Day earlier this month, Australia’s Jewish Independent posted about “Jewish Food Freedom Advocates” (including yours truly). It didn’t take long for trolls to show up. Most of them so far have been pro-Jewish, but anti-fat, and concerned about all of this fat liberation being bad for the Jews. But one guy had the audacity to @ the lovely and inimitable Shira Rosenbluth (a fat Jewish therapist) and write “You all have blood on your hands and BBQ sauce on your fingers.”

So many questions here, really. Has the blood of the anti-Jewish blood libel really just been BBQ sauce fake blood all these centuries? Or is the implication that we Jews use the blood of non-Jewish babies as our BBQ sauce? And do fat Jews somehow have one set of hands covered in blood and then another set of fingers (where?!?) for the BBQ sauce?

To be completely serious about the blood on my hands for a moment, let me be clear that I’m with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel on this: “morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

I refuse to let the flippancy of these trolls, their quickness to dehumanize me, lead me into indifference to suffering. Not the suffering of fat people sickened and killed by medical incompetence, not the suffering of Jews around the world wondering when the next terror attack will tear apart bodies and communities, and certainly not the suffering of Palestinians that is happening right now in the ruins of Gaza and in the fear of yet another settler attack in the West Bank.

“May I not become indifferent” is still often “all I ask of God.”

Indeed, it is because of how deeply I feel human suffering that I refuse to excuse the dehumanizing scourge of anti-fatness. Because I also know that if I stay silent about this then, ultimately, the blood on my fat Jewish hands will be my own.