It wasn’t your everyday invitation to lunch at a second-rate restaurant.

It was an invitation to see a nose.

I had pleaded with Elon not to do it, to save his thirty thousand shekels and invite me to a first-rate restaurant to see something else: a new hairstyle, a tattoo, the latest Nike LunarEpic Flyknit shoes. I tried to reason with my friend that by keeping his ancient Jewish-Iraqi nose while living in the modern city of Tel Aviv, he could enjoy the best of both worlds, and without losing a shred of his dignity in the process.

“I’ve lived with this nose for 47 years,” Elon informed me over the phone.

“Exactly,” I replied, happy we were on the same page.

“That’s 47 years too long,” he said.

When we hung up, I stood in front of the mirror and studied the parts of myself I wished were different: longer, shorter, fuller, thinner, smoother, younger. I studied them, scrutinized them, picked a fight with them, then dismissed them with a shrug and went into the kitchen to make dinner.

 A month went by, and Elon called to invite me to lunch at his favorite Thai restaurant, which might have passed for a Thai restaurant had someone on the staff been able to produce a lime wedge.  

“I did it,” Elon said.  

I didn’t need to ask what.  

“Will I recognize you?” I asked.

“I barely recognize myself,” Elon replied.

We met for lunch. Elon walked in beaming, his face free of backstory, answerable only to itself. Two days earlier, I would have taken cover behind the menu to conceal my disappointment, but two days earlier I had shared Elon’s story with my ex-husband, who stopped me mid-sentence and put me in my place.

“Read Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man before your lunch,” he advised me, adding that to fret about someone’s physiognomy was passé. That even as a Renaissance humanist, Pico was ahead of his time, distinguishing people from nature by our ability to change at our own choosing, our capacity for self-transformation.

“Before you accuse Elon of losing his dignity, consider that the nose job might be his way of keeping it,” Asher said. Then, knowing I would likely not visit Pico’s oration before I visited Elon, he enlisted Google and called on the philosopher himself. “We have made you, Adam, a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer,” he read aloud, then closed his computer.

“I like the new you,” I said to Elon in a half-truth. His face was as plain now as my pad Thai lacking lime, the plastic surgeon apparently unaware that after Pico and the Renaissance, artists stopped being artisans and became individuals, their art a function of their creative expression rather than technical ability. With his new punim, Elon could have hailed from anywhere in the world, or from nowhere at all. But there was something else: for the first time since I had met him two years earlier, he looked me in the eye when he spoke.

“I feel as light as a feather,” he said. “And as free.”

A month later I received a Whatsapp picture of Elon standing in front of some unidentifiable stone structure, an Israeli flag perched in one of its cracks.  

“Hi Dalia. I just came back from Treblinka and am going to Jerusalem tomorrow to sign up as a volunteer tour guide at Yad Vashem,” he wrote. “But I’m having a philosophical problem that maybe Asher can help me with. Can an Iraqi be a tour guide at Yad Vashem?”

The answer was obvious (yes), but I still took the question it to Asher.

“Interesting,” Asher said. “It reminds me of the philosophers from the Vienna Circle, many of them Jews, who argued that most philosophical questions are pseudo questions, questions that don’t have a meaningful answer because they’re not worth asking in the first place. But because they can’t be answered in a meaningful way, they take on a relevance and lead to more pseudo questions. The task of philosophers is to separate real problems from pseudo problems. Of course, the ultimate pseudo problem was the Jewish Question, which led these very thinkers to emigrate in 1938. Tell Elon that when he becomes a tour guide at Yad Vashem, he’ll learn all about them.”

I stared at the picture of Elon, a man dwarfed by a monument, his nose neither a question nor an answer, but a thing of irrelevance, an irrelevance that allowed him to emerge from his shell and blend in with his surroundings, a “creature of indeterminate nature,” like the chameleon Pico wrote so lovingly about.    

Or Woody Allen’s “Zelig,” which I would propose to see with Elon the next time we got together. But something made me think he had already seen it.

Image via Wikimedia.

The post ‘Creatures Neither of Heaven Nor of Earth’ appeared first on Jewcy.

Tired of your boring, regular-person nose? Wish you looked more like the other kind of princess? Fret no further, Lululemonsters, because Long Island-based board-certified cosmetic surgeon Dr. Steven T. Greenberg has just the tweak for you.

He’s calling it the “Duchess Nose,” and it’s apparently gotten quite popular over the past few weeks—he coined the term after noticing a lot of patients requesting that their new noses look like Kate’s. Turns out women in Britain aren’t the only ones after the Middleton schnoz.

Why? Because it’s a great nose. “Nice curvature, not too much of a slope, defined tip cartilage,” Greenberg told me. (Before Middleton, Greenberg’s most frequently requested celebrity noses belonged to Jennifer Aniston and Ashlee Simpson—both of whom he acknowledged have had nose jobs, though he says they’re very natural-looking.)

But here’s the fine print, Middleton wannabes: the surgery won’t actually make you look like the Duchess of Cambridge. It will just make your nose look more like hers. “The most important part is to talk to patients about being realistic,” Greenberg said. “We explain that they can’t just get anyone’s nose.”

Are we seeing the early stages of the nose job style we’ll all be referencing in five years? Will high school girls on Long Island suddenly start to look a bit more English? (“It’s very common to do noses at 16,” Greenberg explained.) I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Want the Duchess Nose? It’ll cost you somewhere between $6,000 and $10,000. Tiara sold separately.

The post Long Island Plastic Surgeon Offers Kate Middleton-Inspired ‘Duchess Nose’ appeared first on Jewcy.

Vulture has unearthed the high school yearbook photos of dozens of celebrities, confirming that no matter how famous someone ends up, they probably had an awkward phase growing up. Not even the most glam of celebrities can escape the pitfalls of adolescence, and now you can gawk at the former gawkiness of endlessly photoshopped stars. (Though the picture of fresh-faced Lindsay Lohan just makes us sad.)

From the embarrassingly time-stamped (we’re looking at you, Anthony Weiner) to the suspiciously different-looking, not even your favorite Jewish celebrities are safe from class photo embarrassment.

Mark Zuckerberg Jesse Eisenberg had not yet perfected his perpetually-in-high-school look, but it’s not for lack of trying. Paul Rudd, apparently, was always Paul Rudd. Mila Kunis rocked the curly half-pony even after her Lisa Frank days (not pictured: Ashton Kutcher). Natalie Portman, however, takes the cake with her studious pre-Harvard look and Long Island-straight hair.

See the rest of the images here.

(Images via Vulture)

The post Awkward High School Yearbook Photos of Your Favorite Jewish Stars appeared first on Jewcy.

• Yiddish sure has a lot of mean names for non-Jews.

• Looks like Roseanne Barr will not be a Green Party presidential nominee.

• AMC’s hit show Breaking Bad: “Old Testament at its core.”

• Joseph Gordon-Levitt, of eternal 10 Things I Hate About You fame, talks about his new movie and playing a young Bruce Willis.

• Alison Brie continues to be our favorite person ever:

The post Daily Jewce: Breaking Bad’s Judaism, Considering Nose Jobs and Yiddishisms appeared first on Jewcy.