A culture of feasting and fasting. Ritual foods for every festival. Double portions for shabbat. A photograph of a grandparent liberated as a living skeleton. A habit of anxious food hoarding passed down the generations. Religious injunctions to modesty. Assimilationist standards of beauty. A community where everyone has an opinion and isn’t afraid to express it. A Jewish nose. A Jewish tuchas.

So many cultural pressures particularise the body image challenges which pervade our whole society.

In this series, Tami Sussman brings together Australian Jews from many parts of our community to discuss how they feel about their bodies. Participants in this series are female, male and non-binary; secular and religous; comfortably round, anxiously thin and everything in between. Some work professionally with food or body image, others carry histories of bullying, eating disorders or body shaming.

All recognise that Every Body has a place in a tradition that says we were were all created in God’s image.