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Eye Wonder About Brows

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I

f you over-pluck your eyebrows or
that way. An ultra-high resolution cam-
don't like your eyebrow waxing job,
era found a single brushstroke of hair
the whole day you feel a bit off. You
above the painting's left brow, implying
look at the mirror every few minutes
either that Leonardo da Vinci did some
and everywhere you go you're sure
revisions or that a curator accidentally
everyone's thinking it, so you bring it up removed the brows in a sloppy cleaning
first: "I know my eyebrows look
attempt. We'll never know.
a bit funny today."
Eyebrows played an interest-
Everything reminds you
ing part in history. Apparently,
about them. You might think:
in ancient Egypt, people shaved
their eyebrows in mourning
The Torah talks about He-brews
... but there's no mention of
when the family cat died. Back
"he-brows"!
then, "cat got your tongue"
Eyebrows are pretty funky.
made even less sense than it
Here are some fun facts or
does today!
"brow wows":
Roche! Burstyn
Writers and poets have
There are about 250 hairs per
described how ancient Greek
brow; if ungroomed, the num-
and Roman women would
ber can rise to more than 1,000.
attach fake brows made from dyed goat's
The longest eyebrow hair belongs to
hair to their foreheads with tree resin.
Sumito Matsumura of Japan and was
Historically, Japanese women were
18.1 centimeters or 7.1 inches when
known for powdering their faces white,
blackening their teeth, painting their
measured in June 2011. Must have been
an odd look — essentially he went down lips red ... and shaving their eyebrows
in history for raising the most eye-
off and then redrawing them high on
brows!
the forehead.
The Mona Lisa might be a sight
Eyebrows are part of showing expres-
sion. Try talking with expression with-
for sore eyes, but she's also famously
eyebrow-less. Apparently, historians
out moving your eyebrows. It's like try-
who've been keeping an eye on her say
ing to eat fried chicken with a fork and
she might not have originally started out knife — possible, but you're concentrat-

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- ■ 41

ing really hard. Just think about those
famous Angry Birds — without their
eyebrows, they'd just be Weird Birds.
(Fun fact: Bird eyebrows are called
supercilium.)
Everyone's eyebrows are on show, all
the time, from the no-browed Whoopi
Goldberg to Anthony Davis of the NFL
who's cashed in on his. Then there are
the people with an abundance of brows.
Whether you call it a monobrow or
unibrow, these people are proud to take
the road less tweezed. Being happy-no-
plucky types, they've started a unibrow
awareness campaign, a website
(unibrowclub.com ) and even a world-
wide club devoted to it.
The truth: Nobody cares about your
eyebrows but you. When you announce
that your eyebrows look funny, the per-
son you're telling is really thinking "her
eyebrows aren't nearly as wonky-looking
as my nose ..."
Did you ever realize there was so
much ado about brows? Well (drumroll
... you knew this was coming ...) there's
always more to everything than what
meets the eye! *

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Rallying Teens Inspire Our Jewish Future

L

ots of positive energy pulsated
from three local teenagers rushing
to Israel's support in the wake of
an anti-Zionist protest at a major street
corner in the heart of West Bloomfield's
Jewish community.
The Nov. 8 "Stand With Israel Rally:' at
Maple and Orchard Lake roads, drew 200
supporters amid Israeli music, dancing,
flags and banners 16 days after one of the
teens, Ben Rashty, happened upon a pro-
Palestinian march at the same corner. "2,
4, 6, 8, Israel is a terrorist state" echoed at
that Oct. 23 march.
Most importantly, the Israel rally, which
drew plenty of adults, showcased the
maturity, resolve and commitment of a
politically aware group of teens.
The day of the rally, an Israeli Arab
Knesset member equated Hitler's genocide
against European Jewry with Israel's poli-
cy toward Palestinians and Israeli Arabs.
In a speech in Amsterdam commemo-
rating the Nazi Germany-era "Night of

Broken Glass:' anti-Zionist Hanin Zoabi
of the Knesset's Joint Arab List declared,
"Kristallnacht didn't suddenly fall from
the sky — come out of nowhere. It was
the result of a development over time. We
can see a similar development happening
in Israel over the last several years:'
Kristallnacht was a Hitler-authorized
pogrom over the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938,
against Austrian and German Jews. It
helped ripen conditions for the Holocaust.
Zoabi said she was speaking "on behalf
of the victims of Kristallnacht, and on
behalf of all victims of racism and oppres-
sion" — linking Jews victimized by Nazi
Germany to Palestinians and Israeli Arabs
"oppressed" under Israeli control. The
far-left group "Platform Stop Racism and
Exclusion," shunned by Amsterdam Jews
for its perceived animosity toward Israel
and sympathy toward Hamas, arranged
her appearance, according to JTA.
Zoabi accused Israel, a land she will-
ingly represents, of "ethnic cleansing"

modeled on Nazism, one of history's dark-
est ideologies.
Many Jewish high school students and
college freshmen recoil in the midst of
anti-Israel chants. They're uneasy with
confrontation — let alone when thrust
into defending Israel against defamatory
propaganda. You can't blame those unsure
of themselves for standing on the sidelines
rather than jumping into the fray.
Ben Rashty told the JN in the Nov. 19
story "Israel Advocates" (page 18) that
news reports detailing virulence directed
toward the Jewish people and their ances-
tral homeland spurred him to organize
the street rally "to show our community's
support" for the sliver of a Middle East
nation we so love as a people.
At a time when teens are tugged so
many ways and subject to so many influ-
ences, Rashty and pals Cole Levine and
Nisim Nesimov showed heart and mettle,
harkening to a bright future for Jewish
Detroit's next generation of Zionists. *

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