Megillat Esther and Jewish Beauty

Esther is lauded as a paragon of Jewish beauty. As Purim approaches, let us consider:

1. What has Jewish female beauty looked like since the early twentieth century?
2. What values do different beauty ideals demonstrate?
3. What values are at play in public discourse on beauty?

Beauty Queen Competition poster
Jerusalem, 1929

Beauty Queen Competition poster
Tel Aviv, 1929

Jewish beauty in British Palestine of the 1920s reflected the varied cultural backgrounds of Jews who had immigrated and not yet assimilated to any singular cultural standard. The first "Queen Esther Election Ball" was organized in Tel Aviv by Baruch Agadati in 1926 to model beautiful Jewish women and raise money for the Jewish National Fund. Each year, a different community was chosen; one year there might be a Bukharan Queen Esther, the next year a Yemeni Queen Esther. Lyla Tchertkov, the first Queen Esther, attended the ball as a guest but was considered so beautiful the audience elected her without an official entry.

The first pageant winner, Lyla Tchertkov, 1926. From the collection of A. Tchertkov, Tel Aviv. https://blog.nli.org.il/en/queen_esther/

Tzipora Tzabari, the third Queen Esther, 1928. Photo: S. Korbman, the Museum of the History of Tel Aviv-Yafo Collection. https://blog.nli.org.il/en/queen_esther/

"The Esther Aesthetic and Jewish Beauty Queens in Early Twentieth-Century America"

Shaina Trapedo, Esther in America

The competition was quickly criticized - within a few years, newspapers received angry letters and posters were posted around Tel Aviv. Critics such as Rav Kook saw the balls as shallow, immoral, and against the goals of a community that sought to become a model state, and asked Mayor Dizengoff to cancel the "monster of the selection of a beauty queen from among Eretz Israeli Judaism." By 1930, Queen Esther Election Balls were banned in the Palestine Jewish community.
Where were such beauty pageants going strong? The United States. In the interwar period, Jewish women in America were awash in the different streams of women's suffrage, Eastern European Jewish mass migration, and a rise of women in the workplace. Film and music were diversifying, but the new non-White voices and faces were foils unto White heroes and heroines. The question of who was truly American and what America looked like began to take shape in the cultural mainstream. Against this backdrop, the Jewish National Workers' Alliance hosted its first Queen Esther Pageant in 1929. By 1933, the pageant finale was held in Madison Square Garden in front of 22,000 spectators.

Photos above of Bess Myerson, courtesy of the Miss America Foundation, retrieved from the Jewish Women's Archive, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/myerson-bess

How much do our standards of beauty come from our Jewish tradition versus the non-Jewish world around us? What does Jewish tradition say about beauty?
The first place to look is Proverbs 31, Eshet Chayil, which describes the ideal woman. It has one explicit mention of beauty: