Tattoos as a political act
Reclaiming the Jewish body
Ali Vener said she did not at first understand “what was at the root” of her desire to get her first tattoo.
Raised in an interfaith household, Vener had to gr\ow into her Jewishness. She said she tended to “downplay her Jewish identity.”
It took time to realize that first Jewish-themed tattoo as “a validation, almost, of my Judaism.”
“I now understand it as almost ritual practice, this radical visibility that you can have as a Jewish person and a proud Jewish person, if you mark yourself,” she said. “That's obviously not the only way that you can express that. But that's something that was really powerful. For me, it was like having my Judaism externalized.”
Vener now has a degree in Jewish studies and, what’s more, she runs an Instagram account highlighting Jewish tattoo artists. She said she finds a new one every three days or so. The list continues to grow. It’s at 155 artists now.
“What I've found is that there's this whole community of Jewish tattoo artists out there that I never knew existed until I made my account,” she said. “They're very proudly and loudly Jewish, but the thing is, they didn't know that each other existed.”
Tattoo artists in general tend to live on the margins of society. Body art has grown in popularity in recent years, and is now taken somewhat seriously as an artform, but the artists themselves still often maintain the gritty outcast sensibility that they’ve held since the sideshow days.
Jewish tattoo artists are often on the margins of both the larger society and Jewish communities.
“I think the tattoo artist identity comes into play there because in the larger Jewish community tattoos are, at the best, fetishized and, at the worst, completely taboo,” Vener said. “It's like, ‘I already have a little bit of insecurity about my own Jewish identity, and then I'm also a tattoo artist on top of that.’”
That’s not true of every artist. There are some, Vener said, “who are very proudly identifying as Jewish tattoo artists and working that into their practice.” But some struggle to reconcile the seemingly conflicting pieces of their identity.
“They don't feel Jewish enough to claim that they are a Jewish tattoo artists,” she said. “I was looking to feature someone and they said to me, ‘Hey, my Jewish background is not really religious. My mom's a Jew, but I'm secular and I just want to make sure that that's okay, and that's Jewish enough for you.’ I was like, ‘You sound like a Jewish person, you're a Jewish person, and that is 100 percent valid.”
Vener sees the growing community of Jews with tattoos and Jewish tattoo artists as indicative of a larger shift in Jewish culture, part of “this age of Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism and this re-understanding of Jewish identity and inclusion of other Jewish identities on the margins.”
She said that for Jews, getting tattooed “is kind of a representation of that progress and that moving forward.” There is also greater acceptance of Jews who trace their ancestry through their fathers, and of interfaith marriages. Texts that once drew sharp lines in the sand are being reinterpreted, Vener said, to create “radical allowance of things that may not have been allowed in the past.”
Perhaps the perfect example is that of trauma, or remembrance tattoos, done in honor of relatives who died in Auschwitz or of the people killed and hostages taken on Oct. 7, 2023.
“When I talk to people who get Holocaust Remembrance tattoos or things like numbers, it's really about reclaiming what was done to our bodies and reclaiming a Jewish body, even if it's a few generations later,” Vener said. “I think every Jewish tattoo is a function of body autonomy. Whether or not it's explicit in the tattoo, or a Holocaust tattoo, that history is so recent for all of us that it's almost a political act. That's very profound. That's how I feel.”