User:Invisiboy42293/Fat Torah

Fat Torah is an organization which advocates for fat liberation and body positivity within the Jewish community, led by Rabbi Mina Bromberg.

• Fat Torah is led by founder a president Rabbi Mina Bromberg.
  • originally from Long Island
  • tried various diets from the age of 7 until age 16
  • “My great-grandfather was visiting my grandmother’s house and heard my mother, who was a baby at the time, crying,” Bromberg recounted. “He said, ‘Feed the baby,’ and my grandmother said, ‘it’s not time yet.’”
  • grew up a "smart, fat, Jewish child in a small community", which helped her "understand what it means to be different"
  • has been involved in fat activism since she was a teenager in the 1990s
  • holds a doctorate in sociology
    • performed music at a Halloween-themed sociology lecture by Prof. Allan Schnaiberg
    • studied sociology at Northwestern University; co-authored with professor Gary Alan Fine a 2002 paper on Pete Seeger, published in Social Forces
    • [1]
    • June 2005; dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy degree was on the subject of Interfaith marriage
  • received semikhah in 2010 from Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts
  • worked as a community rabbi in Pennsylvania before making aliyah and moving to Jerusalem with her family
  • mother of two kids
• Bromberg founded Fat Torah in early 2020, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic
• was inspired to start Fat Torah by a Hanukkah party at her daughter's preschool the previous year, where a songleader jokingly told the girls to get back to dancing "unless you’ve gotten too fat from those sufganiyot."

Overview

History

• webinar

Views

(source notes)

• Tablet, Oct 2020
  • “Diet culture is idolatry,” said Jerusalem-based Rabbi Minna Bromberg, who calls fat liberation her rabbinate. She tried various diets starting at the age of 7, but as she writes on her blog—on a site she founded, called Fat Torah: “Unsurprisingly, none of them were particularly ‘successful’ in helping me lose weight, which is such a good thing since I was, after all, meant to be growing.”
  • "Bromberg’s “Fat Torah Manifesto”—a riff on fat liberation’s radical beginnings—includes the demands that we end weight stigma in Jewish communal life and train Jewish professions to “confront fatphobia wherever they encounter it (including in themselves).”"
  • “The internalization of American beauty ideals impacts behavior,” said Bromberg. “‘Zaftig’ was not usually an insult for Ashkenazi Jews. Size and shame linked with time. Weight stigma is a particularly powerful teacher around how … tikkun halev [innermost healing] and tikkun olam [world healing] are inseparable.”
  • Bromberg recalled dieting groups meeting in Christian spaces, like Overeaters Anonymous meeting in the upstairs of a church, or Weight Watchers with “its dreaded weigh-ins” in church basements. “My great-grandfather was visiting my grandmother’s house and heard my mother, who was a baby at the time, crying,” Bromberg recounted. “He said, ‘Feed the baby,’ and my grandmother said, ‘it’s not time yet.’” Food in the new American world became less about feeding and filling and more about control and regiments. To, as Bromberg put it, “control the wildness of the Jew.”
  • “All human beings are of unconditional and infinite value,” said Bromberg, who today does advocacy work with synagogues to take fat shaming and anti-fat bias and fatphobia out of sermons and the like. “That’s a theological proposition on its own. Jewish communities and religious communities are meant to be spaces of belonging. Anytime there’s barriers to belonging there’s work to be done.”
• JewishBoston, Feb 2021
  • On the homepage of her website, FatTorah.com, Rabbi Minna Bromberg, founder and president, declares that her intention to destigmatize weight and body image issues is about “smashing the idolatry of fat phobia and leading ourselves from narrowness to freedom.” Bromberg sheds light on fat phobia by also addressing “other systems of oppression.” She writes, “I dream of Fat Torah serving as a resource and ally for anti-racism, disability justice, queer liberation, and other movements of the marginalized….”
  • Bromberg will conduct a webinar, “Jewish Belonging for Every Body: Weight Stigma & Mental Health,” on Sunday, Feb. 7, at noon. The program is presented by Fat Torah and the Ruderman Synagogue Inclusion Project.
• JTA article by Bromberg about unwanted diet advice
• Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, July 2021
  • was invited by Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz to give a webinar for Valley Beit Midrash
• The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Aug 2021
  • Rabbi Minna Bromberg was at a Chanukah party at her daughter’s gan, where everyone was invited to eat sufganiyot. When the song leader told the room, which was full of two- to five-year-olds and their parents of all sizes, that they should get back to dancing unless they’ve gotten too fat from all those sufganiyot, Bromberg was aghast. “I was mortified by his implicit judgment of my own fat body and I was angered that he would say such a thing about bodies in general to a room full of young children, but I was also filled with this knowing: Chanukah is a holiday that is a celebration of fat, literally,” she said. “We eat fried foods to commemorate fat as a symbol of our people’s miraculous revival and endurance.”
  • created Fat Torah to combat fatphobia in the Jewish community and deploy Jewish tradition for the liberation of all bodies
  • "Through the organization, Bromberg and her Social Media and Development Coordinator Emily Rogal provide trainings to faculty and staff at Jewish communal organizations, run workshops for congregations and Hillels, mentor and supervise individuals who want to apply a Fat Torah lens to their life and/or work, and nurture a growing online community of people who are passionate about body liberation and Jewish life."
  • “There is already excellent research out there to support the sad fact that fat people are discriminated against in healthcare, employment, education, public accommodations and beyond,” she said. “Weight stigma also impacts people of all sizes, causing body dissatisfaction and leaving people at increased risk of eating disorders. I don’t believe that Jewish communities are necessarily worse at dealing with weight stigma than other parts of the world, but we certainly aren’t immune from the stigmatizing effects of anti-fatness either.”
• Kveller, Nov 2021
• Religion News Service, Dec 2021
• quoted in The Forward, Dec 2021
• Washington Jewish Week, April 2022
• The Times of Israel, Oct 2022
• Jüdische Allgemeine, Jan 2023
  • founded Fat Torah in early 2020, just before the outbreak of the corona pandemic
  • Bromberg is 48
  • "She uses the word "fat" intentionally, confidently and naturally. Unlike the medical profession, she doesn't say "obese" or "overweight," she doesn't say "chubby" or euphemistically "strong," "curvy," or "full-figured." She says fat."
  • "Bromberg sees her organization as part of the body positivity movement. It is more than an identity-political trend. The movement has its roots in the late 1960s when the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance was founded in the USA."
  • ""For one thing, the word 'fat' best describes my body shape in the wonderful diversity of the human race," says Bromberg in an interview. On the other hand, the word "fat" is traditionally used as a swear word. And she has set herself the goal of recapturing the word, making it culturally and socially acceptable again."

External links

• Official website
• Invisiboy42293/Fat Torah on Instagram
• Fat Torah on The Big Fat Gay Podcast
• Fat Torah on the Can We Talk? podcast at Jewish Women's Archive
• Fat Torah on The Light Lab Podcast with Eliana Light