#1 Rhinoplasty

In a 2007 appearance on The Tonight Show, actress Halle Berry shared pictures of herself that had been distorted with Mac’s Photo Booth program. As she showed the audience a picture of herself with a ludicrously big nose, she commented, “Here’s where I look like my Jewish cousin!”

This common ethnic stereotype of the large Jewish nose does have a basis in fact.

In the 1974 book Race, University of Oxford physical anthropologist John Baker devoted several pages to the topic of the Jewish nose and how it can be distinguished from the nose of other Europeans. Baker wrote that the Jewish nose "is large in all dimensions... It is wide at all levels."

In the quest for Aryan beauty, legions of Jewish men and women have turned to nose jobs, or rhinoplasty.

Cosmetic rhinoplasty was pioneered in the late 19th century by Jacques Joseph, a German-Jewish surgeon who wanted to help those who "suffered from a Jewish nose." Joseph performed free nose jobs for fellow Jews who didn’t want to stand out in German society.

Rhinoplasty has also been a common procedure among American Jews, who wanted to fit inconspicuously into the WASP mainstream. According to plastic surgeon Dr. H George Brennan, the 1960s and early 1970s were the heyday of Jewish nose jobs. Back then, a nose job was "a benchmark in a young [Jewish] girl's life ... You had your bat mitzvah and you got your nose done.''

As WASP dominance has waned and Jewish ethnic pride has risen, the number of Jews opting to have nose jobs has fallen in recent decades. But even today, many young Jews, including those who have high levels of ethnic pride, still wrestle with the question of whether to undergo rhinoplasty.

As Melvin Konner opined on the website Jewcy earlier this year, there remains "a fine line between wanting your beak bobbed and wanting to look less Jewish, and where you draw it depends on whether you think there's an abstract standard of beauty independent of culture. I... don't blame anyone for wanting to do it. And it's not going away."