When Vidal Sassoon passed away on May 5, the world mourned the revolutionary celebrity stylist who transformed the average woman with one deft swing of the scissors.
Hair stylists are typically viewed as one-dimensional creatures obsessed by physical appearance. You might not know what appeals to the opposite sex, but your hairdresser knows — for sure.
Sassoon was a consummate artist, introducing a generation of women to the Bob and Five-Point Cut. He was called the founder of modern hairdressing. This explains his fame — but ignores his moral center.
First and last, Vidal Sassoon was a proud Jew who vehemently opposed anti-Semitism. He first encountered anti-Semitism as a kid on the streets of London, where he used his fists against Osmond Mosely’s fascists, responsible for stirring up racial hatred in post-WW II England.
His background was far from glorious. Raised in a small flat, his father left home when he was five; his destitute mother was unable to care for Sassoon and his younger brother. Just five years old, Vidal spent the next six years in a Jewish orphanage. His mother remarried and brought her sons home.
When Vidal was 14 –– about the time he was beating up fascists — his mother dreamed that she saw her son standing in a barbershop. Convinced it was a sign, she took him to Cohen’s Beauty & Barber Shop, and apprenticed him to Cohen.
While Sassoon preferred roaming with the anti-Mosley gang, he decided that if he was going to be a hairdresser, he was going to be the best hairdresser in the world.
But, in 1948, the 20-year-old Sassoon went to the newly created State of Israel and fought with the Palmach in the War of Independence. Only then did he return to London, open his first salon on Bond Street and mount the stylist-stairway to stardom. Suddenly, Bob haircuts appeared in every fashion magazine. “If you don’t look good,” he said of his salons and product lines, “we don’t look good.” That business insight served him well.
Still, he never forgot who he was — a Jew. Or that Jews are vulnerable to anti-Semitism.
In 1982, he established an international study center in Jerusalem that had nothing to do with hair. The Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism at The Hebrew University remains a research powerhouse. He realized fists weren’t the only tools against hate. Information and research are the real power.
Like the Bob haircut, anti-Semitism has experienced a resurgence. Some things die slowly, if at all. But Sassoon did his best to make anti-Semites look far less fashionable than the woman in the salon chair. A star in two distant camps, he made us prettier, wiser, stronger. And we thank him.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
