Uh, was Taylor Swift wearing tefillin at the VMAs?
Taylor Swift accepts the Best Collaboration award during the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards. Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images for MTV
By Talya Zax September 12, 2024
Is it possible that Taylor Swift has entered her tefillin era?
The singer showed up to last night’s Video Music Awards ceremony in a corseted yellow plaid contraption, with accessories that some might call punk, and others frum: criss-crossing black leather straps, laced past her elbows.
Ok, sure, technically they were fingerless gloves. But spiritually? They said: Ramah camper most likely to join Women of the Wall. Free spirit toying with the idea of becoming baal teshuva, but having a bit too much fun to commit. Someone who heard that Candace Owens was spreading conspiracy theories about the Lubavitcher Rebbe, did her own research, and liked what she found.
I mean, yes, it is realistically unlikely that Taylor Swift — who grew up on a literal Christmas tree farm — is actually laying tefillin. But in this era of misinformation, when all that we can really trust is the evidence before our eyes — so long as we’re sure it’s not AI-generated — the evidence before mine says: Those right there are some Jewish arm coverings.
One of the things that makes Swift so successful is that, despite the aching specificity of her music, she has an astonishing mutability: No matter what your dream is, she can be your dream girl. She is just mysterious enough — and just accessible enough — to slot into almost any fantasy.
Part of the fury of the far-right over Swift’s support of the Democratic Party — starting with her first public endorsements in 2018 — was the fury of those who have been robbed of a cherished dream. (The queasy dream in question: That Swift secretly sympathized with the white nationalist movement.) Former President Donald Trump’s ire at Swift’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night transparently had to do with his very public fantasy that Swift had miraculously been persuaded to see the light and support his cause.
Swift’s fans parse her every action not just because they love her, but also because they’re looking for clues that out of all the millions of idealized versions of Taylor that exist, theirs is the one that is actually correct. Everyone wants to be the person to get it right, the chosen one who secretly actually knows their idol.
For some people, that means fantasizing about Swift’s possible Jewishness. This very website, in 2016, published a piece headlined “Taylor Swift Probably Isn’t Jewish But Very Well Could Be,” parsing why some very online people retaliated against the alt-right’s Swiftian pipe dreams by facetiously insisting she was a member of the tribe.
Google trends shows that I am far from the only person to search, today, “is Taylor Swift Jewish?” (No!) We are all aware that there are secrets Swift is keeping from us — an interior life, there, beyond our reach. Why couldn’t it be the one we’d like for her: the one in which, after years of constant album releases and grueling touring, she’s pulled a Madonna and decided to buckle down and devote herself to Daf Yomi?
After all, Reputation — the 2017 album that Swift is widely expected to announce as her next re-recorded release, and which many saw her goth-coded Wednesday outfit as invoking — is, in its own way, Talmudic. When not bogged down by clumsy clapbacks and overwrought romantic metaphors, it’s a record about getting into arguments with yourself: Engaging in the age-old pastime of arguing over what’s wrong, what’s right, how to do right by yourself and your fellows. “I did something bad,” she muses in one track, “so why’d it feel so good?”
And, oh yeah, the album features a song called “Dancing With Our Hands Tied.” Sure, it could be about the rush and terror of falling in love while hiding from the public eye. Or, you know, it could be about the instruction to “bind them as a sign upon your hand.” Or maybe, as so much of Swift’s oeuvre, it’s really meant to live in the in between: What it means is for her to know, and the rest of us to make up stories about.
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