While being Israeli is not in vogue, sabra academic blends faith and fashion at Yale

Every time Meital Peleg Mizrachi slips her feet into her secondhand, three-inch heeled ruby red boots, she feels a bit like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.”

“Whenever I need a boost of confidence or a little reminder of home, I put them on. They always bring me back to the feeling that there’s no place like home,” Peleg Mizrachi said.

While home for Peleg Mizrachi is in Jaffa, these days she lives in Hamden, Connecticut, just a short drive from Yale University, where she’s a post-doctoral fellow in the economics department specializing in sustainable fashion.

When not lecturing students on the nitty-gritty of fashion waste, Peleg Mizrachi researches fair fashion while exploring the ways sustainable fashion and mindful consumption connect to Judaism. In short, she believes less is more. It’s not quite in the vein of Coco Chanel’s famous motto, “Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance,” but more along the lines of, “Stop buying so much.”

“There should be less focus on making more sustainable fibers and technologies, and more focus on buying less. At the end of the day, about 85% of the textiles that end up in landfills spent less than a year in someone’s closet. So no matter how we frame it, no matter how sustainable our materials are, current consumption patterns are unsustainable,” Peleg Mizrachi told The Times of Israel in a Zoom interview.

As Peleg Mizrachi is quick to point out, the $2.5 trillion fashion industry employs over 75 million people worldwide. It also generates 92 million tons of waste annually and contributes between 4% and 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

For the interview, Peleg Mizrachi wore a simple old black T-shirt; the delicate gold rings on her fingers and a skinny gold nose ring twinkled in the light. On other days, one might find the academic dressed in one of her late grandmother’s dresses. If she’s giving a lecture, she might just be sporting a dress fashioned from curtains that once draped the windows in her grandmother’s house — a piece she described as “full of memory, purpose and reinvention.”

As serious as Peleg Mizrachi is about her academic pursuits, she recalls being chided for her chosen field of study by other academics.

“I’ll never forget when an emeritus professor, during a scholarship interview — which I didn’t get — questioned: ‘Do you seriously think Yale’s esteemed scholars care about what they’ll wear next year?’ So on one hand, I get those who say, ‘How can you be serious if you’re in fashion,’” she said.

On the flip side, Peleg Mizrachi also encounters people who assume that she must hate fashion since she’s focused on sustainability and reducing consumption.

“I always feel I need to do some kind of disclaimer when I talk about fashion: I love fashion. I really, really love fashion. There are so many untold stories in clothing and what we wear. There is something magical in the ability to express ourselves in this visual form,” Peleg Mizrachi said.

Aside from buying things second-hand and repurposing older fabrics, she occasionally wears pieces from sustainable Israeli designers such as Dodo Bar Or, whose blue suit she loves to pair with her red boots.

Bar Or has been criticized in the past for co-opting keffiyeh patterns — which are associated with Palestinian nationalism — in her line of dresses and skirts. However, Peleg Mizrachi said the designer employs these patterns as a way to express her desire for peace and cooperation.

An accidental career

Growing up in Israel, Peleg Mizrachi didn’t dream of fashion plates and textile waste. As she tells it, she sort of stumbled into the field.

In her 20s, she worked for an Israeli fast fashion company (which she declined to name) before soon moving on to other jobs, including a stint with Tel Aviv’s welfare department. Dissatisfied with that, Peleg Mizrachi enrolled in a master’s program in public policy at Tel Aviv University.

“I had to register for classes and I decided to take a class on sustainability — not because I thought it was going to be really interesting, but it was either that or statistics,” Peleg Mizrachi said.

It was in that class that she discovered her vocation.

The professor assigned each student a random date and told them to find and research something related to sustainability that corresponded with that date.

“I got April 24,” she said.

On April 24, 2013, the Rana Plaza, an eight-story commercial building in Bangladesh, collapsed, killing 1,000 people and injuring 3,000. Fifty fast fashion brands produced clothing there, including the one she once worked for.

“I felt terrible. I closed my laptop. I didn’t want to see it, but I realized it was one of those things that once you see, you can’t unsee. I consider myself somebody who cares, and I thought if I didn’t know about it, what are the chances that other people didn’t know about it? It became my mission,” Peleg Mizrachi said.

At Yale, she and a colleague facilitate Moving the Needle: An Exploration of Sustainable Fashion, an interdisciplinary initiative that focuses on advancing research and innovation in sustainable fashion.

Anything Israeli is not fashionable

As decisive as she is about her career path, Peleg Mizrachi has recently faced challenges because she’s Israeli and because she’s Jewish.

“At this moment, it’s a terrible time to be an Israeli researcher in an Ivy League institution. I’ve had people tell me to my face they don’t want to work with Israelis,” she said, adding that there’s been an uptick in rejections from academic journals because she didn’t “address Palestinian issues.”

The antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment on campuses has been so vicious that when Peleg Mizrachi attended a panel discussion at Columbia University last month, she debated whether to wear her yellow hostage ribbon pin.

“I decided to keep it on. I don’t want to hide who I am. I’m not ashamed of it, I’m proud of it. This is who I am,” she said.

That means she also relishes opportunities to connect the economic and environmental consequences of fashion waste and sustainability to Judaism.

To that end, she recently headed a panel in New York City, “From Shatnez to Upcycling: Sustainable Fashion and Judaism,” whose title came from the biblical prohibition against interweaving wool and linen.

During the evening, Peleg Mizrachi explored what ancient Jewish texts, ethical commandments, and modern Israeli designers can teach about mindful consumption.

“The more I dive into the Bible, the more I see there is a longstanding connection between sustainability and Judaism. There are Bible verses commanding us to save the world,” Peleg Mizrachi said, adding that the Torah teaches that humans are meant to be stewards of planet Earth, “to work it and to protect it.”

“Sustainable fashion might just be a mitzvah,” she said.