Are Jews in the US that different from British Jews? Because they just had straight hair at my mostly Jewish school. Same with the Jewish friends I made in Canada. The white people I know who had been down that stressful hair-straightening path were all non-Jews.
I don't really know enough British or Canadian Jews to be able to comment on them.
Do you have the concomitant good hair issues where you're judged as militant if you wear your hair as is?
Not in that way. It's ... I can't find a good way to describe it. It's like, little kids with curly hair are cute. But around the time that you're supposed to start caring about how you look, when you start wearing makeup and heels and stuff, you're also "supposed" to start straightening you hair, and I guess it's somewhat equivalent to not wearing makeup or not waxing your eyebrows? That's not quite right, but it's the best I can come up with now.
Or you're a traitor if you do alter it?
Not really that, either. People who straighten it might get some flak from people who don't, but I think it's mostly teasing. I've seen things in some older books and movies where someone Jewish has changed their name and, while not actually denying their Judaism, is pretty much trying to to just be "American," and some other Jewish character says something like, "She's still obviously a Jew -- just look at that hair." Since that kind of passing doesn't really happen as often nowadays, you don't hear stuff like that as much, but I've definitely heard friends explain that they got their hair straightened because "It looks too Jewish."
Or, sometimes, because "It looks too black." I know some curly Jewish women who go to black hair salons because they say that that's where the stylists know what to do with their hair, and some others who are offended at the suggestion, because "My hair isn't like black hair at all! Right? It isn't, right?" I remember one older relative, when I was little, told my mother that she shouldn't let me play outside in the sun so much, because "That child is starting to look black." I don't know how much of that was just because of my skin, and how much my hair contributed to it, or whether she would have said it at all if I had straight hair, or whether a non-Jewish white elderly relative would have said the same thing about a non-Jewish darkish little kid or not. There's a whole lot of different stuff going on there.
So seeing it treated like a pan-Jewish issue? Eye opening.
"Jewish hair" meaning curly has been around for a while. In all those eugenics books from the late 1800s and early 1900s, the description of "characteristics of the Jew" pretty much always includes curly hair.