‘My Unorthodox Life’ is a microcosm of America’s divide
Julia Haart and her kids feature in “My Unorthodox Life”: (left-right) Miriam, Aron, Julia, Shlomo and Batsheva.
(REVIEW) The latest Netflix reality show features Julia Haart, a fashion designer, CEO of Elite World Group (a modeling and talent network) and a mom of four. In her forties, Haart left a strict Orthodox Jewish community and her husband in Monsey, N.Y. and struck out on her own to launch a successful shoe brand.
As a working millennial woman, I love the occasional reality TV binge, especially when the main characters include admirable, well-dressed, saucy women in business and mostly refrain from immature drama: the likes of “Selling Sunset”, “Singapore Social” and “Bling Empire” (the latter with the same producer Jeff Jenkins) come to mind. I’m also not Jewish. And that makes me the perfect audience for “My Unorthodox Life.”
Haart describes feeling suicidal and miserable when she followed the rules of the Orthodox community in Monsey, which she repeatedly calls fundamentalist. She dressed modestly (no pants, no shoulders exposed), wore a wig, married young in a semi-arranged setup, cared for her eight siblings and then children, and generally was not allowed to question rules, she says, but pushed the boundaries on some things like wearing high heels. She began working secretly for an insurance company before she left and without any secular education, designed and launched her shoe brand, which exploded into seven countries’ markets in its first year. Haart ran into a big-name fashion buyer in Paris who liked her shoes she had designed herself and jump started Haart’s career. “It was a string of miracles,” she recently told People. She later married Italian tech entrepreneur and financier Sylvio Scaglia, now Sylvio Haart.
Julia still believes in God but has left behind institutional religion. Still, she respects and observes certain Jewish customs, perhaps for the sake of cultivating intimacy in her family – most of her extended family refuses to speak to her, so she knows what’s at stake. Her sister and ex-husband still living as Orthodox Jews have maintained a good relationship with her, however, and her kids fall along a spectrum of Jewish religiosity.
The show’s title comes from Deborah Feldman’s memoir “Unorthodox,” which is also the title of the Netflix drama miniseries that follows a Hasidic woman’s journey fleeing from her husband and ultra-Orthodox sect in Brooklyn to find her secular mother in Berlin, where she finds individual freedom: throwing her wig away in a lake, singing in public, enjoying a sexual experience for the first time and dancing in nightclubs.
“My Unorthodox Life” is reality TV gold. There’s luxury fashion, Julia’s Tribeca penthouse with a “Clueless”-inspired closet that has rotating racks, getaways in the Hamptons (via helicopter of course), Paris and New York Fashion Week events, sibling love and rivalry, and plenty of build-up to climactic moments that don’t feel shallow.
The characters – Julia’s four children and her gay best friend who’s her C.O.O. at Elite) are at times discussing deeply meaningful and personal topics, like navigating their sexuality and religiosity without rules and searching for identity. Robert Brotherton, the C.O.O. and self-described “man behind Julia Haart”, provides natural wit and laugh-out-loud comedic relief, even while searching for his “birth person”, his biological mother.
Julia’s oldest daughter Batsheva married her teen love at age 19 while still in Monsey’s Orthodox community. The mother and daughter fell out for years without speaking before repairing their relationship. Batsheva and her husband have since left the community and started a life in Manhattan but maintain a Jewish lifestyle in various ways, like eating kosher and observing Sabbath.
Julia’s youngest daughter Miriam is a Stanford college student developing apps, dates both women and men, is confidently an atheist feminist and loves P.D.A. She’s the most like her mom. The eldest son Shlomo only recently stopped wearing a yamaka but always wears a star of David necklace, talks about his affinity for prayer and observing Sabbath, and goes on his first date ever on the show. The youngest son, 14-year-old Aron, lives with his dad in Monsey and at the beginning of the show resists watching TV, listening to non-Jewish music and talking to girls, preferring to study Torah.
After years of political polarization that has bitterly split some families, the show’s best moments are family gatherings and discussions that prove it’s possible for Americans to respect each other’s wildly different takes on religion and authentically love each other. We don’t see too many positive examples of overcoming culture wars depicted in the media and entertainment. For example, at first, Batsheva calls Miriam’s bisexuality “just a phase” but later makes sure her little sister knows that she supports her and loves her no matter who she sleeps with. In another episode, Julia and her kids share a family vacation adjacent to Paris Fashion Week with Julia’s Orthodox sister and her family, observing Sukkot together.
Much like the U.S. at large, the socially liberal, less religiously observant family members sometimes struggle to understand why the more traditional members think differently on feminism, family planning, sex and dating, and the more religious members raise their eyebrows and shake their heads often, but still they seem to keep an intimate bond. “My Unorthodox Life” at times feels like an ad for Julia’s memoir coming out in March 2022 and hype generation ahead of a planned IPO for Elite World Group. So it’s to be expected that Julia’s perspective is portrayed as the most authentic and correct view, but that’s the show’s greatest weakness.
Julia’s story is alluring because it’s so unusual (and who doesn’t love a badass woman not just breaking from a controlling environment but thriving?), and yet viewers, especially those in areas of the U.S. where they do not encounter Jews, may see Orthodox Judaism through her eyes now. While she tries to differentiate fundamentalism from religion several times to not condemn Orthodox Judaism altogether, the boundaries of fundamentalism are subjective and blurry.
For example, Batsheva begins wearing pants for the first time during the show’s filming, a step her husband Benn is not comfortable with at first. He asks for time to tell his family about it and become more comfortable seeing her abandon dresses, understanding that Batsheva will wear pants regardless and not wanting to feel controlling. Julia and Miriam instantly think the worst of Benn’s intentions, with Miriam going so far as to tell her sister that her husband is holding her back, indirectly suggesting that she should leave him. Julia interrupts Benn many times, and we often don’t hear his full side to the story. Batsheva never wavers away from her commitment to Benn and shows she favors compromise and honoring her husband’s wishes and feelings in their marriage over making choices for herself alone.
We also learn that Benn has wanted to have children for years and is waiting for Batsheva to agree. Julia and Miriam think Benn represents the patriarchy for wanting kids with his wife, again he is interrupted, and Batsheva again defends him, reminding her mother that she often says her kids are her world, and she too wants to have kids, just not yet.
One of the most emotional frictions in the show is that Aron’s religious devotion concerns Julia greatly. After he returns from a Jewish camp experience, he breaks up with a girlfriend and resolves not to talk to girls so that he has more time to study the scriptures and please God. Julia begins crying, calling this fundamentalism. Later Aron frustratingly but still smiling, remarks to the camera, “I’m a black hatter [a more religious Jew]. Accept me.”
Miriam and Shlomo talk to their little brother Aron about going to a co-ed high school in the fall.
Julia wants to show her son other opportunities and the “outside” world, she says, not tell him how to think. Aron is preparing to enter a co-ed high school that includes Jewish and secular education, something neither Julia, Batsheva nor Shlomo experienced. But Julia does tend to push people out of their comfort zones in a bit of an ironically controlling manner (she also literally controlled the edits of the show, according to the New York Times). For example, Julia arranges for Aron’s ex-girlfriend to “bump into” Aron while out for lunch in Monsey, successfully convincing her son that talking to girls is not a sin. He says he still won’t date though. And when Robert says he’s not ready to date, Julia secretly hires a matchmaker.
Rather than listen to those close to her and seek greater understanding, Julia tends to jump into action with her own solutions. The show’s producer Jeff Jenkins seems to have taken her lead and perhaps did not anticipate how Orthodox Jews would feel about Julia’s portrayal of them. He could have aired more perspective from the more observant Jews in the show like Aron, Julia’s ex-husband or her sister to tone down the overarching message that all ultra-religious people are repressed.
Failing to consider those perspectives could even be dangerous for American Jews facing rising violence and hate crimes. The Monsey community no doubt freshly remembers December 2019, when an attacker who had Googled “why did Hitler hate the Jews” stabbed five Jews at a Monsey Hanukah party, killing one person, and another attacker stabbed a rabbi outside a synagogue. Around the same time, anti-semitic attackers opened fire in a kosher grocery store in New Jersey, killing three people and injuring others.
Though it’s highly binge-able and entertaining, “My Unorthodox Life” makes the same mistakes Hollywood and Netflix make over and over again. While they create content that grapples with religion (and a lot of cults), the shows are usually about leaving religion rather than coming into faith. The theme that religion is oppressive to women is so repeated it’s downright cliché. Is it surprising Aron chooses not to watch TV for a while?
Highlighting stories like Julia’s but failing to feature journeys into faith or from a faith perspective also mask the reality that traditional forms of religion are growing adherents, as Bethany Mandel at The Deseret News smartly pointed out. While religion in America on a whole is declining, including the more liberal strands of Reformed and Modern Judaism, Orthodox Judaism is actually increasing. Younger American Jews today are more likely to identify as Orthodox or nothing at all, a Pew survey found.
The show has already prompted a group of Orthodox Jewish women to create online content to counter the narrative that they are oppressed and show they are both religious and empowered. Many write about their journeys from secularism into orthodoxy, including their academic and career achievements.
Shira Jack Melul writes under the hashtag #myorthodoxlife on Facebook:
“The stories of the people who were unhappy (and I am saddened and pained that they feel that way) are what sell. But if you are going to watch this show, know that there is another side to the coin – the thousands of people who have chosen to learn about and return to their 3,000-year-old heritage.”
The end of “My Unorthodox Life” captures some of the personal life of Julia’s ex-husband, who still practices Orthodox Judaism in the Monsey community and yet does not show many of the traits Julia labeled fundamentalist. If the show signs for a second season, perhaps the producers will feature a bit more from Monsey.
Meagan Clark is the managing editor of Religion Unplugged. She has reported for Newsweek, International Business Times, Dallas Morning News, Religion News Service and several outlets in India, including Indian Express and the Wire. She is a 2022 candidate for the Masters in Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. Follow her on Twitter @MeaganKay.