Julia Haart from “My heterodox life” responds to critics of the reality show

(JTA) — The day My Heterodox Life premiered on Netflix, Julia Haart was frustrated by negative reviews, especially from Jews living the way she once did.

"Before you judge the show, maybe you want to watch it?" Haart told The Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Wednesday, responding to those who say the TV series is just the latest in a series of pop culture cheap shots against Orthodoxy.

"Because they had the word 'unorthodox,' people have made thousands of assumptions without taking the time to listen to what I really have to say," said Haart, chief executive of global modeling agency Elite World Group. "If someone watches the show... it will be very difficult for someone to say that I didn't mention anything positive."

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However, what Haart has to say may be hard to hear for those who defended Orthodoxy against Netflix's previous forays into stories about people who have left Orthodox communities.

The title My Unorthodox Life pays homage to the company's 2020 Emmy-winning success Unorthodox, a series loosely based on the 2012 best-selling memoir by Deborah Feldman, who left the Hasidic community after marrying at 17 and having a son.

That show was preceded by One of Us, a 2017 documentary that follows the lives of three former Hasidic Jews, one of whom deals with the aftermath of sexual abuse, as they struggle to acclimate to the challenges of their new lives.

But while critics of those shows could and sometimes did argue that the abuse and trauma that drove the subjects to leave was simply due to a few bad Orthodox apples, Haart says the problem is endemic to the world. Haredi Orthodox, where women often marry young, have many children, and rarely go on to higher education or careers of high power.

“What I would love to see is women having the opportunity to have a real education, they can go to college, not get married at 19 in a Shidduch,” or an arranged marriage, Haart told JTA.

“I want women to be able to sing in public if they want or dance in public if they want. I want you to believe. I want them to be doctors or lawyers or whatever they want to be. I want them to know that they are important, in and of themselves, not just as wives and mothers.”

A flurry of press surrounding the show's premiere has already made the contours of Haart's life familiar to many.

She was born Julia Leibov in what was then the Soviet Union. She (she later called herself Talia when she started dating to get married). Her parents were practicing Jews, although that was difficult at the time, even though there were no Mikveh or Jewish ritual baths in the country at the time, Haart's mother had to plunge into the Black Sea, even in the dead of winter. .

The family came to the US in the 1970s, moving to Austin, Texas, where Haart was the only Jew enrolled in her private school. When she was in the fourth grade, the family, which had become more religious, moved to Monsey, a town outside of New York City that is home to a large population of Orthodox Jews. Haart was enrolled in a religious school for girls there and, for the first time, she did not meet anyone in her daily life who was not an observant Jew.

She said the change caused a deep culture shock.

“She had always been very proud to be Jewish, she loved my Jewish identity,” Ella Haart said. "I just didn't know that that meant I had to cut myself off from the rest of the world."

Haart graduated from high school in Monsey and attended a religious girls' seminar in Israel for a year before returning to start shidduchim, or matchmaker-arranged dates. At 19, she married Yosef Hendler and they moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn, where Hendler studied at a local Yeshiva.

The couple later returned to Monsey and became part of an Orthodox community where men study Torah sometimes full time.

In some ways, the Yeshiva community is less isolated than the Hasidic communities Feldman and the One of Us subjects left behind, with most people speaking English as their first language and some attending college and graduate school.

Haart's husband was among them. She graduated from the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania before becoming more observant and embarking on a career in the energy field. When she was offered a job in Atlanta in the 1990s, Haart jumped at the chance to move.

“Out of town” communities, or Orthodox communities outside of the New York metropolitan area, are considered more open and often allow a greater variety of religious practices than communities in New York and New Jersey.

“I was so ecstatic, honestly, it didn't occur to me to leave the world. But at least I thought, you know, being out of town is a little more relaxed," Haart said. "Atlanta was the beginning of everything."

Haart became a leader in the local Orthodox community there, lecturing on Jewish topics to great attendance and gaining a reputation as an engaging teacher.

She often hosted large Shabbat potlucks, feeding an average of 40 people a week. Among them were local college students and others who needed a Shabbat meal or wanted to learn more about Shabbat.

Those encounters introduced her to secular Jews and exposed her to their ways of life. She started visiting the local Barnes and Noble and buying secular literature, then bought a television and started going to the drive-in with her husband. She (she said they preferred drive-ins because they didn't "mingle with non-Jews" there).

But when Haart tried to import some of what she was learning about the secular world into her own life, she said she hit a wall.

“I was tired of being told… Julia, you are too flashy, Julia, your clothes are too tight, Julia, your clothes are too colorful, Julia, stop being conspicuous,” she recalled. "I was so tired of being told to make myself invisible."

She tried to talk to teachers and rabbis about her struggles in her religious community. The rabbis told her to recite the Psalms.

“My favorite was someone who said to me, 'Julia, where does it say you need to be happy? There is nowhere in the Torah that says that,” Haart said.

By the time her eldest daughter, Batsheva, married at age 19 in 2012, Haart had learned enough about the "outside world" to want to participate.

The week after the wedding, Haart left the Orthodox community behind, taking her youngest daughter, Miriam. (Her eldest son, Shlomo, later moved to New York City and continued to observe Shabbat, though he said he recently stopped wearing a Kippah. Haart and her ex-husband share custody of their youngest son, Aron, who is 14. and attends an Orthodox school. All of her children appear on the show.)

A year after her departure, Haart started a shoe company of the same name. Before long, she was tapped to become the creative director of luxury lingerie brand La Perla, where she was influential in getting Kim Kardashian, whose family reality show paved the way for My Heterodox Life, to wear a bra as an outfit. wear.

In 2019, Haart took the lead role at talent management company Elite World Group, whose president is her Italian husband.

The show is sparse on details about Haart's meteoric rise from former Orthodox mom to CEO of global fashion. For that, Haart said, they'll have to wait for her memoir, which is scheduled for release next spring. (The book figures heavily into the show's early episodes, as Haart disagrees with some of her children about whether she should be able to reveal personal details about them.)

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But Haart said her religious journey was more gradual. She said she learned about the world beyond her Orthodox community for 8 years before she left, slowly experimenting with some of the stricter parts of her religious life along the way.

“People just assume I left one day. That's not what happened,” she assured. “It took me more than 8 years to leave and in those 8 years I became less and less fundamentalist. So the people who know me from the last few years before I left know a very different woman than the woman [I was] until I was 35."

That's not to say that she's embraced the outside world the way she's seen on the show, where she wears revealing clothing, gives advice on vibrators, and eats non-kosher food.

During her years in Atlanta before she left, Haart taught at a religious school and taught women in her community. Recordings of some of her religious lectures can still be found online.

"When I say we've become increasingly secular, you still have your nose pressed against the glass in the bakery door, but we're not going to go into the bakery, and we're certainly not going to buy the croissant," Haart said. “During those 8 years I was observing.”

Yael Reisman, director of field and movement building at Footsteps, an organization that helps those who want to leave Orthodox communities adjust to life in the secular world, said Haart's journey story could be inspiring. But he said it could also be dangerously misleading.

“Our members really fight back,” Reisman said. “Leaving has a tremendous cost, the stakes are high. It worries me that the show doesn't deal with the complexities of leaving everything you know behind."

Haart and her family members allude to the challenges of leaving Orthodox communities. Her son-in-law Binyamin Weinstein said she got into real estate because it only requires a high school diploma and Haart frequently laments the poor education she and her children received at Monsey.

Elsewhere, Shlomo has spoken of having to make up lost ground at a local community college before he can transfer to Columbia University.

But Haart and her children disagree on how to help someone who wants to leave the Orthodox community. In one episode of the show, Haart invites a woman who wishes to leave her community to discuss the process of starting a new life.

Rather than offer her professional advice, as Batsheva and Ben believe she should, Haart gives the woman a complete makeover with a new haircut, makeup, and jeans. Much to the annoyance of her children, she gives the woman a vibrator.

“If she came from Monsey and had never been in a big, beautiful office and met a CEO, what would be her next move the next day?” Batsheva asks. “Mine would be, wow, that's really amazing, I want to be in the workforce and in the world. But I would still feel at a loss as to how I can get there."

Ben, speaking to Miriam, adds: "I think what Batsheva is saying is that it would have been more practical if your mother sat down with her and looked for a job and showed her a plan of action instead of the hair, makeup and vibrator." .

Batsheva confronts her mother, who defends her approach.

"I'm trying to promote self-awareness, and knowing how to pleasure yourself as a woman is part of self-awareness," Haart said.

It is clear that Haart would rather her children be in her world than in the Orthodox community and that she is uncomfortable with them embracing aspects of life that she left behind.

The series shows Haart sometimes pressuring his sons to be less religiously observant, for example urging his youngest son to reconsider his decision not to talk to girls and scolding his son-in-law for his discomfort when Batsheva wears pants. .

But there are also scenes where she notices the presence of Kosher food and she celebrates the Sukkot holiday with her children and one of her sisters who is still observant.

“If you look at it, you see that we all love each other and even though my mom is not religious… she is extremely respectful, you know, she spends all the holidays with us, she makes sure there are Kosher food options, she respects our travel restrictions on Shabbat.” Batsheva Weinstein, who now identifies as Modern Orthodox, told JTA.

Some Orthodox critics see the show as a malicious smear of the entire Orthodox community, and Haart's support of those seeking to leave as proof that she has an agenda beyond telling her own story.

The Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Committee has been criticizing the show on Twitter, and Orthodox women have even taken to social media to counter the show's portrayal of Orthodoxy, sharing stories about finding fulfillment in their own lives as women. along with smiling photos of themselves with their hair covered and wearing a modest dress with the hashtag #MyOrthodoxLife.

“These lewd stories are actively causing people to hate Jews,” wrote Kylie Ora Lobell in The Jewish Journal. “And Orthodox Jews generally don't speak out because they are too busy living their lives to pay attention to what the media has to say. If they take a stance, mainstream publications will generally not publish their responses. The media doesn't want to hear it. And so they hit us over and over again.”

Writing in Glamour, Jenny Singer took issue with the idea that watching My Heterodox Life would constitute a form of feminist activism. Instead, she said, the program could make Orthodox Jews even more vulnerable to anti-Semitism.

“It is not acceptable to punish an entire minority group, no matter how much you disagree with them or how harmful some of their practices are. It does not help Orthodox women; it simply endangers all Orthodox people,” Singer wrote.

Reisman said the idea that stories like Haart's cause anti-Semitism is unfounded.

“I can't say how much of a problem that is. These stories don't cause anti-Semitism, it's just another tactic to make people shut up,” she said. "I think what needs to be addressed is these behaviors that make people leave."

Haart also rejects criticism that the show is anti-Semitic or anti-Orthodox. She still believes in God, she said, and appreciates the values ​​of kindness and charity that she said she takes from Judaism.

She just doesn't want any other woman to feel the desperation she experienced as a young wife and mother, whose role in her community felt too circumscribed.

“Shabbat is beautiful. Do you think I want people to stop keeping Shabbat? Of course not," Haart said. "I want them to stop telling women what to do."

From the translation (c) Jewish Link Mexico Reproduction prohibited

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