Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on April 6, 2020

CultureNetflix's superb new drama tells the true story of a young woman who fled her Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn

Friday, 3rd April 2020, 12:33 pm

Why is television so fascinated by religious rebels? And why does it never get their portrayal quite right?Anyone who has broken from their faith community in extreme cases, cults, but more commonly, the Amish or Mormons are considered beguiling, different, alien.

Too often in drama, a persons break from the world that has raised them is sensationalised as a total rejection of their upbringing, faith and customs; the individuals simplified as naive oddballs, or wild and off the rails, unable to cope with the trappings of modern society. Which is why the fantastic new mini-series Unorthodox is so striking in its measure and consideration.

This is Netflixs first series filmed in Yiddish. Based on the 2012 memoir by Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, it follows Esty Shapiro, a 19-year-old who flees her Orthodox Jewish community in Williamsburg and travels to Berlin.

i's TV newsletter: what you should watch next

i's TV newsletter: what you should watch next

Through flashbacks - during which we feel lurched far further in the past than mere weeks and months; shots of busy roads and familiar New York street signs remind us were in contemporary Brooklyn - we see glimpses of her former life, and the reasons she had to leave: her marriage to her husband, Yanky, was not happy, and childless. Under much family pressure, he asked Esty for a divorce.

Esty herself is described as an orphan though it transpires that her crazy mother fled when Esty was a toddler. Shira Haas, the 24-year-old Israeli actress who plays Esty, is superb: determined, insular, captivating to watch. She looks even younger than she is, which makes scenes such as her wedding, at which she seems doll-like in her dress, an even starker reminder of the life and liberties she was denied.

Her grit when she reaches Berlin making friends, going to bars, auditioning for a conservatory is all the more staggering for it: she is trying out adulthood for the first time. Isnt it splendid? she is asked, in a club as the techno pounds. I dont know yet, she says. All my life Ive been warned that all this would kill me.

That youth is her most powerful weapon again in the shows most devastating scene, a flashback to the moment she and Yanky were finally able to consummate their marriage after months of failed attempts it had always been too painful for her. Mid-argument, she lies on her back, clenches her jaw and tells him to climb on, covering her eyes with her hands, face scrunched up in pain. She tells him to keep going and when he finishes, beaming, a different kind of innocence has been lost as she weeps in lonely agony beside him.

We never see Esty deliberating about whether to leave: that she has to go is her only certainty

Those contrasts between girlhood and womanhood are the only times Unorthodox sets out to shock. There is no final fight after which she must pack up; tension and conflict with her family is kept to a minimum; and her community and religion are never condemned as simple oppressors.

She told her husband when she first met him that she was different, but we are rarely reminded that Esty is an odd one out the point is, she could be anyone. Symbols of Hasidic Judaism are everywhere, and do not need to be explained for the viewer to understand their importance in one scene, Esty cries as her head is shorn, while younger girls look on in horror; in another, her husbands peyot come to represent his heartbreak. Mostly, though, Esty's imprisonment by a patriarchal world in which her worth is measured in how many babies she has is conveyed through women like her interfering mother-in-law rather than any religious doctrine, which compounds the sense of her entrapment.

We never see Esty deliberating about whether to leave: that she has to go is her only certainty. And when she does, the new freedoms she cherishes are simple: love, music and her mother, who has spent decades making peace with everything she gave up: So much damage done in Brooklyn in the name of God.

'Unorthodox' is available now on Netflix

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Netflix's compelling drama Unorthodox is a striking examination of faith and feminism - inews

Category: Hasidic
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