The ultra-Orthodox community is the fastest-growing segment of Jewry in the United States and in the world Jewish community at large. Because of the astonishingly high rate at which Conservative and Reform Jews marry out, Orthodox Jews are on pace to become the majority of American and world Jewry by 2050. At least two-thirds of them will be ultra-Orthodox, or “Haredi.” Haredi Jews have accordingly been receiving a fair amount of attention in film and television in recent years, from the notorious 1998 film A Price Above Rubies to the touching 2013 film Fill the Void and the recent Netflix show Shtisel.
Shtisel, which focuses on the lives of a Haredi family in Jerusalem, is emblematic of the strong group cohesion and time-tested values that have kept traditional Haredi culture thriving despite the unceasing onslaught of modernity. No character in the show, not even the Shtisel family’s estranged daughter, leaves the Haredi fold. Despite their awareness of modernity and all that it offers, none of the Haredi characters are tempted to “go off the derech,” or “leave the path” — the Jewish expression for abandoning the religious way of life.
In reality, however, more and more Haredi Jews are “going off the derech.” Haredi birthrates are high enough to sustain these losses, but the fact that there is a steady rate of attrition is a significant fact about contemporary Haredi life that is almost entirely ignored by Shtisel.
Netflix’s Unorthodox arrived this spring as a kind of companion piece to Shtisel. Unorthodox stars Shira Haas in the role of Esty, a young woman living in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn who flees to Berlin to escape her unsatisfying marriage and her rigid, narrow-minded Haredi community. Haas also plays a young Haredi woman in Shtisel, making one wonder whether she’s becoming typecast or whether she simply enjoys taking these roles. As in Shtisel, Haas here plays a strong-willed character who takes initiative and defies the expectations of her parents and her community. But instead of feuding with her parents because she wants to get married, as her character does in Shtisel, here she is at odds with her community because she wants to escape her marriage.
Haas is a master of steely expressions and jerky, decisive movements. She showcases these aplenty in Unorthodox, which allows her to showcase the full range of her talents. Watch her face during the scene in which her hair is getting shorn off prior to being fitted for a marital wig or during the scene in which she calls her grandma from Berlin, or any scene, really. She is an absolute revelation in this series, and it’s only a matter of time before she moves on to more prominent roles.
All of which makes it a terrible shame that her supporting cast fails so miserably. Haas is like a starting pitcher who throws a one-run complete game but ends up losing because her team has given her absolutely zero run support. The rest of the cast in Unorthodox is more wooden than a pine box of Louisville Sluggers. Both Haredi Jews and secular Germans are presented as caricatures of religious and secular people (particularly crude ones, in the case of Haredim). And I’d like to be kind about the writing, but there are so many lines like, “There’s no place like home,” “I’m not like the other girls,” and, “Different is good,” that saying something nice is virtually impossible. The dialogue is at times laughable, at times hackneyed — there is actually a “two Jews, three synagogues” joke, for anyone playing Jewish humor cliche bingo — and at times simply baffling, as when Esty meets an Israeli girl in Berlin, who, in response to Esty saying her family lost almost all of its relatives in the Nazi death camps, says, “So did half of Israel. But we’re too busy defending our present to be sentimental about our past.” Even forgetting that Israel created the world’s first two Holocaust museums, who could believe this line? Thank goodness that at least we get to hear Antonin Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings.
The show also commits a number of errors in its depictions of Haredi and religious Jewish life, too many to go into here. As my friend Samuel Klein said to me and to five of our other friends, “I’m so relieved that among all the cringeworthy errors, the one fact they got right is that it is shayach (very likely) for a choson (groom) to look supremely constipated under the chuppah (marriage canopy).”
Shtisel is such a triumph in part because of how natural and real each character feels. Unorthodox misses the mark because of how strained and manufactured the characters and situations appear to be. I feel bad for Deborah Feldman, the author of the memoir that has inspired this series, for having to see her very real life story turned into something that seems so contrived. And I feel especially bad for Haas, an actress with the talent of Natalie Portman and Monster’s Ball-era Halle Berry, who’s been forced to team up with minor league players.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
