The series, of course, is not about ultra-Orthodoxy per se but a personal tale – whose exhilarating and tragic story-line is now somewhat weathered – of a person who flees ultra-Orthodoxy suddenly and without notice to “find herself” in what her community views simply as “evil culture” ( tarbut ra). The exotic nature of a community that is uncanny, both familiar and utterly strange, has become a curiosity for Jews and non-Jews alike. Ultra-Orthodox communities that refrained from social distancing in the COVID-19 pandemic continue to make international news. The celebrated series Shtisl, a masterful study of an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem, has gone viral. The world, or some part of it, seems increasingly curious about Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy. Unorthodox appears at a strangely opportune time. As if it is a “world.” Unorthodox shows us the extent to which this is both true and false, and the price that world, or any such world, pays in order to sustain that myth. It exists “as if” it is a world unto itself. The ultra-Orthodox community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the home of the protagonist Esty Shapiro, is one such enclavist community, born from, and driven by, fear of the outside. Their lives are categorically different, for example, than Modern Orthodox Jews who live fully absorbed in the larger world in which they live. is meant to sustain separation, not only from the non-Jewish world but from other Jews as well.

Their entire social system, from law and custom, to dress, to language, food etc. One of the distinguishing features of ultra-Orthodox “worlds” is that they function, or envision themselves, as self-enclosed spaces socially and ideologically, even when they exist in urban areas. Shaul Magid on Netflix’s Unorthodox A Rosh Yeshiva (Yeshiva Dean) in Jerusalem once said to me, “One of the biggest problems with the yeshiva world is that it thinks it’s a world.” I thought of this remark as I watched the Netflix series Unorthodox, based on a book by Deborah Feldman about her personal journey out of Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy.

Unorthodox deborah