Classically Abby - Religious Jew Explains Why ＂MY UNORTHODOX LIFE＂ Is Hateful PROPAGANDA

00:00:00.000 Hello, Classic Crew, and welcome to my channel, where we talk about political and cultural

00:00:04.980 topics of the day in an in-depth and relatable way.

00:00:08.020 Today we're going to be talking about My Unorthodox Life.

00:00:11.720 If you haven't heard of it, it's a reality show produced by Netflix about a woman leaving

00:00:16.500 the religious Jewish community, and it's a problem.

00:00:19.740 Today I want to break down why this show is a problem, why it's dangerous for Orthodox 1.00

00:00:25.040 Jews, and why it's not even true.

00:00:28.080 Before we get into today's video, make sure that you're subscribed to my channel and

00:00:31.920 ring that notification bell, and if you haven't already subscribed to my Substack newsletter

00:00:35.820 where you'll get access to exclusive content not available anywhere else, including four

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00:00:43.360 So what is My Unorthodox Life?

00:00:45.700 My Unorthodox Life is the story of Julia Hart, originally Talia Leboff.

00:00:51.060 Julia Hart was born in Russia, moved to Muncie, and then moved to Atlanta. 0.98

00:00:55.160 Although the way that she tells it, at least in the first episode of My Unorthodox Life,

00:00:58.780 is that she spent her entire Jewish life in the city of Muncie.

00:01:03.260 So that isn't true.

00:01:04.900 She decided that she wanted to leave the Jewish community in order to start a shoe brand,

00:01:09.660 then a lingerie brand, and she is now a girl boss at Elite World Group, which is a modeling

00:01:16.100 agency.

00:01:16.620 She and three of her four children have now left the Orthodox Jewish community in Muncie,

00:01:22.800 and one of her children spends half of his time with his father in Muncie and half of

00:01:27.260 his time with his mother in Manhattan.

00:01:29.540 Now, the way she makes it sound is that she decided that she needed to leave the Jewish

00:01:34.560 community.

00:01:35.080 She was feeling very overwhelmed, suicidal, when she felt that her daughter, her youngest

00:01:40.080 daughter, Miriam, wasn't being allowed to express herself, aka that she was a bisexual.

00:01:45.420 So she left her husband and brought her daughter with her and went to start her own shoe company.

00:01:51.220 When she started her own shoe company, with what she says is little to no education, she

00:01:56.240 was able to get enough prestige that she was able to run La Perla, which is a lingerie company, 0.64

00:02:01.240 something that made her very happy, because when she left the Jewish community, she wanted 0.99

00:02:06.020 to reject everything that she had left behind.

00:02:08.080 So she slept with as many people as she could. 0.94

00:02:10.240 But she wanted to dress in as inappropriate a way as possible.

00:02:14.960 She met an Italian man named Silvio that she married.

00:02:19.840 He took her last name, Hart, which she had changed her name to Hart when she left the Jewish

00:02:24.620 community, because Liebhoff in Yiddish is Hart in English.

00:02:29.480 So that's a little bit of background on Julia Hart.

00:02:31.660 She calls religious Judaism fundamentalism, and she is as secular as they come. 0.99

00:02:37.300 She wants to talk about sex with her kids. 1.00

00:02:39.480 She wants to carry around her vibrator. 1.00

00:02:42.500 This is a woman who has left behind everything that Judaism means. 1.00

00:02:47.020 She really just wants to be able to use Judaism for its cultural, fun traditions.

00:02:52.620 And that's it.

00:02:53.700 Everything that Judaism actually stands for, all of the actual practices, she wants to leave 1.00

00:02:58.140 behind.

00:02:58.440 Now, something that I want to say is that going on a religious journey, I have no issue

00:03:03.340 with.

00:03:04.020 I personally, if you've watched my channel before, you know that I have gone on a religious

00:03:09.280 journey.

00:03:09.840 I left Judaism. 0.85

00:03:11.260 I believed in God, and there were certain things that I still practiced.

00:03:15.360 But overall, I went off the derech.

00:03:17.880 That means went off the path in English.

00:03:20.080 And I am now currently on my way back to my faith.

00:03:23.480 So the show follows her transition from the religious Jewish community into the very secular

00:03:30.700 Manhattan world that she's now a part of, and her rejection of normal morality.

00:03:36.400 Time for a quick break so that I can thank Simple for sponsoring a portion of today's video.

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00:04:41.800 Let me know in the comments if you've ever heard of intermittent fasting before, or if you've

00:04:45.380 tried it yourself, and thanks again to Simple for sponsoring this portion of today's video.

00:04:49.800 Now let's get back into it.

00:04:51.260 So before we get into the way the show lies about Judaism, and the way that Julia Hart

00:04:55.620 lies about her experience with Judaism and Judaism itself, we have to understand how

00:05:01.180 Hart actually lives, and what she thinks liberation looks like.

00:05:05.620 It's actually very telling that this is the kind of person who thinks that religious

00:05:10.280 Judaism is a terrible thing. 1.00

00:05:12.120 Julia Hart is a 50-year-old woman who defines her freedom in sexual mores and immodesty. 1.00

00:05:18.780 She thinks that the acme of life is sex, and that the way for her to express her personal

00:05:24.720 freedom is by wearing as little clothing as possible.

00:05:28.540 I was covered up my entire life.

00:05:30.340 So to me, every low-cut top, every miniskirt is an emblem of freedom.

00:05:34.940 So in the first episode, we see her encouraging her bisexual daughter to go out and hook up 0.97

00:05:41.700 with someone on the first date. 0.86

00:05:43.260 We see her encouraging her son, who's a virgin and was waiting until marriage to have sex, 0.99

00:05:48.800 to kiss girls, hook up, have sex with who he wants to. 0.99

00:05:53.120 We see her talking about how important vibrators are, and openly talking about this with her 0.99

00:05:57.700 children consistently.

00:05:58.960 We see her get angry at her son-in-law for having any standards about modesty when it

00:06:03.980 comes to his wife.

00:06:05.140 And she talks about sexuality like it's just the most important thing.

00:06:08.980 Honestly.

00:06:09.540 That's really the big takeaway from the first episode.

00:06:12.700 So this is what takes the place of religion in Hart's life, is just sexuality and immodesty,

00:06:20.700 and really living for the senses and the present, and not taking into account anything that

00:06:27.240 could happen in the future.

00:06:28.180 It's also really important to understand that even though Hart grew up in the religious

00:06:32.760 Jewish community, it doesn't seem like she understands what the religious Jewish community

00:06:37.520 is all about, and many of the laws that she talks about.

00:06:40.720 She doesn't really understand where they come from.

00:06:43.240 She talks about them in a very vague way from an outside perspective.

00:06:48.520 Literally, she talks about the things that she supposedly practiced from the view of someone

00:06:53.100 who never actually practiced it, from an outside eye.

00:06:55.720 A good example of Julia Hart's limited knowledge of Judaism is that L'chaim does not mean to 1.00

00:07:04.720 family.

00:07:05.560 It means to life.

00:07:07.320 And it doesn't prove to me that she ever understood what the purpose of any of these

00:07:11.020 laws were.

00:07:11.680 When she talks about modesty, she talks about it like it's an oppressive system only meant

00:07:16.580 to stop men from getting turned on by women's bodies. 0.99

00:07:20.300 And if you want to know more about my thoughts about modesty, I will link something up here

00:07:25.040 in the i and down below in the description box, because I've done many videos on why

00:07:29.180 modesty is important.

00:07:30.540 It comes from a place of treating ourselves like princesses.

00:07:33.360 And that's a beautiful thing.

00:07:35.260 In another scene, her assistant asks her if there are rules for sex, and she says, of course 0.97

00:07:40.540 there are rules for which shoe to tie first.

00:07:43.520 Are there rules about sex?

00:07:45.060 There's rules about which shoe you're supposed to tie first, just to give you an idea.

00:07:50.220 Does she know why we're supposed to tie one shoe before the other?

00:07:53.440 I can tell you.

00:07:54.680 I don't know that she can.

00:07:56.180 We are told to tie the left shoe before the right because the left side represents mercy,

00:08:01.440 and the right side represents judgment.

00:08:03.920 And we are supposed to have more mercy than we're supposed to have judgment.

00:08:08.360 That's a beautiful thing, isn't it?

00:08:09.920 The show wants you to believe that Hart's story is a compelling narrative of a woman

00:08:14.560 leaving her community because she was oppressed and finding freedom and liberation in the modern

00:08:20.060 secular world.

00:08:21.260 A woman wrote an open letter to Hart because she grew up in the same community and her sister

00:08:25.080 was friends with her.

00:08:26.160 And she alleges that much of what Julia Hart has to say about her time in Muncie is just

00:08:31.000 not true.

00:08:32.120 Apparently, Hart used to dance at their high school.

00:08:34.920 She was known for dressing really well in the community.

00:08:37.460 No one got upset at her for expressing herself in a modest way.

00:08:41.460 Hart accuses Basiakov, her high school, of not giving her an education and not teaching

00:08:45.760 anyone anything.

00:08:46.880 This woman says that she got great scores on her regents, attended the college of her

00:08:51.140 choice, and some of her classes even gave her college credit.

00:08:54.340 She talks about the fact that in her community, many women have jobs, including her, and that

00:08:58.980 you're not only allowed to be a wife and mother.

00:09:01.260 She also talks about the fact that at the time, people watched movies, people read magazines.

00:09:06.560 Julia Hart talks about it as if none of that was allowed.

00:09:09.120 She never watched a show until she was in her 30s.

00:09:11.380 But in her community, that wasn't the case.

00:09:13.520 So it's just not true.

00:09:15.660 It seems that Hart has rewritten the past in order to make her narrative even more intense. 0.66

00:09:21.560 And the fact of the matter is, Jewish women don't appreciate it. 1.00

00:09:24.960 To me, it seems that Hart never really made an effort to understand the Judaism she grew

00:09:30.160 up with.

00:09:30.780 She wants to talk about it like an expert because she lived among Jews for much of her

00:09:36.020 life.

00:09:36.340 But if you don't understand why you're doing what you're doing, and then you go out and

00:09:40.340 purport to be an expert, that's a real problem.

00:09:43.480 And it's not reflective of what religious Judaism is all about. 0.79

00:09:47.300 The show wants us to believe that this is a liberation story of an oppressed woman who

00:09:52.240 left a backwards religion so that she could join modern feminism and find fulfillment personally, 0.96

00:09:58.660 professionally, and sexually in a way that she never could have accomplished had she stayed

00:10:03.100 in her insular community.

00:10:04.720 What we see instead is a woman who cares only about herself, who's cynical, who doesn't 0.99

00:10:09.880 want the best for her family, or what she thinks is the best for her family is definitely

00:10:15.400 not so.

00:10:16.520 And that she has lied, misrepresented, or misunderstood everything that she was from in order to make

00:10:22.720 money off it and to grow her brand.

00:10:24.500 And that might be fine if it was just about her.

00:10:27.420 It might be fine for her story to be just her story.

00:10:31.540 But she's throwing an entire religious community under the bus. 1.00

00:10:35.660 The problem with shows like My Unorthodox Life and Unorthodox is that, to the average person,

00:10:41.680 this is a true representation of the religious Jewish community.

00:10:46.100 And how many people are going to know that this isn't correct?

00:10:49.300 Or even think to research it after watching.

00:10:52.460 A religious Jew will watch a show like this and immediately be able to pick out all of 0.99

00:10:56.980 the problems and all of the lies.

00:10:58.960 But the fact of the matter is, the average person who's watching it thinks this is a

00:11:02.480 real representation of a religious community.

00:11:05.760 And if the religious community is represented as patriarchal, hateful of women, insular, 0.68

00:11:11.980 backwards, then why wouldn't they judge that community?

00:11:15.220 Why wouldn't they even hate that community?

00:11:17.440 The result is that people will form an opinion based on the story of a woman who doesn't

00:11:22.700 understand Judaism and who thinks that sex is the most important thing in her life.

00:11:27.120 So if Julia Hart is lying about Judaism, what is Judaism really like?

00:11:31.360 I grew up in a modern Orthodox Jewish community.

00:11:34.860 And the way that Julia Hart talks about the Jewish community doesn't add up.

00:11:38.920 My mother had a full-time job. 0.98

00:11:40.920 Many women I knew had a full-time job. 1.00

00:11:43.840 Religion was a beautiful thing.

00:11:45.640 It was something that we loved.

00:11:47.520 Yes, there were times that it was more difficult.

00:11:50.240 But that doesn't mean that it wasn't worth it.

00:11:52.280 It doesn't mean that I didn't see its value.

00:11:54.520 I was part of a beautiful community.

00:11:56.380 I had an amazing education.

00:11:58.440 I understood where I came from.

00:12:00.700 I understood where my values stemmed from.

00:12:03.740 And I'm grateful that I grew up in the religious Jewish community.

00:12:06.600 And I'm grateful that I've had the opportunity to explore my faith more over time.

00:12:11.160 So what's the role of women in Judaism? 0.99

00:12:13.580 Are women relegated to second-class citizens? 1.00

00:12:17.320 Absolutely not.

00:12:19.020 And this makes me crazy.

00:12:21.220 In the most observant Jewish communities, you still have women working full-time jobs. 0.98

00:12:25.780 You have women who are in powerful positions. 1.00

00:12:28.340 Women aren't relegated to being at home. 1.00

00:12:30.920 But the role of women in the Jewish community is really important from a communal aspect.

00:12:37.940 We respect women as mothers, as homemakers, and as the builders of community.

00:12:42.620 Women have so much power in the community. 1.00

00:12:45.120 We give them so much respect for having children and raising them to be good, strong members of society.

00:12:52.440 Being a Jewish woman doesn't mean you can't have a career. 0.92

00:12:55.700 It doesn't mean you can't work outside of the home.

00:12:58.220 But it also means that being a wife and a mother and being a strong part of your community makes you important.

00:13:04.960 And it doesn't make you less important than any man.

00:13:08.020 Everything is a role.

00:13:09.640 We all have roles that we have to practice.

00:13:12.060 So women's role is incredibly important. 1.00

00:13:15.860 Not only do we have the opportunity to work if we want to,

00:13:18.720 but the role we have as mother, as community member, and as wife is so respected.

00:13:25.840 And I think that's amazing.

00:13:27.380 In today's day and age, in the modern world,

00:13:29.700 where staying at home and being a mother is seen as less important.

00:13:35.120 We're putting back the cause of women 100 years. 1.00

00:13:38.120 I am so grateful that I am in a community that views motherhood as an incredible gift

00:13:44.460 and something worthy of respect.

00:13:46.480 And if you're curious about marriage and if it's patriarchal in the Jewish community,

00:13:50.600 go ahead and go back to my last video where I talked about if marriage is a patriarchal institution.

00:13:55.640 Especially in the Jewish community, you'll find that that's definitely not the case.

00:13:59.600 So shows like My Unorthodox Life are really dangerous for religious Jews. 0.98

00:14:05.340 People will come away thinking that they know exactly what Judaism is like and why it's such a problem 1.00

00:14:09.980 when they know nothing about religious Jews and nothing about Orthodox Judaism.

00:14:13.840 This show is meant to reach people who don't know a lot about religious Judaism

00:14:17.400 and present the opinions of one woman who left the Jewish community

00:14:20.760 as an important reflection on the insular and backwards practices of religious Jews. 0.95

00:14:25.200 Of course that hurts Jews. 0.99

00:14:27.280 Of course that gives people the impression that religious Judaism is insular and is oppressive.

00:14:32.840 How often in real life are you going to either meet a religious Jew

00:14:36.520 or even participate in a religious Jewish community?

00:14:38.940 Unlike secular Jews, who are in the media all the time, 1.00

00:14:42.560 religious Jews make up 10% of American Jews, which is 650,000 people.

00:14:48.220 And religious Jews are focused on raising their families, being part of their communities,

00:14:52.220 studying Torah, and the result is that the vast majority of people

00:14:56.180 who learn something about religious Jews are learning it from someone who left it and hates it 1.00

00:15:01.200 or from someone who knows nothing about it.

00:15:03.080 So when a woman who is living a degenerate life and is being bankrolled by Netflix 1.00

00:15:07.640 is telling her story of leaving the oppressive Jewish community,

00:15:11.820 it can only be a bad thing.

00:15:13.620 There's already so much violence against Jews in America.

00:15:16.460 This is only going to give people permission to do more. 1.00

00:15:19.420 The violence comes from ignorant, racist people who believe conspiracy theories about Jews 1.00

00:15:24.560 and who nurse old ethnic hatreds of Jews from years past. 1.00

00:15:28.360 But now we're allowing those who might not act violently themselves to tolerate violence against Jews 0.62

00:15:34.720 because, of course, they're backwards. 0.61

00:15:36.660 I heard it from a plausible resource.

00:15:38.960 I heard it from a woman who lived it herself.

00:15:41.300 After the show aired, a group of religious Jewish women started the hashtag MyOrthodoxLife 1.00

00:15:46.860 where they shared why they love being Jewish

00:15:49.400 and why shows like this are not representative of their experience.

00:15:53.660 They've chosen to be religious and they love being religious.

00:15:56.980 They've chosen to dress modestly and they don't find dressing modestly to be oppressive.

00:16:02.480 They've chosen to get married and have children and to make that their primary goal.

00:16:07.540 And they love that they get to do so. 0.96

00:16:09.740 My Unorthodox Life is a ridiculous, self-indulgent reality show 0.95

00:16:13.700 about a woman who left Judaism and who seems to have had little to no understanding of it in the first place. 0.89

00:16:19.900 She wanted fame and Netflix gave it to her. 0.89

00:16:22.460 She wanted to live her hedonistic little life and Netflix is allowing her to do so in the public eye. 1.00

00:16:28.200 All of this has been laundered by Netflix into a reality show that is harmful and bad for religious Jews. 0.80

00:16:35.120 So that's it for today's video.

00:16:36.800 I hope you guys enjoyed it.

00:16:38.380 Let me know in the comments below if you've heard of this show, if you've watched this show.

00:16:42.020 I would love to hear your thoughts.

00:16:43.380 If you're not already subscribed to my YouTube channel, make sure that you are and ring that notification bell.

00:16:48.840 And if you haven't already subscribed to my Substack newsletter, make sure to do so.

00:16:52.760 If you'd like to follow me on social media, it's at Classically Abby Absolutely Everywhere.

00:16:56.300 Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys in my next video.

00:16:59.040 Bye!

00:16:59.360 Bye!

Classically Abby - August 10, 2021

Religious Jew Explains Why ＂MY UNORTHODOX LIFE＂ Is Hateful PROPAGANDA

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