Religious Jew Explains Why ＂MY UNORTHODOX LIFE＂ Is Hateful PROPAGANDA
Episode Stats
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Summary
My Unorthodox Life is a reality show produced by Netflix about a woman leaving the religious Jewish community, and it s a problem. Today I want to break down why this show is a problem, why it s dangerous for Orthodox Jews, and why it's not even true.
Transcript
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Hello, Classic Crew, and welcome to my channel, where we talk about political and cultural
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topics of the day in an in-depth and relatable way.
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Today we're going to be talking about My Unorthodox Life.
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If you haven't heard of it, it's a reality show produced by Netflix about a woman leaving
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the religious Jewish community, and it's a problem.
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Today I want to break down why this show is a problem, why it's dangerous for Orthodox
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Before we get into today's video, make sure that you're subscribed to my channel and
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ring that notification bell, and if you haven't already subscribed to my Substack newsletter
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My Unorthodox Life is the story of Julia Hart, originally Talia Leboff.
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Julia Hart was born in Russia, moved to Muncie, and then moved to Atlanta.
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Although the way that she tells it, at least in the first episode of My Unorthodox Life,
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is that she spent her entire Jewish life in the city of Muncie.
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She decided that she wanted to leave the Jewish community in order to start a shoe brand,
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then a lingerie brand, and she is now a girl boss at Elite World Group, which is a modeling
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She and three of her four children have now left the Orthodox Jewish community in Muncie,
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and one of her children spends half of his time with his father in Muncie and half of
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Now, the way she makes it sound is that she decided that she needed to leave the Jewish
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She was feeling very overwhelmed, suicidal, when she felt that her daughter, her youngest
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daughter, Miriam, wasn't being allowed to express herself, aka that she was a bisexual.
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So she left her husband and brought her daughter with her and went to start her own shoe company.
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When she started her own shoe company, with what she says is little to no education, she
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was able to get enough prestige that she was able to run La Perla, which is a lingerie company,
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something that made her very happy, because when she left the Jewish community, she wanted
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But she wanted to dress in as inappropriate a way as possible.
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She met an Italian man named Silvio that she married.
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He took her last name, Hart, which she had changed her name to Hart when she left the Jewish
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community, because Liebhoff in Yiddish is Hart in English.
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So that's a little bit of background on Julia Hart.
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She calls religious Judaism fundamentalism, and she is as secular as they come.
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This is a woman who has left behind everything that Judaism means.
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She really just wants to be able to use Judaism for its cultural, fun traditions.
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Everything that Judaism actually stands for, all of the actual practices, she wants to leave
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Now, something that I want to say is that going on a religious journey, I have no issue
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I personally, if you've watched my channel before, you know that I have gone on a religious
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I believed in God, and there were certain things that I still practiced.
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And I am now currently on my way back to my faith.
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So the show follows her transition from the religious Jewish community into the very secular
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Manhattan world that she's now a part of, and her rejection of normal morality.
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tried it yourself, and thanks again to Simple for sponsoring this portion of today's video.
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So before we get into the way the show lies about Judaism, and the way that Julia Hart
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lies about her experience with Judaism and Judaism itself, we have to understand how
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Hart actually lives, and what she thinks liberation looks like.
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It's actually very telling that this is the kind of person who thinks that religious
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Julia Hart is a 50-year-old woman who defines her freedom in sexual mores and immodesty.
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She thinks that the acme of life is sex, and that the way for her to express her personal
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freedom is by wearing as little clothing as possible.
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So to me, every low-cut top, every miniskirt is an emblem of freedom.
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So in the first episode, we see her encouraging her bisexual daughter to go out and hook up
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We see her encouraging her son, who's a virgin and was waiting until marriage to have sex,
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to kiss girls, hook up, have sex with who he wants to.
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We see her talking about how important vibrators are, and openly talking about this with her
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We see her get angry at her son-in-law for having any standards about modesty when it
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And she talks about sexuality like it's just the most important thing.
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That's really the big takeaway from the first episode.
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So this is what takes the place of religion in Hart's life, is just sexuality and immodesty,
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and really living for the senses and the present, and not taking into account anything that
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It's also really important to understand that even though Hart grew up in the religious
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Jewish community, it doesn't seem like she understands what the religious Jewish community
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is all about, and many of the laws that she talks about.
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She doesn't really understand where they come from.
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She talks about them in a very vague way from an outside perspective.
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Literally, she talks about the things that she supposedly practiced from the view of someone
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who never actually practiced it, from an outside eye.
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A good example of Julia Hart's limited knowledge of Judaism is that L'chaim does not mean to
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And it doesn't prove to me that she ever understood what the purpose of any of these
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When she talks about modesty, she talks about it like it's an oppressive system only meant
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to stop men from getting turned on by women's bodies.
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And if you want to know more about my thoughts about modesty, I will link something up here
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in the i and down below in the description box, because I've done many videos on why
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It comes from a place of treating ourselves like princesses.
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In another scene, her assistant asks her if there are rules for sex, and she says, of course
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There's rules about which shoe you're supposed to tie first, just to give you an idea.
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Does she know why we're supposed to tie one shoe before the other?
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We are told to tie the left shoe before the right because the left side represents mercy,
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And we are supposed to have more mercy than we're supposed to have judgment.
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The show wants you to believe that Hart's story is a compelling narrative of a woman
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leaving her community because she was oppressed and finding freedom and liberation in the modern
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A woman wrote an open letter to Hart because she grew up in the same community and her sister
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And she alleges that much of what Julia Hart has to say about her time in Muncie is just
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Apparently, Hart used to dance at their high school.
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She was known for dressing really well in the community.
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No one got upset at her for expressing herself in a modest way.
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Hart accuses Basiakov, her high school, of not giving her an education and not teaching
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This woman says that she got great scores on her regents, attended the college of her
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choice, and some of her classes even gave her college credit.
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She talks about the fact that in her community, many women have jobs, including her, and that
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you're not only allowed to be a wife and mother.
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She also talks about the fact that at the time, people watched movies, people read magazines.
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Julia Hart talks about it as if none of that was allowed.
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She never watched a show until she was in her 30s.
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It seems that Hart has rewritten the past in order to make her narrative even more intense.
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And the fact of the matter is, Jewish women don't appreciate it.
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To me, it seems that Hart never really made an effort to understand the Judaism she grew
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She wants to talk about it like an expert because she lived among Jews for much of her
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But if you don't understand why you're doing what you're doing, and then you go out and
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purport to be an expert, that's a real problem.
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And it's not reflective of what religious Judaism is all about.
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The show wants us to believe that this is a liberation story of an oppressed woman who
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left a backwards religion so that she could join modern feminism and find fulfillment personally,
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professionally, and sexually in a way that she never could have accomplished had she stayed
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What we see instead is a woman who cares only about herself, who's cynical, who doesn't
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want the best for her family, or what she thinks is the best for her family is definitely
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And that she has lied, misrepresented, or misunderstood everything that she was from in order to make
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And that might be fine if it was just about her.
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It might be fine for her story to be just her story.
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But she's throwing an entire religious community under the bus.
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The problem with shows like My Unorthodox Life and Unorthodox is that, to the average person,
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this is a true representation of the religious Jewish community.
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And how many people are going to know that this isn't correct?
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A religious Jew will watch a show like this and immediately be able to pick out all of
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But the fact of the matter is, the average person who's watching it thinks this is a
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And if the religious community is represented as patriarchal, hateful of women, insular,
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backwards, then why wouldn't they judge that community?
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The result is that people will form an opinion based on the story of a woman who doesn't
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understand Judaism and who thinks that sex is the most important thing in her life.
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So if Julia Hart is lying about Judaism, what is Judaism really like?
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I grew up in a modern Orthodox Jewish community.
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And the way that Julia Hart talks about the Jewish community doesn't add up.
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Yes, there were times that it was more difficult.
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And I'm grateful that I grew up in the religious Jewish community.
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And I'm grateful that I've had the opportunity to explore my faith more over time.
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In the most observant Jewish communities, you still have women working full-time jobs.
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But the role of women in the Jewish community is really important from a communal aspect.
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We respect women as mothers, as homemakers, and as the builders of community.
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We give them so much respect for having children and raising them to be good, strong members of society.
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Being a Jewish woman doesn't mean you can't have a career.
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It doesn't mean you can't work outside of the home.
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But it also means that being a wife and a mother and being a strong part of your community makes you important.
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And it doesn't make you less important than any man.
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Not only do we have the opportunity to work if we want to,
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but the role we have as mother, as community member, and as wife is so respected.
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where staying at home and being a mother is seen as less important.
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We're putting back the cause of women 100 years.
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I am so grateful that I am in a community that views motherhood as an incredible gift
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And if you're curious about marriage and if it's patriarchal in the Jewish community,
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go ahead and go back to my last video where I talked about if marriage is a patriarchal institution.
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Especially in the Jewish community, you'll find that that's definitely not the case.
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So shows like My Unorthodox Life are really dangerous for religious Jews.
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People will come away thinking that they know exactly what Judaism is like and why it's such a problem
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when they know nothing about religious Jews and nothing about Orthodox Judaism.
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This show is meant to reach people who don't know a lot about religious Judaism
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and present the opinions of one woman who left the Jewish community
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as an important reflection on the insular and backwards practices of religious Jews.
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Of course that gives people the impression that religious Judaism is insular and is oppressive.
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How often in real life are you going to either meet a religious Jew
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or even participate in a religious Jewish community?
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Unlike secular Jews, who are in the media all the time,
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religious Jews make up 10% of American Jews, which is 650,000 people.
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And religious Jews are focused on raising their families, being part of their communities,
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studying Torah, and the result is that the vast majority of people
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who learn something about religious Jews are learning it from someone who left it and hates it
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So when a woman who is living a degenerate life and is being bankrolled by Netflix
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is telling her story of leaving the oppressive Jewish community,
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There's already so much violence against Jews in America.
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This is only going to give people permission to do more.
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The violence comes from ignorant, racist people who believe conspiracy theories about Jews
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and who nurse old ethnic hatreds of Jews from years past.
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But now we're allowing those who might not act violently themselves to tolerate violence against Jews
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After the show aired, a group of religious Jewish women started the hashtag MyOrthodoxLife
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and why shows like this are not representative of their experience.
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They've chosen to be religious and they love being religious.
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They've chosen to dress modestly and they don't find dressing modestly to be oppressive.
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They've chosen to get married and have children and to make that their primary goal.
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My Unorthodox Life is a ridiculous, self-indulgent reality show
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about a woman who left Judaism and who seems to have had little to no understanding of it in the first place.
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She wanted to live her hedonistic little life and Netflix is allowing her to do so in the public eye.
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All of this has been laundered by Netflix into a reality show that is harmful and bad for religious Jews.
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Let me know in the comments below if you've heard of this show, if you've watched this show.
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If you're not already subscribed to my YouTube channel, make sure that you are and ring that notification bell.
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And if you haven't already subscribed to my Substack newsletter, make sure to do so.
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If you'd like to follow me on social media, it's at Classically Abby Absolutely Everywhere.
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Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys in my next video.