Julia haart book7/23/2023 (She said they preferred drive-ins because there they weren’t “mixing with non-Jews.”)īut when Haart tried to import some of what she was learning about the secular world into her own life, she said she ran into brick walls. She started visiting the local Barnes and Noble and picking up secular literature, then bought a television and started going to drive-in movies with her husband. Those encounters introduced her to secular Jews and exposed her to their ways of life. Among them were local college students and others in need of a Shabbat meal or wanting to learn more about Shabbat. She often hosted large Shabbat meals, feeding on average 40 people a week. Haart became a leader in the local Orthodox community there, delivering widely attended lectures on Jewish topics and gaining a reputation as an engaging teacher. “Atlanta was the beginning of everything.” But at least I thought, you know, out of town is a little more relaxed,” Haart said. “I was so ecstatic honestly, it didn’t occur to me to leave the world. “Out-of-town” communities, or Orthodox communities outside the metropolitan New York area, are considered more open-minded and often allow for a greater variety of religious practice than communities in New York and New Jersey. When he was offered a job in Atlanta in the 1990s, Haart jumped at the opportunity to move. Haart’s husband was among them, graduating from the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania before becoming more observant and settling into a career in energy. In some ways the yeshivish community is less insular than the Hasidic communities that Feldman and the “One of Us” subjects left, with most people speaking English as a first language and some attending college and graduate school. The couple later returned to Monsey and were part of an Orthodox community called “yeshivish” because of the centrality of yeshivas where men study Torah, sometimes full-time. At 19, she married Yosef Hendler and they moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn, where Hendler studied at a local yeshiva. Haart graduated from high school in Monsey and went on to attend a religious girls’ seminary in Israel for a year before returning to begin “shidduchim,” or matchmaker-arranged dating. “I just didn’t know that that meant I had to cut myself off from the rest of the world.” “I’d always been very proud of being Jewish, I loved my Jewish identity,” Haart said. She said the change induced a deep culture shock. Haart was enrolled in a religious girls’ school there and, for the first time, did not regularly encounter anyone in her daily life who was not an observant Jew. When she was in the fourth grade, the family, having grown more religious, moved to Monsey, a town outside of New York City that is home to a large population of Orthodox Jews. The family came to the United States in the 1970s and moved to Austin, Texas, where Haart was the only Jew enrolled at her private school. Haart and her 11-year-old son, Aron, who is still religious. (She later went by Talia beginning around the time she began dating for marriage.) Her parents were observant Jews, though that was difficult at the time - despite there being no mikvahs, or Jewish ritual baths, in the country at that time, Haart’s mother would still immerse in the Black Sea, even in the dead of winter. She was born Julia Leibov in what was then the Soviet Union. I want them to know that they matter, in and of themselves, not just as wives and mothers.”Ī flurry of press surrounding the show’s premiere has already made the contours of Haart’s life familiar to many. I want them to be doctors or lawyers or whatever they want to be. “I want women to be able to sing in public if they want or dance in public if they want. “What I would love to see is that women have an opportunity to have a real education, can go to college, do not get married off at 19 on a shidduch,” or arranged match, Haart told JTA. That show was preceded by “One of Us,” a 2017 documentary following the lives of three formerly Hasidic Jews, one of whom grapples with the aftermath of sexual abuse, as they struggle to acclimate to the challenges of their new lives.īut while critics of those shows could make the case - and sometimes did - that the abuse and trauma prompting the subjects to leave stemmed from simply a few bad Orthodox apples, Haart says the problem is endemic to the haredi Orthodox world, where women typically marry young, have many children and rarely pursue higher education or high-power careers. The title “My Unorthodox Life” pays homage to the company’s 2020 Emmy-winning hit “Unorthodox,” a series loosely based on the 2012 bestselling memoir by Deborah Feldman, who left the Hasidic community after marrying at 17 and having a son.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |