Netflix Reality Show Faces Even More Scrutiny

Jew in the City creator Allison Josephs isn’t a big fan of the Netflix reality series My Unorthodox Life and she’s calling out its main focus, Julia Haart, and all of Hollywood for its depiction of the Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community. “I think that everybody should be allowed to tell their story, but their story should be based on truth. And the reality is that Julia Haart is not telling her story. She’s talking about a much more Hasidic life that she never actually lived,” Josephs told TMZ on Aug. 7.

“Now, I do believe that something happened to her and she had some sort of struggle as a human being, but she basically co-opted someone else’s story. The fact that she called an entire community ‘fundamentalists’ when people from this community are being attacked on the street really endangers Jews and we really hope that Netflix and all of Hollywood will do better.”

She continued, adding that TV shows of this nature further add to the problems within the Jewish community. “People are devastated because there are issues in the community and we can’t pretend that there’s not. That’s something that we have to admit to to fix but to make it seem like these negative stories over and over and over again is all that exists, we never get any positive stories.”

“I believe she is a hurting person and I have compassion for her pain. But I don’t believe that the orthodox community is to blame for what she’s hurting for,” she said, before sharing that the show is part of a much larger Hollywood problem. “There’s more on their way. There’s naked singularities with that and there’s a new movie that’s coming out today (Aug. 7) with Hasidic Jews dealing drugs. Are there any Hasidic drug dealers? I’m sure, but again, and also I’m so sick of these depictions of Hasidic Jews with the glued-on beard and side curls. There’s no authenticity. Every minority wants to play their part and when it comes to the Jews, they just slap on a costume and make some ridiculous depiction and they put Jews in this shy-luck money-counting role, which should just be not acceptable in 2021.”