Aficionados Favor ‘Shtisel’ Over ‘Unorthodox’

“Unorthodox,” a four-part Netflix series in Yiddish and English, opened to rave reviews in the United States. Time calls the German-American production “profound” and “riveting.” In Germany, where much of the series was filmed in Berlin, it was no. 1 on the Netflix chart for weeks.Replete with formulaic motifs, the plot is a made-for-TV bildungsroman. It is the tale of young Esty – Esther Shapiro – trapped in the claustrophobic world of a Hassidic Satmar dynasty in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg. Forced into an arranged marriage at the age of 17, Esty is a tortured soul.At first, she submits to oppression by faith and tradition. Then she sets out to break the chains. Secretly selling her jewelry to buy a ticket, she defects to Berlin, of all places. Her mother, now in a lesbian relationship, lives there. An escapee herself, she had left her child behind when she was three.In Berlin, Esty goes through the travails of self-emancipation. In a none-too-subtle scene at Berlin’s Wannsee Lake, right across from the villa where Adolf Eichmann and the SS planned the Holocaust, Esty is reborn. Dressed in the garb defined as “modest” by her community, she immerses herself, letting her sheitel float to the bottom of the lake. It is a hard-to-miss message: no more mikvah, no more submission.Fending off a search party from Brooklyn — her evil cousin Moishe and her befuddled husband Yanky — she prevails against all odds: no money, no shelter, no friends. Then she finds happiness among a nice, multicultural bunch of music students in Berlin. A happy end.Like all morality tales, “Unorthodox” comes with a didactic message. The purpose is to skewer faith-driven oppression on the part of a reactionary community that stifles freedom and degrades women to birth machines. Naturally, “antisemitism” has popped up here and there. Sometimes, such a charge may be a cheap shot, though it is not as inflationary as “racism” in the larger arena. As a real thing, antisemitism is the obsessive denigration of Jews, smearing them as enemies of mankind. The bill of indictment lists deicide, greed, subversion, conspiracy, and the will to world power.“Unorthodox” does not replicate such fabrications. Yet on a subliminal level, the series plays with eternal stereotypes about Jews. Esty’s uncle is a rent-gouging real-estate shark who threatens a down-and-out piano teacher with eviction. Cousin Moishe, who tries to abduct Esty in Berlin, is a pistol-packing creep pretending to serve family honor and the Lord. Dutifully praying in his hotel room, he is a bigot who gambles away Yanky’s cash, dragging the weak-kneed fellow off to a Berlin bordello — Jewish-owned, of course. Moishe is a mafioso in side curls and ritual fringes.Such scenes are right out of Hollywood’s bag of tricks. But they set the stage for more serious stuff. The Satmarers are portrayed as woman-hating totalitarians on a mission from God, and lest we forget who they are, they get to top every cliché. According to a New York Times review, “the thin eruv wire that surrounds the Satmar community where [Esty] lives might as well be an Iron Curtain.”So, watch out for the KGB, except that the actors wear not peaked caps, but gigantic pill boxes that must test their faith in 90-degree weather. So, they are dumb, as well. (The makers of “Unorthodox” emphasize that the hats were made from fake fur to honor secular standards of correctness.)The Satmarers are weird denizens of the planet, their outfits an insult to Reason & Enlightenment. The married women serve as auxiliaries of the Rebbe’s police. They enforce the code by shaming and verbal abuse. So much for the subliminal message that casts the sect as advance guard of divine despotism. Except: “None of the characters feels real,” notes Frieda Vizel in the Forward. She should know. She is a fugitive from another Hassidic sect.These cardboard characters are put onstage to insinuate ever so subtly: Jews are the eternal outsiders who refuse to be like us — and have done so for 2000 years. Is this antisemitism? Not the classic kind of the Popes, nor the racial version of the Nazis. Any secular person — Jew or Gentile — may feel unease when chancing on self-absorbed folks who look like bearded aliens.Yet we regard the Amish, who also look “funny” and enforce an isolationist moral code, as quaint, if not loveable. So, cut to Lancaster County, Pa. In the 1985 movie “Witness,” detective Harrison Ford hides out in an Amish community to evade corrupt cops who want to kill him. It is a heartening tale, suffused with mutual respect and kindness. There is even a tender love affair between Ford and Kelly McGillis, illicit sex and all.Sex goes to the nub of “Unorthodox.” It is Exhibit A, and it is neither gentle nor credible, but a horror story, which dwells on the enslavement of women in the name of the true faith. It begins with a pre-nuptial visit by Esty’s sister-in-law who wants to prepare her for the Big Night. She is totally ignorant. So, the older woman coaches her: “Inside, you have a hole. It leads to a passage and then to a small door — to your womb, the source of all life.” Shocked, Esty yells out “no!” A 17-year old who does not know her body? Who has never touched herself? And the sun rises in the west.Yet the fabrication is crucial because it sets up the rest. For good measure, add vaginismus that makes intercourse brutally painful. Husband Yanky does not care. After all, a woman is just a vessel for God’s commandment: “be fruitful and multiply.” Night after night, he inflicts himself on Esty in rape-like scenes, with her moaning in agony. God and the Rebbe will it. So does the community that expects an offspring nine months after the weddingLet’s not ascribe intent to “Unorthodox.” Way down, an anti-Jewish trope is embedded in the subconscious. It goes deeper than the all-too-familiar image of the Jew as racial predator-contaminator so beloved by the loony Right. Jews, those mighty malfeasants, titillate the pornographic imagination; behind the keyhole lurks the unspeakable, yet lurid. What are they doing in secret, whence their irresistible seductive strength? Power and porn are cousins. Omnipotence gets you sex, and seduction begets power, the quintessential Jewish game.Now, Yanky is not the Über-Jew, but the designated loser, and Esty escapes from bondage — but not before suffering appalling depredation. As befits a didactic tale, she finds love in the arms of a Gentile fellow student in Berlin. Having outwitted the Brooklyn Hassidim, Esty now enters into a secular paradise, peopled by Jews and Muslims, gays, and strong women. Though enchanting, the fable is correct only in the current ideological sense. The price of pedagogy is clichés galore.For the subtle, but far more persuasive story go to “Shtisel,” also on Netflix. It covers the same ground, though in Jerusalem, not Williamsburg. These Haredim are not playing out stock characters. Credible and complex, they populate a “generous, lighthearted and nostalgic” story, reports Ruth Margalit in the New Yorker.Unlike “Unorthodox,” it is based on attention to detail, and the actors speak authentic Yiddish. The series does not deploy one-dimensional types, either heroic like Esty or nasty ones like the gun-toting gambler Moishe. There are the same tortuous conflicts: self-realization and choice vs. duty to God and the Rabbi.“Unorthodox” echoes some elements of “Shtisel.” Like Esty for music, young Akiva, the central figure, hides a talent for painting. Like her, he is beset by matchmakers who foist on him mates he does not want. Like Yanky, Akiva looks like a shmuck, always torn between the self and the group.Akiva does assert himself in the end and grows into a loveable fellow. So do others as they wrestle with tragedies and dilemmas while straining to deal with modernity. There are no tyrannical yentas, and the sex is loving and discreet. Non-believers come away with a sharpened sense of real-life Haredim. They learn to see the mensch behind the dogmatism imported from 19th century Europe.This is why aficionados look forward to the third season of “Shtisel.” The series does not proselytize, nor manipulate. It opens a door to an separate world peopled by fellow-humans with their fortes and failings. The irony is palpable. For Esty and her Berlin comrades, the overarching motto is “inclusion,” as the new secular faith demands. But only for the worthy: people of color, Muslims, gays, and enlightened Jews. “Unorthodox” bars this congregation against men with kaftans and shtetl headgear. Their women, traitresses to feminism, are infra dig, as well. Recall “Animal Farm,” George Orwell’s bitter satire about far-left orthodoxy: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”________Mr. Joffe, Distinguished Fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, serves on the editorial council of the German weekly Die Zeit.

Aficionados Favor ‘Shtisel’ Over ‘Unorthodox’

Aficionados Favor ‘Shtisel’ Over ‘Unorthodox’

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