Only Miriam has gotten all the way there. Although she often claims that it’s fundamentalism she loathes, not religion per se, Julia would clearly like to see her kids reject Judaism as fully as she has. The show highlights some fascinating tensions that arise within an apparently loving family in which no one occupies precisely the same point on the spectrum between Orthodox and secular life. Now a remarkably young 50, Julia is doing everything she didn’t get to do in her 20s: wearing leather catsuits, talking constantly and graphically about sex, radiating big girlboss energy. She’s since gotten divorced and remarried, to super-rich Italian entrepreneur Silvio Scaglia Haart (who took the last name she gave herself upon leaving the Monsey fold), moved into a vast Tribeca penthouse and propelled herself rapidly upward in the fashion world. But secretly, that circumscribed lifestyle was killing her. Just six years earlier, Julia was living a fully frum life in the Orthodox enclave of Monsey, in New York’s Rockland County-keeping house, tending to her four children, wearing wigs, submitting to her husband, strictly observing the Jewish sabbath, the whole deal. The eponymous unorthodox life belongs to Julia Haart, who has, since 2019, been the chief executive of modeling mega-brand Elite World Group. While I’m sure it makes perfect sense to the algorithm, the result is an exceedingly strange, questionably authentic mix of moods, genre conventions and contrivances. Instead of an eye-opening docuseries or a tear-jerking drama, it’s a reality show in the glossy, soapy Bravo mold. My Unorthodox Life, whose nine-episode first season just arrived on the service, is yet another story of an irrepressible woman escaping her ultra-Orthodox prison. Now Netflix, like Eve in the Garden of Eden, has finally seized the low-hanging fruit-and it’s a juicy one. But no mass-media trend stays earnest forever. Their tone tends to be somber, then triumphant. These are, for the most part, tales of trauma, abuse and repression, culminating in hard-won liberation.
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