Warning: This article contains spoilers for Netflix’s new series, Unorthodox.
In the past month, there have been two Netflix series that everyone has been talking about: Tiger King and Unorthodox.
While one focuses on the controversial big cat community, the other explores the conservative Yiddish speaking Satmar community in Brooklyn. And it’s not hard to see why people are obsessed with it.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Unorthodox follows the story of 19-year-old Esther ‘Esty’ Shapiro and her escape from a strict Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighbourhood.
The four-part Netflix series is based on the real life story of Deborah Feldman, as documented in her 2012 memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots.
Watch the trailer for Netflix’s Unorthodox here. Post continues below.
Deborah and her on-screen counterpart Esty (played by Shira Haas) both grew up in the Satmar community, which was founded by Holocaust survivors after World War II on the belief that Hitler’s extermination of the Jews was God’s punishment for European Jewish assimilation.
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The Satmar (Hasidic) movement was founded in Hungary in about 1904 and was anti Zionist at a time when many European Jews were making aliyah to Palestine (Israel), Whilst anti Semitism was rife in Europe, Hitler was still a toddler. Their Rabbi was rescued just before World War Two and taken to America and set up their community in New York. It is ultra Orthodox and their village of Kiryas Joel which has the rate of unemployment and use of food stamps in America. Deborah Feldman was indeed very brave to have escaped a life where education of women is seen as immoral and they are viewed as little more than baby making machines.