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.
#Julia hart series#
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.
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