#anyway i've never seen it i just googled the names you mentioned. still very lost on the Why of it all

[dailyfigures]

WEEEEEEEEEE DOOOOOOONT CAAAAAAREEE ABOOOUUUTTTTTTT ITTTTTTTTTTT

DIEGO WAS NOT THE RIGHT GUY FOR VILU OKO

SORRY U CANT ACCEPT ENDGAME BUT LEONETTA 4 LIFE OK

bestie i have absolutely no idea what possessed you to send me an ask about the 2012 argentinian disney show violetta but i respect your passion

[sunflowerbloomss]

Hi! I've seen your post about Unorthodox. As a person who is not Jewish I wanted to search for opinions about this show here on tumblr to get to know different points of views, especially from Jewish people. Then I found your post and a few other posts. Many of them were criticising the show for using the "escape from the cult" trope. Yours was rather positive. Those people said that it's making Hasidic people look bad and that it's ignorant. What's your take on this?

hello!!! i actually have a lot to say about this so bear with me for a sec. my tl;dr is basically that the “escape from the cult” trope is always bound to showing “the cult” in the worst way possible, while on unorthodox the only person with bad motives from the community is moishe.

i’ll start by saying that the hasidic community they’re talking about is satmar, which is located in brooklyn and has many of the “rules” (for a lack of a better english word i know) that are presented in the series. they didn’t state the name in the series because they would sue their asses, but keep in mind that we’re talking about one of the most strict hasidic communities there are in the world. i am not as familiar with the subject as i would like to be, but i know names of a few hasidic communities and approximately how strict they are (though it’s complicated). satmar are known for leading a pretty strict way of life. when i told my mom i’m watching a show about a girl running away from satmar, she said “yeah, well, with them, the only way out is running of suicide”. (keep in mind that my mom really doesn’t like religion). so, generally - we’re talking about a very strict community that is known for being so strict.

now, to the series - i don’t think  they’re showing the community esty runs from to be a cult. i think that when we see esty “following the rules” she’s happy even after she runs she still loves her community. when things are not getting complicated for her - and even when they only start to - esty is still happy. she’s married and she has her family and she’s doing the things she loves. she realises she doesn’t belong there when she understands she has to give up the things she loves to do things she doesn’t love because “that’s the way it is”. when she gives up her piano lessons to go to this woman who tries to teach her how to have sex, when she forces herself to have sex even though she doesn’t want to, when she realises she has to live with yanky for the rest of her life even though she wants to go back to her grandmother’s house for a bit. this is where things start to get complicated for her - when she has to do the things she doesn’t want to do.

that’s when she decides to run. that’s when she thinks she can’t do this anymore, becuase she doesn’t like the idea of doing things simply because she must. now, here’s the time to stop and get back to reality again. i believe some of the criticism is about the fact that the series shows esty “having” to do things she doesn’t want to do to make hasidic communities look bad and sexist. i do not know personally someone who came from a hasidic communities (and frankly, i’m too lazy to google it) but i do know religious and haredi jewish people, and i’ll tell you this - from my personal experience and from many different people’s personal experiences, the more religious you are the more it’s okay for you to be sexist. this is a huge generalization, but i’ll say that orthodox jewish communities have a sexism problem (just like many other communities, yeah? i’m just saying that for our own discussion). i can talk a lot about sexism and judaism, but i’ll shorten this huge essay to this - ignoring the ways orthodox jewish communities use the bible and the rules of judaism to justify and amplify their oppression of women is also a problem. we don’t like to talk about it, because then we feel like we portray judaism as bad, but imo not talking about it or trying to soften it is unfair to every woman who gets beaten down by it. so i think showing the community pushing esty to have children and listen to her husband is not only okay but important. that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about other good things that happen in religious communities, but if we decide to talk about orthodox judaism we have to talk about this. imo it was very well done.

anyway, back to the story - so esty decides to leave. and she doesn’t tell anyone about it, because she knows they wouldn’t let her go if she would. how does she know that? she sees how much they despise anyone who decides to leave. this is also something that is important to represent about hasidic communities (and also about any orthodox communities, the more religious they are the importance of representing it grows) - they don’t like it when people leave. sometimes it’s because they’re afraid some things that are secret about their community would get to other people who are not part of it and then the community would lose it secrecy (which can be both good and bad, if you’d ask me). once again i don’t know a lot of stories regarding different hasidic communities (and every one of them is so different so the stories would be different) but i know many stories of people from religious and haredi communities who told their family they don’t want to be religious anymore, and their family had abandoned them. my disclaimer is that there are in fact some stories about those who are still in great touch with their family, and that they visit on holidays and so, but there are many stories about people who end up losing their family because they didn’t want this type of life anymore and the family couldn’t agree to that. (there are also many stories like this about families disowning gay kids in the name of the bible, but that’s for a different show). so anyway - the community wanting esty back even though it’s clear that she doesn’t want to go back to them is not portraying them as a cult. it’s pretty realistic imo.

and hey, she never says that she ran because she hates them and that she wants “to take this cult down” (which is a very important thing in the “escape from the cult” trope). she said she left because “i didn’t fit in there”. she didn’t try to take with her anyone, she didn’t try to “save” anyone from her community. if this show had really taken the road of showing hasidic communities as a cult, esty would’ve tried to take her aunt and grandma with her. she didn’t.

another thing that is important is how the only person from the community who is supposed to be unlikeable all through the series is moishe. now, i have something to say about this. there is a chance it’s by chance, there is a chance it’s just because how this turned out, but moishe - the character we’re supposed to hate - is the only character from the community (who isn’t esty or her mom) which “enjoys” sins. we have him betting (forbidden), and even though i think it’s not forbidden we have him taking yanky to a strip clup with him, which isn’t something i believe the community would look at as happily. moishe, then, is a character that sins both in the religion and in morals. he scares esty and he breaks into her mom’s house, he constantly lies to yanky just because he wants to. looking at all the characters who stayed in the community, the only one the audience is supposed to dislike is moishe. we’re supposed to like yanky, because he just wants to bring esty back; we’re supposed to like the grandmother, because she feels bad that both her daughter and her granddaughter left the community; we’re supposed to like the aunt, because she cares so much about esty and she doesn’t really know what to do.

so, really, after all that, we’ve come to the conclusion that the community esty comes from is shown both positively and negatively. the criticism isn’t there just because the director wanted the viewer to hate everything esty came from - it’s there because it’s important to show the negative sides of strict communities. we’re only supposed to dislike one character - moishe - who is someone we probably should’ve disliked even in another show, at a different time. 

i do want to say something about yael, since she’s the only representation of secular judaism in this show and imo her character is fantastic. as i said on one of my posts - i hate her guts, but i love her character. she’s the representation of the secular judaism, and when we see her from esty’s pov we see just how many things she does are not to many people’s liking. when esty says “my parents lost their whole families in the holocaust” and she replies “so did half of israel” we can understand how for her it’s not as a big deal as it is to esty. she talks about hasidic people the way this series is blamed for showing them - “they’re nuts, the men study the torah every day and the women are baby machines”. if this series truly would’ve wanted to show this pov (which would think esty escaped a cult) we would conclude that yael is right. but she’s not, and it’s something we see a lot in the show.

this is long and this concludes to the point that i don’t think this show uses a trope of “escaping the cult”. it clearly has criticism about the hasidic community, which is pretty justified in my opinion, but it’s not seen as a cult. i would also like to mention that this series is based on a book by a woman who also left the satmar community. i haven’t read it so idk how accurate to her story the series is, but the themes are first and foremost introduced here by someone who actually lived there.

this was long and if you’ve actually read all of this i’m really happy!! i hope this is good enough of an answer. kinda messy and i probably forgot a few things, but my main point stands. i do get however why there are people who don’t like this show, but i personally think it’s very well done, so. yeah. that’s all