By Shoshana Olidort. As a young Lubavitch girl growing up in Crown Heights, my earliest encounters with people from the community who were questioning our way of life, and beginning to explore alternate paths, were all with men. This was right around the time of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s death, which turned our little world on […]
We want to hear your responses to FSR Blog’s @theTable: “Unorthodox Media.” We invite you, our readers, to reflect on any of blogs in this series or contribute your own analysis of “My Unorthodox Life” or other forms of what this series names “unorthodox media.” Introduction to the series: “This collection includes a number of responses […]
By Dory Fox. Last summer, I was debating whether or not I should unpack my library. I had defended my dissertation, thus marking the end of the line for me in academia. Accordingly, I vowed that it would be a summer free of interpretation, free of intellectual inquiry, free of the books I had once […]
By Sam Shuman. In the summer of 2009, Julia Haart was in a decidedly different social milieu than the one in which we find her in 2021 in the Netflix reality TV show, My Unorthodox Life. Before she lived in a 10,000 square foot penthouse apartment in TriBeCa and served as the CEO for Elite […]
By Shira Schwartz. A central theme of My Unorthodox Life, the latest release in the genre of Unorthodox Media, is the presumption, acquisition and staging of “choice,” often paired with its close cousins, “freedom” and “self.” The liberal language of choice is a critical feature not only of OTD media, but of OTD life. (See […]
By Shira Schwartz. This collection includes a number of responses by Jewish studies scholars to Netflix’s reality show My Unorthodox Life, released in June 2021. When I first conceived of this collection, I wanted to highlight the significance of this latest release in ex/post Orthodox Jewish media, which, as a hyperbolic reality television series, may […]
We want to hear your responses to FSR Blog’s @theTable: “FSR Summer Book Club” The “FSR Summer Book Club” series started off Summer with a bang! Holly Hillgardner started off the series with an introduction to the stunning novel, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. Second, Rev. Mia McClain suggests that you read a classic play this summer through […]
By Jimmy Hoke. “Is a virus not a kind of zombie, a quasi life-form moving in and out of inertness? It is zombie time…” –Lorrie Moore, New Yorker, April 13, 2020 It is “zombie time”—or time to think with zombies. While the spread of Covid might provide a particularly poignant moment for reading stories that […]
By Yasmine Singh. How does one live in an atmosphere where most if not all bets are against you because of your class, gender, and/or religion? Is advancement possible for those who dream and aspire but struggle to survive? If so, at what cost? Who gets a second chance if they find themselves at the […]
By Christy Cobb. In the past year, the fragment called the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” has received a resurgence of attention in popular media, after the journalist Ariel Saber published the book Veritas which outlines the discovery of the papyrus as well as the complicated path that ultimately revealed this fragment as a forgery. Yet […]