The current spate of US films and TV shows about modern Jewish life highlight a lack of Australian representation – which leads to a lack of visibility
Ask many Australians what’s getting them through isolation and they’ll tell you the same thing: Netflix and wine. Imagine if this pandemic had happened pre-streaming services. Imagine going through lockdown with nothing but free-to-air television. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Even wine couldn’t adequately numb that pain.
In praise of giant mercies, Covid-19 waited until there were more streaming services than we could justify paying for before it forced us into home isolation.
One show on high rotation in Australian homes is Unorthodox, a Netflix Originals series based on a true story about a Jewish woman who flees her husband and ultra-Orthodox community in the United States for a new life in Germany.
Unorthodox offers a rare peek into the lives of Hasidic Jews, a largely closed-off community that was until recently rarely portrayed on screen. It is set in the very real Satmar Hasidic Jewish enclave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and viewers around the world will note overwhelming similarities to communities in their own towns. For many, perhaps even most Australians however, the world and characters of Unorthodox will be as foreign as Israel.
Read the article by Nadine Cohen in The Guardian.