If you’re a fan of the reality show My Unorthodox Life, featuring the woman who left a Charedi enclave to become CEO of a high-powered Manhattan modelling agency, you probably have an opinion on her cleavage.

In every episode of My Unorthodox Life —now two seasons strong — Julia Haart’s decolletage is paraded.

Not only a visual element of the show, Haart’s breasts are also part of the content; in the second series, as a war breaks out between Julia and her estranged husband Silvio Scaglia, Julia is accused of paying for her breasts with corporate funds.

As soon as the series first aired on Netflix last year, numerous detractors weighed in. Some complained that the fashionista showed so much cleavage, she might as well have been topless (and also that the show was a “chillul hashem” — a denigration of God’s name).

At their most generous, critics read Julia’s look as a sign of her freedom from the strictly-Orthodox world, which insists on modest cover for women. Hey, everyone, I’m out! And here’s my physical proof!

But is Haart actually out?

As a literary scholar, I can’t help but think that she is a lot like Henry Levin, the protagonist of Bernard Malamud’s postwar cautionary tale The Lady of the Lake, part of the short story collection The Magic Barrel.

When Henry, a New Yorker, goes to Europe, he decides to abandon his Jewish past, attempts to erase it altogether, in fact, by changing his surname to Freeman. Free Man: get it? He’s no longer bound to an outdated, tribal identity.

On his travels, Freeman meets and falls for a beautiful, aristocratic Italian woman named Isabella. Yet Isabella hesitates to accept Freeman, suspecting that he is Jewish. Freeman insists that he is not. I won’t ruin the ironic twist at the end, but let’s just say Freeman gave the wrong answer.

Why doesn’t Malamud allow Freeman to be free of his past? Was Malamud suggesting that a Jew has something so indelibly distinct in the core of their being that no name-change or denial could ever make people believe that they are anything else?

Not quite. There is something more subtle at play. Henry could have chosen Smith, or Thompson, or Clark.

Instead, he chose a name that put on full display his relationship to his fraught Jewishness. It’s a Jewishness that’s not constitutional but psychological. Freeman was not a free man. He was a man always in the state of freeing himself.

Haart’s breasts work the same way.

Josh Howie, in his JC review, pointed out that the most interesting part of Julia’s story, her escape from Orthodoxy, happened before the series began.

All the other dramas — Haart’s tussles with Scaglia and the company, the strained relationships between Haart and her children — seem dull in comparison. This response is indicative of a post-Unorthodox era.

In that previous Netflix series, we got to watch the main character, Esty, suffocating in her insular community, enduring sexual trauma, plotting her escape, getting caught and threatened with a gun.

Because the story is not told chronologically but rather in a series of flashbacks, we see elements of Esty leaving her oppressive, misogynistic environment in every episode as the drama is drawn out over the series.

But in fact, say the breasts, Haart, too, is always leaving Orthodoxy, in much the same way that Esty is always fleeing Brooklyn, and Henry Freeman is fleeing from his Jewishness.
None of them cannot fully leave their former identities behind; their past is part of who they are.

I’m not going to hard-sell this series. If you’re looking for an intellectual approach to stories of leaving Orthodoxy, listen to the podcast Heretic in the House; the host, Naomi Seidman, is brilliant. My Unorthodox Life is what it is: trash TV.

It’s a great series to hate-watch; you can pick it apart for its utterly contrived scenes, stupid conversations and ruthless capitalism disguised as feminism.

Still, I would urge you not to knock it for the knockers.

In its own way, the series adds to an ongoing conversation about Jewish identity that Malamud was engaging in more than half-a-century ago and that is located today in the narratives of the formerly strictly Orthodox — that My Unorthodox Life is locating, more specifically, in Julia Haart’s boobs.