Taking a pair of large kitchen scissors, Adina Miles starts hacking away viciously at her glamorous, long, brunette sheitel. The scene changes and we see her diving fully clothed into a swimming pool, then fishing out her bedraggled wig with a net. Finally, Miles gives her hair covering the ultimate mark of contempt, smashing an egg down on the crown of her head, taking obvious delight in smearing it into her wig.
Otherwise known as Flatbush Girl to more than 45,000 followers on Instagram, Miles is a 31-year-old Orthodox social media sensation who creates video clips like Wig Destruction and stages comical photos of herself to cast a critical lens on the frum community of Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she lives — and on the role of women in Orthodoxy in particular.
Miles rose to prominence after a local Jewish paper in Brooklyn refused to publish an advert with her photo in it. In response, she started a loud social media campaign under the hashtag #FrumWomenHaveFaces, publishing the same photo with a smiling emoji obscuring her face. The campaign caught on and a number of celebrities, including actor Mayim Bialik, came on board.
“Who decided in the last 15-20 years that the face of a female cannot be printed? This is not stated anywhere in the Torah or in the commentaries on the Torah,” rages Miles. “It’s a poison, a new twisted evil. Somehow it became OK not to print pictures of three-year-olds, rebbetzins… any female aged zero to 100.”
Miles continues to campaign on this issue; “It’s one of my core battles,” she says, predicting that as frum women become more and more successful in business, they will eventually be able to “call the shots” and will put pressure on Orthodox magazines to print adverts showing women’s faces again.
Miles, who has two children, started her social media career after launching Flatbush Media, a marketing company, with her husband Chaim Sash, two years ago. “I wanted to use social media to start the company as it was hard to get noticed. I started doing comedy bits, social commentary on the frum community. People really took to it, and started sharing the videos.”
The company helps “heimish” brands, more accustomed to traditional print media, to enter the social-media world. “They are not used to being on a public platform which can be shmutzy,” says Miles wryly.
She has learnt the hard way that the more controversial the videos she posts online, the greater the risk of losing clients. “Some clients are scared of losing customers, or of losing their hashgacha [kashrut supervision]. It’s a testament to the ways in which the community can be so pressurising,” she says.
Since Miles first started posting videos and photos on Instagram and Facebook, she has poked fun at many rituals Orthodox Jews will be instantly familiar with.
In one popular video sketch, Human vs Chicken, she satirises the kapparot atonement ritual on Yom Kippur Eve when Strictly Orthodox Jews traditionally wave a live chicken around their heads as they recite specific verses. Here we see Miles dressed up as a human-sized chicken who grabs a Barbie doll from an overcrowded cage packed full of wailing dolls, and proceeds to wave the clearly suffering doll around her head.
“We flipped the way it’s usually done to cast light on the abhorrence of the ritual,” says Miles. “It’s hard to resist the message.”
In The Best Dressed in Shul, we see her marching to shul in a stylish designer dress which she proceeds to cover with thick white paint as she’s walking. Here she is satirising the paradoxical social pressure on frum women to be the best dressed yet also most pious female in shul on the High Holy Days (white, the colour of purity, being traditionally worn on Yom Kippur).
Humour operates as an effective method for her brand of social commentary. Miles is clearly an astute self-marketeer, and has created her Flatbush Girl persona to be intentionally ditsy, quite different to the articulate woman she seems to be offline.
“I like using this daft girl as the character so my audience doesn’t take me too seriously — until they are hooked. It allows me to keep my audience closer to me.”
But, at times, she slips out of playing “the class clown”, and posts more serious, personal content. In one Instagram post, for example, in which she is wearing one of her trademark glamorous dresses and killer heels, Miles talks about her own painful experience of suffering from multiple miscarriages before having her children, and challenges the silence surrounding pregnancy loss.
She calls on women to speak out and be their own advocates for reproductive health issues: “Own your health. Do the research. Be an annoying patient. Do another round of tests. Don’t take no for an answer. Ask why. Ask how. You are your own biggest advocate.”
Glancing at the Flatbush Girl account on Instagram, you could be mistaken for thinking this was the account of a popular, attractive fashionista posing in an ever-evolving series of contour-hugging, on-trend outfits. But look a little closer, and you see her clothing adheres to the basic standards of Jewish modesty.
Predictably, Miles has to deal with constant criticism on and offline, often with a misogynistic tinge. She is regularly labelled an “attention whore”, “slut” or “provocative”, as well as branded a heretic by detractors from the more conservative streams of the frum community. She gets a lot of hate messages, phone calls, “people trying to scare me to stop me speaking my truth”. Back in Brooklyn, she has to deal with “cousins who look the other way at family simchas. They pretend I’m not there. People I grew up with.”
Yet Miles is adamant she will keep speaking out, not least for the sake of her followers.
“My audience are the fringe voices who are being silenced, the girls who question their role in the community as women, or people who feel their sexual identity may be more fluid than the frame of reference around them. There are people who are isolated and disenchanted in their Jewish identity. This is a tragedy.
“I use whatever ways I can think of to get the conversation rolling in a safe way for other people — even if it’s not safe for me!”
How does she deal with all the hate? “I have a solid support system so that I can make myself more vulnerable to hate and criticism. My parents really cheer me on. And my husband is very supportive; we’re a team — he writes a lot of my video scripts and edits them. We’re a two-member band.”
She remains a committed Jew in spite of her questioning the Orthodox way of life.
“I’m proud to be frum, I identify as frum. I keep kosher, I keep Shabbos.” She has no plans to leave Flatbush for a more accepting community. “I’m a martyr, I can’t abandon ship,” she admits.
Miles had a “classic right-wing Orthodox schooling” in which she describes being “blissfully unaware” of the pressure to conform. “We were all encouraged to look the same, down to the length of our hair.” Yet she was already rebelling from a young age. She describes feeling so ashamed of reading a (non-Jewish) children’s fantasy novel at the age of nine or ten that she hid the book under her pillow — but still kept reading.
This was the start of her quest for knowledge, and she later went on to college, gaining a BA followed by an MA in Medieval Literature.
Flatbush Girl’s reach recently extended beyond social media into the realm of local politics. In September, Miles stood as a Democrat candidate for the position of District Leader in her local area of Brooklyn.
She actively campaigned in Flatbush, appealing to young Jewish people to register to vote, but ended up coming in second, with a still respectable 40 per cent of the vote.
Although there were presumably other factors which contributed to her defeat, Miles describes encountering “a wave of backlash.
“I didn’t expect to be accepted with arms wide open but I was not prepared for all the frum male officials to band together and publicly support my opponent with their funds,” she says, describing how these officials took out ads in local papers “proudly endorsing” her rival. “The males are such bullies, I can see why women drop out.”
She is still proud of her achievements during her campaign in educating and mobilising young frum people — who have traditionally not been active voters — to register to vote.
And in a recent video — another in which she shows her more serious side — she describes the responsibility she feels to young women to keep up her fight. “It’s my duty for the girls who come after me to recognise that change is painful. And I’m looking for those girls to take the torch from me and keep going to inspire the next generation of girls to do the same thing.”
Back down to earth, where next for Flatbush Girl?
“I really take it a day at a time. I’m trying to grow my following, make more funny videos and stay politically involved.”
