“I'm at the place mentally where most 32-year-olds are, I just did it years later because I didn't get out until 42. But I'm at that same spot: I'm still hungry, I'm ambitious, I have all these new companies and products that will be coming out,” Haart says. “I'm just getting started.”
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Haart is a compulsive doer. Since she left the strictly Orthodox community in Monsey, New York just over a decade ago, she founded an eponymous line of shoes, became creative director of lingerie brand La Perla then CEO of the talent media agency Elite World Group, produced and starred in a reality series about her life, wrote a memoir, and in 2023 she launched a luxury shapewear brand called Body by Julia.
This is just the highlight reel.
Having amassed an eye-watering fortune that has only grown since her divorce (from her ex and former business partner Silvio Scaglia, Haart won control of the business they ran together, their $65 million penthouse and nearly $10 million in cash), Haart’s freedom is as expansive as ever.
Freedom and autonomy, independence and self-determination. Haart may as well have these words tattooed on her forehead for how energetically she espouses them. She left Orthodoxy not out of a disdain for the religion but because of the “archaic laws against women,” the restrictions that kept her from becoming who she wanted to be. Fashion was a major part of this. For Haart, autonomy has always been measured by how much skin a woman can expose without facing shame and alienation, and she knows better than most the emancipatory power of clothing – or a lack thereof.
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“Every fundamentalist culture in the world covers their women, makes their women feel ashamed of their bodies,” Haart says. “So to uncover your body, I think it's the ultimate freedom. People don't understand what it's like when you cannot pick the things you put on your body. It's so personal.
“For me now, it's like, ‘how short can I go? How low can I get away with?’ Only because it makes me feel strong and independent and powerful and I'll never stop – I'll be that old lady with the saggy everything at a hundred years old, still wearing a miniskirt.”
Who can blame her? She has, after all, been making up for lost time.
Haart was born in Russia and immigrated to the US at the age of three with her family, who became increasingly observant and eventually joined the ultra-Orthodox community when Haart was a child. At 19 she married her first husband, a yeshiva student, with whom she had her four children: Batsheva, 32, Shlomo, 30, Miriam, 25, and Aron, 19. Years of ongoing discomfort with the community’s expectations of women and girls led to Haart divorcing her husband and parting with religious life, a choice her children followed with varying degrees of acceptance.
In 2021 Batsheva divorced her own husband. Like her mum, she married at 19 whilst still strictly Orthodox, the relationship deteriorating as she, too, went ‘off-the-derech’ – Orthodox slang for leaving the community. Also like her mum, Batsheva is now single, secular, and dating 32-year-olds in New York City.
Haart, seemingly incapable of embarrassment, laughs as she explains that, yes, both she and her daughter are dating within the same age group and on the same exclusive dating app, Raya. The situation has forced them to institute some safeguards to avoid accidentally dating the same guy:
“Every time before I go out with someone, I send Batsheva a name, and she sends me her names, so that we make sure we know. It almost happened twice.”
Before she can divulge more details, a member of the hotel staff enters the suite. “Hello darling, you can come in,” Haart says, beckoning the woman into the sitting room, pointing her to the adjoining bedroom where her belongings are strewn about, waiting to be stowed away. “Everything that I don’t need packed is in that red suitcase. Thank you, my love.”
Haart is disarmingly down-to-earth, so much so that it is easy to forget – or maybe forgive – the opulence that surrounds her, the sheer enormity of her success. But that wealth has become somewhat inextricable from the persona that Haart stepped into when she became a public figure, and for all intents and purposes that persona is very much who Haart is. The glamour, prestige and riches of her high-flying fashion career seem as comfortable and natural to Haart as her ascetic religious past, the latter a kind of extended prologue before the inevitable and truer story began.
My Unorthodox Life wrapped up after its second season in 2022, with Haart looking forward to growing her businesses and working through her divorce. It ended before another defining shift in Haart’s life took place, an instance that brought her Jewishness screeching back to the fore after years spent barely engaging with it at all.
“When October 7 happened, everything changed for me,” says Haart. “I found something I didn't know that I had inside of me, this massive, deep love and this powerful rage. Since that day, I would say 80 percent of my time is spent on advocacy against antisemitism and for Israel.”
Julia Haart, right, and her daughter Miriam at a rally for the hostages.[Missing Credit]
Almost overnight, Haart's Instagram went from a collection of family and fashion shots to an Israel activism page, with posts decrying antisemitism and calling for the release of the hostages, often in collaboration with Jewish organisations, and according to Haart, always at the cost of one opportunity or another.
“I’ve lost tens of thousands of followers, I’ve had jobs cancelled, I’ve had some really nasty things sent to me,” Haart says.
She recalls a particularly disturbing piece of hate mail – if you can call it that – sent to Batsheva: “She once had someone send her a baby carriage, like with the handle and the wheels, but instead of the body of the carriage, it was a mini oven with a Jewish baby inside and it said ‘Jewish baby carriage.’”
But Haart has remained undeterred, spurred by “an overwhelming, intense, deep love for the Jewish people and the state of Israel” to keep speaking out against antisemitism.
“I think our resilience, our humanity in the face of constant evil, is something that everyone should aspire to, and I could not be prouder to be a Jew.”
It is no wonder Haart was the face of a popular reality series, that people wanted to hear her insights and watch her go about her day-to-day life. She is captivating, her words fortifying. Leaving Haart’s suite at the lavish Knightsbridge hotel, I ruminate on the bits that affected me the most, sentiments that demand to be printed on a throw pillow or tacked onto a vision board.
Because, although Haart’s life up close appears just as tinselled as the dream world presented in My Unorthodox Life, full of fashion shows, penthouses, 5-star hotels and multimillion-dollar lawsuits, the woman at its centre is the grounding force that continues to draw people in: whip-smart, sincere and utterly unabashed.
And as for her haters, the people who have dropped her for supporting Israel and speaking out against antisemitism?
"F*** them. I don't care,” Haart says. “If you're an enemy of the Jewish people, I don't want to have anything to do with you anyway.”
