I never thought I would feel so seen in a reality television show about a woman with a penthouse and position as CEO of the talent media company Elite World Group, but I did. That latter restriction becomes central to the show, which focuses on Julia’s successful fashion career, wherein every miniskirt and low-cut top feels like an “emblem of freedom.” Hailing from the ultra, ultra-Orthodox town of Monsey in upstate New York, Julia talks about being raised as a “second-class citizen” in her own community, unable to sing, ride a bike or wear pants around men or in public. The show, which released its first eight-episode season on July 14, follows the ex-Orthodox Julia Haart, who is the mother to Bat Sheva, a 27-year-old social media influencer and consultant Shlomo, a lawyer Miriam, a Stanford undergrad and app developer and Aron, a high school student. These memories fluttered back to me with a laugh while binge-watching the new Netflix reality series “ My Unorthodox Life” with my sister. Just imagine, his mother has died, and on top of that, his daughter is wearing pants in mixed company! I would clutch my long skirt inside my backpack and imagine ways to quickly slide it on if he were to burst into my classroom. Sometimes I sat in class wracked with anxiety about my father potentially arriving at school to pick me up due to a family emergency. I hid this from my dad every morning, shimmying my tznius (modest) skirt off in the bathroom before school began. So I started committing a real sin: wearing pants and above-the-knee skirts. In public school, I learned from my fashionable, LA-style, agnostic-Protestant classmates that I was committing a fashion sin every time I wore a frumpy, ankle-length skirt with a long-sleeve shirt. Those were my first two years in public school, after four years of facing what I could tell, even at a young age, was a subpar secular education in ultra-Orthodox Jewish day schools. Every day in the fourth and fifth grade, I dressed in either the large-pocketed American Apparel skirt that was trendy in 2011 or jeggings covered with a long skirt.
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