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On a new Israeli TV show, the secret lives of Orthodox Jewish atheists
When we think about “off-the-derech” Jews, those who have left Orthodoxy behind, we tend to think of rebellious youths in their teens and 20s, those who party and do drugs to shed the religious yoke. But there’s another category of Jews who’ve left the fold, ones who’ve lost their faith and yet remain Haredi. First documented in “The Impostors Among Us,” a 2011 article published in Ami magazine by the pseudonymous Raphael Borges, this category of “duplicitous, heretical infiltrators” are now the subject of a new Israeli TV show from Kan, Behasture, which translates to “In Hiding.” The show’s English language title is Ambiguity.
Set during the height of the COVID pandemic, Behasture opens with Rochal’e intentionally catching the virus to gain access to a quarantine apartment. Accompanied by her mother, we see her enter a space for Haredi women dressed in full modesty garb. However, the moment her mother exits the compound, the transformation begins. The women remove their sheitels and frumpy dresses to reveal their hidden secular selves. Men emerge from adjoining rooms. They’re all secret heretics, and this compound is their Ir Miklat, their safe refuge.
While the article in Ami called these Jews “fifth columnists,” on their secret Internet blogs, they usually refer to themselves as “in the closet” or “orthoprax.” In Israel, they are called “anusim” (forced ones), inverting the term used for crypto-Jews, who believed in Judaism but were forced to act Christian. By staying in their Orthodox communities, the anusim become ghosts going through the motions of Haredi life; no one can truly see them, and no one knows their true thoughts. Secret apartments like the one featured in Behasture are the only places they can be themselves.
Although their belief in God has fallen away, they remain deeply culturally Haredi. They say traditional blessings before eating or drinking, and give dazzling Torah sermons while holding shrimp up to their mouths. As viewers, we get a voyeuristic peek into this liminal space which straddles the boundaries between Haredi and secular. There’s something surreal, uncanny even, about watching a character with a beard and curly peyos but without a yarmulka, or a woman in a tank top strumming her guitar to Hasidic niggunim.
The theme song that opens each episode, the Shabbos standard “Lecha Dodi,” sung soulfully to the tune of “The House of the Rising Sun,” represents this blend of secularism and holiness. Singing happens frequently at the compound where the men and women sing heartfelt Hasidic melodies, dance together and enjoy treyf, relishing in their small freedoms. At the head of this secret family are Yossi Zuchmir and Aviva, who serve as father and mother figures.
The story of Aviva, the matronly woman who plies everyone with delicious food and emotional support, is explored in just a handful of scenes. Zuchmir, however, plays a central role in each episode and is perhaps the show’s most intriguing character. He hasn’t believed for a long time, but he refuses to leave the Haredi world. Instead of dealing with the family issues at home that a life of secrets causes, he’s having an affair with another woman at the compound: Gitty, his Rebbe’s wife.
Zuchmir finds meaning in these in-between spaces and exults in his small community of anusim who treat him as their Hasidic Rebbe. He mourns the members of the compound who leave for the secular world, and fails to see the tragedy in a life full of secrecy and lies. When a fellow member’s teenage daughter wants to join the anusim, Zuchmir trills about the prospect of a “father-daughter” duo, even as the girl’s father warns her off this torturous path.
In Ayala Fader’s 2020 landmark study, Hidden Heretics, which explores the lives of these secret non-believers, the author identifies two areas that lead to doubt: social issues, and intellectual ones. While these categories sometimes intersect, they are usually split along gender lines. Men, who are socialized around Talmudic debate, usually tend to frame their doubt as a more intellectual, text-based journey. The doubts of women, who are barred from reading the Talmud, are often a reaction to the crushing burden placed on wives in the Haredi community, or sometimes to covered-up sexual crimes.
In Behasture too, the male characters’ doubts stem from intellectualizing; one character even references Spinoza. Their issues come only after they lose their faith. The women, on the other hand, face challenges in their patriarchal homes: Michal joins the compound to escape her abusive husband; Sarah is forced to admit to her husband that she’s both a secret atheist and a lesbian; Gitty’s arc accurately portrays the cover-up of sexual abuse in the Haredi community and the trauma that follows.
One scene in particular highlights the intense intellectual socialization men receive in yeshiva. When Gitty’s husband discovers she’s having an affair with Zuchmir, his reaction isn’t one of heartbreak, but of legalistic contextualization. According to Halacha (Jewish law), a woman who cheats is forbidden to her husband. He quotes rabbinic texts to prove that halachically, she isn’t believed to have had an affair, even though there are pictures of her and Yossi together. “You are still muttar (permitted) to me!” he insists desperately.
The show’s authenticity, and its deep understanding of anxieties over Jewish law, stems from its co-creators. Yossi Madmoni is a veteran of Haredi drama, while Avi Tfilinski lived as a secret atheist himself for 12 years even as he remained an esteemed rabbi and head of a yeshiva. After he left, he faced the very consequences all anusim fear: He lost contact with his children for seven years, before eventually reconnecting.
These severe social consequences — losing your entire social circle and even your relationship with your children — are the primary reasons Hidden Heretics identified for why anusim stay in the community. Economic dependence is another strong factor, as Haredi schooling doesn’t offer secular education and graduates rely on jobs they couldn’t find outside the Haredi community. Finally, the cultural attachment to the separate insular community can be too strong. Leaving for the secular world can be as jarring as moving to a new country.
Perhaps because of the story of Avi Tfilinski’s own tragic exit, there are no uplifting stories of escape where a shining secular world embraces the poor anusim. Instead, we see the vast cultural gulf between the two communities. In one episode, we meet Henry who leaves his wife and child to make a new life for himself in Tel Aviv. There, however, he stumbles on the societal expectations and cultural norms of the secular world. Yossi Zuchmir berates him for attempting to leave, saying, “Idiot, our girls are a thousand times better than theirs.”
The show demonstrates the extremes some will go to stay in the community and keep their family. Shmuel Eizner, the scion of a Hasidic dynasty who goes by the name “Donald Trump” to protect his identity, is caught by his father, the famed Admor of Yashi. His father then reveals that he too once had doubts. He calls it a family curse and explains his moments of disbelief as psychotic episodes, for which he takes Zyprexa. In a horrifying scene, he convinces “Donald” to take these same anti-psychotics.
If the cast of characters in Behasture can feel overwhelming, that’s because each episode focuses on a new character in the compound, and in 45 minutes, there’s isn’t enough time to give everyone’s stories the space they deserve. The showrunners try to solve this issue by grafting on two continuous plotlines throughout.
One plotline involves Yossi Zuchmir, who funds the compound and various anusim events using loans from the criminal underworld. Yehuda, an especially harsh loan shark, beats him up and threatens to expose his secret life to the other Haredim. Guns and violence, however, feel quite out of place in the anusim’s quieter world of shame, secrets and identity shifts. Although there’s a certain lack of courage in shying away from portraying quieter, less melodramatic stories, this plotline does demonstrate the inability of an uneducated Haredi man to make money outside approved channels.
The second plotline is clumsier and involves a romance between Rochal’e and “Donald Trump.” Throughout the show, we’re often pulled away from stories exploring the deep psychology of a character to watch a scene of Rochal’e and “Donald” awkwardly failing to flirt. One wonders why so much time is spent on this contrived story of young love instead of the much more fiery affair between Zuchmir and Gitty, his Rebbe’s wife.
There are other flaws too. While the main characters look like authentic Haredim, costumed with meticulous accuracy, many of the side characters look like caricatures with obvious fake beards and ill-fitting hats. The show also attempts to neatly resolve the characters’ troubles with a deus ex machina finale that feels both contrived and unearned.
Even so, Behasture does an incredible job at highlighting a hidden community on the edges of the Haredi world. Given the popularity of Haredi TV shows like Shtisel and Shababnikim, we can expect to see this show gracing our American screens with English subtitles soon.
The show demonstrates many of the observations about this community that Ami exposed 15 years ago and that Fader made in Hidden Heretics. In one interview, the co-director Tfilinski estimates that there are 30,000 anusim currently living this double life. Let’s hope that those 30,000 in the closet feel seen by Behasture and empowered in their difficult decision to leave or remain in those secret gray areas.
The post On a new Israeli TV show, the secret lives of Orthodox Jewish atheists appeared first on The Forward.
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Recognizing Shabbat Is Not Establishing a Religion
Shabbat candles. Photo: Olaf.herfurth via Wikimedia Commons.
The backlash to President Trump’s “Shabbat 250” proclamation reveals something deeper than disagreement over a single president or a single ceremonial gesture. It reveals how uneasy a slice of American Jewish leadership has become with the public acknowledgment of a tradition that helped shape America’s moral vocabulary.
The timing matters. Since October 7th, antisemitism has surged on a scale unfamiliar to most American Jews living today – across college campuses, in major cities, on social media, in synagogue parking lots that now require armed guards and entrances fitted with metal detectors. Against that backdrop, a sitting president has used a White House proclamation to honor a core Jewish practice, to invoke George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, and to name Haym Salomon – the Jewish immigrant financier who helped fund the Revolution – as a model of Jewish American patriotism. One might have expected the organized Jewish community to receive that gesture with something closer to unanimity. Instead, the response has split.
As eJewishPhilanthropy recently reported, the divide ran along predictable lines. Orthodox and politically conservative organizations – Chabad communities, Agudath Israel, the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council of America, Young Jewish Conservatives – embraced the proclamation immediately. Progressive institutions and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs raised church-state concerns. The fault line itself is worth noticing. It tracks, with unsettling precision, which segments of American Jewry still feel confident about Jewish practice in public and which have grown uneasy when Jewish tradition appears outside the synagogue.
The critics’ anxieties are not frivolous. Jewish history is full of governments that used religion coercively and turned on the minorities they once flattered. American Jews were right to be cautious about religious majoritarianism in the past, and a cautious American Jewish political tradition has long taken that lesson seriously. But caution becomes distortion when even symbolic recognition of Jewish practice is treated as a constitutional threat.
The most serious version of the objection comes from Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, who warned in the eJP piece that when church-state lines blur, “one day you’re in and the next day you could be out.” The worry deserves a real answer, not dismissal. But Spitalnick herself drew the right distinction in the same interview. A government celebration of Jewish identity and practice, she said, “is very different than trying to utilize the government to advance a specific approach to religion.”
A proclamation honoring rest, gratitude, and the Jewish American contribution to the national story falls squarely on the first side of her line. It establishes no theology. It privileges no denomination. It requires nothing of anyone. It is ceremonial recognition: the same category as presidential Hanukkah candle-lightings, Ramadan iftars, Easter messages, and Thanksgiving statements that have rolled out of the executive branch for generations. The American constitutional order does not require a public square emptied of faith; it requires a public square open to all of them. A president who honors Shabbat one season and hosts an iftar the next is not establishing a religion. He is doing what American presidents have done since Washington: recognizing that the country contains many traditions and that none of them needs to be hidden to be American.
A different objection comes from Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie of Lab/Shul, who wrote that we should observe Shabbat “not because a leader commanded it, but because our humanity demands it.” That is a theological worry, not a constitutional one, and it deserves a theological answer. Trump has commanded nothing. All he has done is acknowledge that Shabbat exists, that millions of Americans keep it, that the country is better for the practice.
One can hold separate concerns about this president’s habit of telling Jews how to be Jewish. Those are concerns about a man. They are not an argument against the proclamation. The principle would be right whether the proclamation came from this president or any other, and an American Jewish community that could only accept public recognition from presidents it liked would not be defending the Constitution. It would be practicing politics.
The deeper problem with the church-state framing is that it gets American Jewish history almost exactly backward. American Jews did not flourish because the public square was scrubbed of faith. They flourished because the public square was open to faith – to all faiths -and because the founding promise of religious liberty was extended to a people who had never before been treated as full citizens anywhere in Christendom. Washington’s letter to Touro Synagogue, which the proclamation invokes, did not promise the Newport congregation that religion would be banished from American life. It promised them that the new republic would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” and that the children of the stock of Abraham would sit safely under their own vine and fig tree. That is not the language of secularism. It is the language of religious confidence extended to Jews as Jews.
The Jews who arrived in America did not ask for invisibility. They asked for equality, and America’s founding promise made that claim possible in a way nearly no other country had. Haym Salomon – born in Poland, jailed by the British, dead in poverty at forty-four after pouring his fortune into the Continental cause – did not finance a revolution so that his descendants could ask the public square to please not mention Jews. The American Jewish bargain has always been the opposite: be visible, be present, be unembarrassed about being Jewish in public, and the country will be the better for it. The First Amendment was designed to prevent a national church. It was never designed to scrub religion from American public life. Covenant, human dignity, moral obligation, liberty under law, the sanctity of conscience; none of it appeared from nowhere. Recognizing that inheritance is not theocracy. It is historical literacy.
It is worth saying plainly what Shabbat is, because much of the anxious commentary proceeds as though the underlying practice were a minor ritual rather than one of the central institutions of Western civilization. Shabbat is the weekly insistence that human beings are not merely productive units. It is the structural refusal to let work, commerce, and noise consume the whole of life. It builds in, by law and by habit, a day for family, for study, for rest, for gratitude and for the things that markets cannot price and bureaucracies cannot manage. The Jewish tradition holds that Shabbat sustained the Jewish people through exile, dispersion, and persecution: more than the Jews kept Shabbat, Shabbat kept the Jews.
That a weekly cessation might be good for an entire country – and not merely for Jews – is not a controversial proposition. It is one of the most quietly radical contributions the Jewish people have made to human civilization. A country drowning in screens, in noise, in the demand to be always available, might reasonably want to pause and acknowledge the institution that taught the West how to stop.
The split inside the American Jewish community over “Shabbat 250” is, in the end, a split about confidence. The progressive instinct to guard the church-state line is the right instinct, applied to the wrong case; the Jews who worry about state-favored religion are reading from the correct historical script, only on the wrong stage. The Orthodox and conservative Jews who embraced the proclamation did so because they still feel ownership over Shabbat; because the practice is theirs, lived, and they are glad to see it honored. Some progressive leaders responded with discomfort because seeing Shabbat publicly honored by political authority now feels unfamiliar, uncomfortable, perhaps even weaponizable. That asymmetry says something painful about where parts of American Jewish life now stand in relation to their own tradition.
Recognizing Shabbat is not the establishment of religion. It is the recognition of a gift; a gift this country received from the Jewish people, and a gift it is finally, in its 250th year, pausing long enough to say thank you for. At a moment when Jews on American campuses are being told they do not belong, and Jews in major cities are being assaulted for being visibly Jewish, the proclamation says something the Jewish community badly needs to hear from the highest office in the land: you are not foreign here. You built this. The country is grateful.
The answer to that gesture is not worry. It is the lighting of candles.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Stacey Bosworth selected as the Forward’s next Vice President of Development
Forward Publisher and CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen announced today that Stacey Bosworth has been selected as the Forward’s next Vice President of Development, beginning June 1, 2026.
Bosworth comes to the Forward from documentarian Ken Burns’ Better Angels Society, where she served as Chief Development Officer, leading donor strategy and philanthropic initiatives. Prior to that, she was the Director of Development and Co-Chief Advancement Officer at the Sundance Institute. At both Sundance and Better Angels, she worked with major donors and foundations such as the Emerson Collective, the Ford Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation and others to secure funding for stories that needed to be told.
Bosworth also served as Vice President of Advancement at MacDowell Artists Residency, where she launched a journalism fellowship fund, was the president of Aaron Consulting, supporting various nonprofit organizations in fundraising strategy, and founding executive director of the Joyful Heart Foundation.
Bosworth began her career at the Workers Circle, then located in the Forward building on 33rd Street in Manhattan. She is also on the board of The Old Stone House in Brooklyn, where she lives.
The post Stacey Bosworth selected as the Forward’s next Vice President of Development appeared first on The Forward.
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Despite Rule Changes, Israel Proved the Haters Wrong at Eurovision
Noam Bettan, representing Israel, performs “Michelle” during the Grand Final of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria, May 16, 2026. REUTERS/Lisa Leutner
The crowd in Austria booed when it was announced that Israel was in the lead, with only several countries remaining to receive audience votes, in this year’s Eurovision competition.
Noam Bettan’s song “Michelle” — in Hebrew, French, and English — was without a doubt the best song in the competition. But The New York Times had written a disgusting hit piece about how Israel spends a lot of money on its Eurovision entry, while not mentioning anything about the efforts and spending of other countries in the competition. Spain, Slovenia, Iceland, Ireland, and the Netherlands boycotted the competition.
It also made Jew-haters nervous that traditionally, the country that wins hosts Eurovision the next year — meaning that if Israel won, the competition could have come to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
Ultimately, Bulgaria was the surprise winner with the nonsense song “Bangaranga!” performed in English by Dara. It’s fun in a campy way, but seems more like a sketch song from a comedy show than a song that should win Eurovision.
Bettan’s “Michelle” showed off his powerful voice, and the song got bigger and better as it went on.
I thought that Finland had the second best song after Israel, with “Liekinheitin” performed by Pete Parkkonen with Linda Lampenius on violin. The country finished sixth. Australia’s Delta Goodrem impressed with “Eclipse,” in what was the third best song of the competition, though the country was awarded fourth place.
Countries in the grand finale were awarded a jury vote (by a panel of professionals) and the televote-countries got 12 votes if they were the top vote getter from another country, with other points if they were in a country’s top 10.
Those voting on their phone or online could not vote for someone from their own country. The rules changed from last year so that each person could vote 10 times, as opposed to last year’s 20. Some critics of Israel online hoped this rule change might limit Israel’s ability to have a strong finish. There was also a “Rest of The World Vote” factored in.
Israel was in the lead with a total of 343 points, 220 from the public and 123 from the jury. With Bulgaria getting 204 jury points, the announcer noted that Bulgaria would need 140 points from the public to be the winner. It received an inexplicable 312 public votes. The jury gave France 144 points, Poland 133 points, Denmark 165 points, and Italy 134 points — which some saw as possible bias against Israel, though Australia’s 165 points and Finland’s 141 points, may have been due to the actual merit of the songs.
With rumors flying that Bulgaria can’t afford to have the Eurovision show in their country, there was speculation online asking if Israel would host it next year — but that sadly will never happen.
Even though Bettan finished second, it was a clear victory, as the song was great, and Israel thrived despite the new rule changes that were put in place because the public complained about last year’s pro-Israel results.
Will Bettan’s strong finish change anyone’s mind about Israel? One never knows exactly, but it doesn’t hurt to have a handsome amazing singer shine on the global stage.
This marks the third consecutive year that Israel has had a great song and performer, and finished in the top 5. Last year, Israel came in second with Yuval Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise.” She received 297 public votes, the most of any competitor, but only 60 jury points, the fewest of any in the top seven. In 2024, Israel finished fifth with Eden Golan’s “Hurricane.” She received 323 points from public votes, the second most in the competition, but only 50 from the jury, the lowest number of any in the top 10.
Israel finishing second for the second consecutive year once again shows a country that beats the odds and shows greatness.
The author is a writer based in New York.