Uncategorized
A new documentary challenges stereotypes about Orthodox Jewish women — and their wigs
Many among the secular, including me, grew up believing the sheitel, the ritual wig worn by married Orthodox and Hasidic women, was not intended to be attractive. Quite the contrary: Its purpose was largely to make sure the women were undesirable and thus of no interest to men on the street, or worse, in the synagogue.
Yet even this admittedly reductive spin was awash in assumptions about men’s sexuality, the patriarchal dynamic between men and women in general and within marriage in particular.
Sheitel: Beauty in the Hidden, an insightful documentary, takes a deep dive into this complex topic. It explores the unexpectedly wide-ranging cultural, religious and deeply personal significance of hair covering among Orthodox and Hasidic women — from Miami to Jerusalem; from New York to Los Angeles; from Toronto and Montreal to, of all places, Halifax, Nova Scotia, director Lynda Medjuck-Suissa’s home base. (Her first film, Camp Kadimah—The Story of Our Lives, examined the history and ongoing impact of a well-known Canadian Jewish summer day camp.)
In Sheitel, her sophomore effort, she reveals how wigs, scarves and other hair coverings serve not only as symbols of faith and tradition, but also political identity and female empowerment. The movie confronts widespread misconceptions and stereotypes — including my own parochial thoughts on the subject — and also offers a rare look into the global wig industry.
The opening sets the historical tone with shots of the cobble-stoned, winding and congested streets of ancient Jerusalem, filled with many large families headed by sheitel-sporting women, and men in long black coats and payos, or curled sidelocks. Later, we’re in Borough Park, Brooklyn with its store fronts boasting signs in Yiddish. But modernity is present too, including scenes in the uber-contemporary, slick high-rises of Miami with its bustling ultra-religious communities.
This vivid documentary interweaves segments of women being fitted for wigs and interviews featuring dozens of Jewish wives. Some are sitting alongside their husbands, who offer their opinions as well. The stores and salons presented are lined with wigs in various shades and styles and textures. Women are seated on salon stools as hair dressers color, and highlight and trim the wigs they’ve purchased, an arduous, detailed and time- consuming process.
Some women are having a fine time as they consider the fashion possibilities and are fussed over. Others, especially the brides to be, are apprehensive. Nobody claims that wearing these head coverings is comfortable. But all are committed to the practice.
Donning an uncomfortable wig reflects a higher calling than creature comforts, one woman explained.
On the flip side, the wigs don’t require much work once they’ve been fitted, though periodically they need to be brought in for shampoos and touch-ups. The women are encouraged to have more than one wig, and one woman slyly noted that she has so many wigs and accompanying personas that her husband thinks he’s married to many, many women.
What emerges right off the bat, and is reiterated throughout, is that today sheitels are designed to be attractive, although there is an aesthetic range, mostly depending on cost, from the least expensive to the most pricey. (The wigs start around $1,500 and go over $10,000.) The craftsmanship involved, but even more important the materials used — synthetic hairs, fully natural strands or a mix — determine the expense and appearance.
The particular kind of head covering a woman wears depends on the traditions of her religious community — some wear only wigs, others sports wigs and hats, and still others don hair-covering head scarves. But equally important, and in some cases more so, it’s the woman’s individual tastes that define the look. Every woman interviewed maintained their sense of autonomy and agency. They are not subjugated by anyone. They choose to wear the sheitel.
The women interviewed include, among many others, influencers, podcasters, businesswomen, a champion marathon runner and New York State Supreme Court Justice Ruchie Freier, whom I profiled in 2018. Wife and mother of six, she was the first Hasidic woman judge in America, if not the world. Everyone interviewed in the film, representing a cross-section of Jewish Orthodoxy, is highly articulate.
Judge Freier stressed that the sheitel is part of a much larger picture that celebrates modesty, arguing that modesty does not exclude beauty. “But it’s a way for women to not use their bodies to affect the world,” she says.
The subtext is the assumption that a man cannot see a woman’s uncovered head because he’d be so aroused he’d be unable to control his sexual impulses and not able to focus on important things like prayer.
But not all of the women shared this idea. Sarah Guigue, a New Jersey-based influencer whose Instagram followers tops 60,000, said that she, herself, found that thought “toxic” and could not accept it.
“I believe the Torah is divine and that idea is not divine,” Guigue said. Her own signature wig, matching her cheerful outspoken style, is long, straight hair crowned by a large, brimmed hat.
(The film does not address, and I wish it did, the question of why unmarried women are not required to cover their heads, though their hair is often tied back as an expression of modesty.)
Contrary to my initial assumptions, a thematic motif in Sheitel is that beauty and godliness are interconnected: that God wants you to be the best you can be, and that includes physical attractiveness. Nothing in the Torah, the Rabbis concurred, says that a woman, even a married woman, shouldn’t be attractive.
(In fact, there’s nothing in the Torah that dictates that a married woman must cover her head, though it’s arguably a gray area; more than one of the women cited a section in the Talmud that references an unholy woman, possibly an adulteress, removing her wig — implying, by contrast, that a holy woman wears one.)
Indeed, far from feeling unattractive, several women talked about feeling a heightened sexuality while wearing the sheitel, feeling a thrill inherent in that which is hidden. The sheitel represents a woman’s bond with God and her husband. When she removes her wig in the bedroom and exposes her real live hair — while the wig, by contrast, is dead hair — it is a manifestation of intimacy with her husband that she shares with nobody else.
One interviewee likened the devout married Jewish woman to a thermos bottle: “Cool on the outside, hot on the inside.”
The women also talked about a mystical, not easily articulated, connection to God they feel when they wear their sheitels. Some noted that to don a sheitel is to perform a mitzvah that, in turn, will generate blessings for themselves and their families. They are sanctified.
One American-born secular woman, who had lived the life of a party gal, said she was overwhelmed with a sense of peace when she transitioned to Orthodoxy and became what is known as a Baalat Teshuva. She said she had never felt such a strong sense of identity, community and belonging as when she sported a sheitel.
Choosing to be an outlier, part of an insular world symbolized by, among other things, covering one’s head, is also a political statement that is tied in with survival, one woman implied. “It’s a way to make sure we don’t disappear,” she said.
The informative film also touches on the evolution of the sheitel.
Emma Tarlo, an emeritus professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, talked about the significance of hair coverings throughout history and across cultural divides, which she explored in her latest book, Entanglements: The Secret Lives of Hair.
“In Europe during the Middle Ages Christian women covered their hair,” she said in Sheitel. “But it wasn’t until the 16th and 17th centuries that women started covering their hair with wigs. Wigs were worn by royalty, and so they were associated with high status and high fashion. Jewish women wanted to participate in it and the Rabbis didn’t like it. They felt it was too gentile, to which the Jewish women said: ‘But we’re covering our hair.’ So right from the outset, there has been a conflict between religion and fashion.”
Later, at the turn of the 20th century as Jewish immigrants flocked to America, the sheitel was increasingly viewed as a symbol of old world poverty and superstition. Many women tossed theirs overboard to celebrate their new found liberation and assimilation into a new land. (See Joan Micklin Silver’s wonderful 1975 narrative film, Hester Street.)
In the 60s and 70s the sheitel enjoyed a renewed cachet thanks in part to the burgeoning wig industry that found a large fashionista market, among both Jews and gentiles. Enter the iconic Lubavitcher rebbe, Menacham Mendel Schneerson, who took advantage of the trend to promote sheitels, a tenet he was adamant about.
Perhaps the most lovely, yet oddly unsettling, anecdote about the power of a sheitel came from Amanda Spiro, a once-secular Jewish woman from Montreal, who started wearing a wig while undergoing chemotherapy for cancer.
She “grew fascinated by the Haredi women who chose to wear it, finding beauty from within,” she said.
It was a transforming realization. After Spiro completed her treatment, she removed her wig as her own hair grew back, knowing she “wanted the experience of taking it off and then putting it back on as a true Jewish woman.”
And she did. Now she is Orthodox, married and a mother of three children, as well as 10 years cancer-free.
“I never thought I could have children,” Spiro said.
Is it a divinely sanctioned miracle? Is there a connection between the trajectory of her life and her donning the sheitel? It’s a feel-good coda. I’d like to believe it.
The film Sheitel will be at the Manhattan JCC on the UWS on May 11. For more listings check out the website.
The post A new documentary challenges stereotypes about Orthodox Jewish women — and their wigs appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Pioneering restaurant chain Taïm closes, outlets padlocked for unpaid taxes
Taïm Mediterranean Grill, a pioneering fast casual Israeli food chain, is closing locations across the country, after New York State issued warrants for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes.
The restaurant, founded by Israeli-American celebrity chef Einat Admony and now owned by the Illinois-based conglomerate Craveworthy Brands had expanded across New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago. Last week, pictures of two of New York City locations appeared on social media, with signage saying they had been seized by the state for nonpayment of taxes.
In an email to the Forward, a representative for Admony wrote that “she is unable to comment on the current status of the chain,” having not been involved with it since 2022.
When Admony first opened Taïm in New York’s West Village in 2005, it was one of the city’s first fast casual Mediterranean options. Zagat and New York Magazine gave the restaurant rave reviews, and lines formed outside the door.
Taïm opened its second location in 2012, and in 2018, former Chipotle executive Phil Petrilli and business partners invested in the restaurant and led its expansion across the country. By that time, Taïm faced a more crowded market, competing with Miznon, another Israeli fast casual creation by celebrity-chef Eyal Shani, and Cava, a Mediterranean bowl restaurant.
The restaurant switched ownership in 2024 when Craveworthy Brands bought Petrilli’s restaurant platform. But a year later, the state of New York issued dozens of tax warrants to Taïm-related entities at multiple locations. Some stores closed ahead of the recent round of state seizures.
The state has held both Pitrelli and Craveworthy’s CEO, Gregg Majewski, responsible for taxes owed. Pitrelli is currently suing Majewski, alleging that under their merger agreement, Majewski and Craveworthy are liable for all debts incurred by Taïm.
In his lawsuit, Pitrelli alleged the Taïm outlets owed $632,000 in unpaid taxes. Majewski did not respond to a request for comment; the Forward has reached out to his attorney.
Since the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on Israel, Taïm, which is Hebrew for “delicious,” has received some pushback. It has appeared on boycott lists and posts, criticizing it for being “Israeli owned,” even though its current owner is not Israeli. In a recent Instagram post noting the closure, users took to the comments to criticize the restaurant for being Israeli. However, a push to boycott Taïm specifically has not received as much widespread attention from the BDS movement as Goldie, a Philadelphia chain run by celebrity chef Michael Solomonov that recently closed six locations.
The restaurant currently brands itself as “Mediterranean,” though in the past it hashighlighted its Israeli background.
Others criticized Taïm for reasons unrelated to geopolitics. “They ruined that place when they changed the menu and made it like a big chain fast casual place,” one FoodNYC Redditor commented.
“Place has been going downhill for years, I’m not surprised,” another said.
The post Pioneering restaurant chain Taïm closes, outlets padlocked for unpaid taxes appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Antisemitism flourishes amid cultural and historical illiteracy. Classrooms should be a cure.
School will be back in session before we know it. A smattering of the headlines in the final weeks of the last academic year, coinciding with Jewish American Heritage Month in May, suggest that fighting antisemitism in educational environments will remain a monumental challenge.
They include a lawsuit against the nation’s largest teachers’ union for encouraging discrimination against Jewish teachers and students, a Texas private school displaying maps of the Middle East erasing Israel, swastikas scrawled on multiple school grounds in Massachusetts and in Georgia, and — just a few blocks from my child’s former school, which has had its own share of such issues — a flag bearing the hate symbol billowing over New York University.
The scene in the streets this summer has been arguably as bleak. Hate crimes against Jews are on the rise, even as rates of other major crimes fall. In response to the stabbing of a Jewish man in a kippah as he exited the Jewish Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Democratic congressional nominee Micah Lasher implored Mayor Zohran Mamdani to do more than react with the requisite expressions of empathy and promises of increased security, but to “take the temperature down” rather than foster a climate that jeopardizes Jewish safety.
Taking the temperature down is exactly what’s in order. We need proactive, preventative action from our political leaders, in New York City and beyond, to transform an environment in which antisemitic attacks still comprise the majority of hate crimes, and harsh words can too often combust into violence.
The good news is that we have a ready-made place to continue this urgent work: classrooms. As an educator, I have a strong sense of how historical and cultural illiteracy are far more rampant than unrepentant antisemitism, and that this is where we must focus our educational efforts in a more deliberate way than we currently do.
Ignorance provides antisemitism, an insidious shapeshifter that infects and unifies the otherwise polarized political right and left, with a powerful accelerant. Yet the only times when K-12 students might encounter Jewish experiences are in a Holocaust unit — mandated in 29 states — or in an antisemitism training, often introduced reactively after an incident. Neither approach addresses a generalized illiteracy about Jewish identity and experience that allows this hatred to fester. These traditional methods of “fighting antisemitism,” including in classrooms, are important but inadequate.
Rather than teaching about Jews primarily as targets of hatred — the obvious organizing principle of many lessons on the Holocaust and antisemitism training — it is crucial that students learn about Jewish identities and experiences as inextricable from our broader national narratives. When Jews are understood as full members of the polity, and as diverse participants in every historical era — as labor organizers and industry leaders, fashion designers and film directors, athletes and intellectuals — it becomes much harder to caricature us as evil or outsiders, or to render us invisible.
Such historical accuracy, rigorous source analysis, and a spirit of cultural inclusiveness, is the ethos of the New York City public schools’ Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans in United States History curriculum materials, for which I serve as lead scholar. Volume 1 is out now, and Volume 2 will be released later this fall.
A two-volume collection of profiles, original sources, guiding questions, and analytical essays written and reviewed by experts, the free materials enable history and social studies teachers to enrich existing lessons, or to create entirely new units of study.
Rich narratives about individuals illuminate broader historical eras, whether organizer Clara Lemlich on Progressive Era labor legislation, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis on transformed legal approaches to monopoly, or Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s advocacy for sex education, to name a few. Moreover, Hidden Voices explores how each individual’s Jewishness shaped their contributions to American society.
Rather than just sprinkling in a few Jewish figures into existing narratives, “Portrait of an Era” essays show how integrating stories of both luminaries and lesser known Jews nuances and challenges dominant historical frameworks – like “the Civil Rights Era,” or “Postwar America” – in ways that render history more accurately, and more interestingly.
For example, what does it say about the early national period of a country founded on religious freedom that Rabbi Isaac Leeser worried Jews would become “Christianized,” and thus offered sermons in English, while simultaneously advocating for the “Judaization” of American Jews? Or, how is the notion that American Jews “became white” after World War II challenged by the fact that the first, and only, Jewish Miss America, Bess Myerson, sparked a torrent of complaints to pageant organizers, was disinvited from various appearances, and was encouraged to choose a less Jewish name (she didn’t)?
Hidden Voices is no hagiography — history as hero worship — even as one of its aims is to challenge negative stereotypes. Since students might only encounter one of these profiles throughout their studies, we were especially judicious in selecting individuals that highlight the complexity of history and of humanity. For example, Spaniard Luis de Caravajal y de la Cueva, whose family converted to Roman Catholicism but secretly practiced Judaism under the threat of death, arrived in the New World to advance colonization. Yet he used this position to rescue other persecuted conversos. Many years later, we profile Groucho Marx, who with his brothers indelibly shaped the worlds of vaudeville and film, new industries where Jews found success in part because antisemitism excluded them from more established ones.
Emphasizing Jews’ role in U.S. history at large is crucial, but so is educating about the specificity of Jewish experience, from the momentous — including the Holocaust and Israel’s founding – to the everyday, like mainstreaming blue jeans and bagels and establishing overnight camps. Cultural topics are especially powerful teaching tools, for students are often less guarded in discussing food or fashion than when grappling with the most fraught political questions. Given so many current conversations about Jews now turn to Gaza, Hidden Voices decenters this conflict to offer a wider lens on a diverse people too often unhelpfully decontextualized.
Why isn’t a more robust Jewish-American history curriculum already a staple in more schools, especially given how largely other identities loom in our classrooms and our culture? Indeed, Hidden Voices — which has covered race, ability, and other categories — has existed since 2018 in New York City, home to the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, and yet the project I lead was only commissioned in late 2023, spurred by Oct. 7. While Volume 1 has been downloaded 200,000 times, and encouraging reports of teachers using the materials are rolling in, integrating these Jewish stories into the study of U.S. history and culture remains optional.
Multiple factors account for this relative absence of Jewish stories in the teaching of American history, in New York City and nationwide: foremost, the widespread, reductive assumption that identity and power in the United States operate around a Black-white binary, with Jews on the white, privileged side, and thus not a marginalized group worthy of attention. Similarly, many identity-based frameworks focus on “underrepresented” groups, which Jews — despite comprising a tiny minority — are not. Lastly, many such curricula are introduced due to parental advocacy, but Jewish Americans have largely expended such energy on building a Jewish education network outside the public system.
Overlooking Jewish American history and experience intensifies both antisemitism and historical illiteracy, and must be addressed. While Hidden Voices may appear to “just add Jews” into a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion framework, it actually represents a subtly, but substantially, different intervention. First, the argument for such programs is often for people to “see themselves.” While I hope Jewish schoolchildren feel affirmed by such visibility, that aim is profoundly parochial. Learning the history of Jews — or Latinos, LGBTQ people and others — is not primarily valuable in order to cultivate particularistic pride, a dubious aim for a secular school in a pluralistic society. Rather, it is to equip all students to navigate our shared society with evidence, empathy, and universalism. Actually, a Jewish history curriculum arguably stands to be most valuable in districts without Jews at all, but ample room for antisemitism to fester unchecked by interpersonal experience.
I understand the skepticism of staking our hopes on a better future for Jewish Americans in educational institutions; I’ve been a vocal critic of how alienating these places have been to many since 10/7. To be sure, education is no magic pill, and ignorance is not our only enemy. Avowed antisemites and ideologues exist in K-12 and college classrooms, as in all professions, and they too demand our unsparing attention. But for the vast majority of Americans with scant awareness of Jewish history or experience, teaching and learning about Jews as integral to this nation’s past and present is a new, and potentially powerful intervention. We owe it to each other to pressure our politicians and our public schools to at least try it.
The post Antisemitism flourishes amid cultural and historical illiteracy. Classrooms should be a cure. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
What does DSA actually want? Its national co-chair can’t say.
It’s been a heady couple of months for the Democratic Socialists of America. Candidates the organization rallied behind ousted establishment Democrats in New York, Michigan, Colorado and Wisconsin state primaries. Pundits who doubted the movement last year are now eating crow.
With the DSA having forced its way into the spotlight, national co-chair Megan Romer went on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast to share what the movement is all about. But the interview has elicited an online backlash — and some ridicule — after Romer said she would have attended an Oct. 8 protest and that she would have sought to stop Russia’s advance in Ukraine through diplomacy.
Just as damning to some viewers was Romer’s reluctance to provide specifics on a number of DSA policy positions when pressed for them by New Yorker editor David Remnick.
The backlash to the interview put Romer on the defensive. The day after its publication the national co-chair called Remnick a “debate bro” who had tried to make her look and feel stupid during the conversation. Remnick, a Pulitzer Prize–winner and former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, has edited The New Yorker since 1998.
“Luckily lots of practice keeping my temper in check when debate bros are well-actually’ing me, tho it still flusters me,” Romer wrote Saturday on X. “I am def particularly sensitive when people are actively trying to make me look/feel stupid and it can throw me off my game.”
The interview highlighted a challenge that faces the organization as it gains members and breaks through on the Democratic stage: Translating its rallying cries into the gritty work of partisan politics — or, for the candidates DSA champions, getting things done while remaining true to the movement’s ideals.
Nowhere was that clearer than Romer’s talking points on Israel. Romer said the organization’s position was “a free Palestine with a capital in Jerusalem, and so I think that can safely be read as a one-state solution.” When Remnick asked her if DSA would have supported the proposed terms of the Camp David summit in 2000, had the Palestinians accepted it, Romer said: “Good question — I’d have to actually look at what the specifics there were.”
(The exact terms discussed at the summit are in dispute, but most agree it would have involved a separate Palestinian state with a capital comprising several Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem.)
A testy exchange followed around Romer’s stance on the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Asked whether she supported New York congressional primary winner Darializa Avila Chevalier in attending a “pro-Hamas” rally on Oct. 8, Romer said yes — she would have gone herself.
“If you put people in an open air concentration camp, and you deprive people of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety,” Romer said, “you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long. And that is not defending any harm of civilians or of non-combatants.”
Remnick replied, “Well, sure it is — you said you’re supporting it.”
Romer said, “I’m saying that I think it was inevitable.”
On issue after issue, Remnick pressed Romer for details and found few.
- Romer said DSA wanted to “tax the hell out of millionaires” but demurred on what that would mean in practice.
- Romer said she believed in open borders, but not in “throwing the gates open.” When Remnick asked if that wasn’t just immigration reform — which is to say the Democratic policy platform — Romer replied, “It means reforming the system we have while we rethink the system, while we build this new one from the ground up, and then hopefully eventually flipping the switch.”
- Romer said she did not believe in sending arms to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. She asked Remnick, “Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual diplomacy? Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual sending actual human beings to talk to human beings?” Remnick pointed out that there had been many attempts of diplomacy, “however failed,” since the beginning of the war.
- Remnick asked Romer what she meant when she said she believed in prison abolition. She answered that the safest communities were not ones with cops on every corner, but ones with “good schools, good jobs, good park systems, good recreation for their teenagers, things like that. Those are the safe communities.”
- As for her support for defunding the police, Romer said she was “not in favor of getting rid of police entirely tomorrow” but that she supported decreasing their budgets until a point where social services were sufficiently funded.
For the most part, Remnick — trying to fit Romer into a 30-minute podcast slot — let Romer’s answers speak for themselves whether they answered his question or not. But he did hint at a broader argument in one of his final questions, about the DSA’s position in favor of abolishing the U.S. Senate.
Given the scant likelihood of such a measure passing, Remnick asked, didn’t it distract from policy goals that were more likely to succeed?
“I don’t think so,” Romer replied. “I think taking principled positions tells people that you’re principled, and I think we see voters really responding to that, and we see people saying, ‘Oh, you’re actually thinking about the systems.’”
The post What does DSA actually want? Its national co-chair can’t say. appeared first on The Forward.
