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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.
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Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever
The Israeli city of Netanya has renamed one of its streets Rechov Avrom Sutzkever (Abraham Sutzkever Street), after the renowned Yiddish poet and Vilna partisan.
The event on June 10 marked an important cultural moment, recognizing the legacy of a poet who devoted his life to Yiddish language and Jewish culture. During his lifetime, Sutzkever was celebrated not only for his poetry, but also for editing the storied Yiddish literary magazine Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) for 46 years. His work remains a fixture in the field of Yiddish literature today.
Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the shtetl of Smorgon, in what is now Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother Rayne moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever survived the Vilna Ghetto. He was a leader of the “Paper Brigade” that rescued Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis and later became the only Jewish witness called by the Soviets to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.
His poetry chronicled his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna ghetto and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1947 he settled in Palestine, later Israel.
In Israel, he continued to create, publish and preserve Yiddish culture for decades. Yet, despite his immense influence around the world, he remained less known in Israel because he chose to write and fight for the Yiddish language rather than switch to Hebrew.
This is the first time a street in Israel has been named after him. Even Tel Aviv never did so, despite the fact that Sutzkever lived there for many years and the city was once a hotbed of Yiddish cultural activity, due to the influx of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who settled there after the Holocaust.
The street-naming ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Netanya, Avi Slama; representatives of the Lithuanian Embassy; public figures, artists, and members of the family, including Sutzkever’s granddaughter, Hadas Kalderon.
In the past decade, Kalderon has been instrumental in keeping Abraham Sutzkever’s memory alive, most notably through two documentary films: Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?) in 2021, and Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever in 2018.
Kalderon told me that she was very moved by Netanya’s decision to name the street after her grandfather, in a garden overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. “It was not only a tribute to Sutzkever himself, but also a powerful moment of recognition for Yiddish language and culture within the State of Israel,” she said.
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At the dawn of the World Cup, the story of the Jews who helped bring soccer to America
When the North American FIFA World Cup starts in Mexico City on June 11, the story will largely be told through the familiar lenses of Lionel Messi, the geography of the 48 participants and three hosts, and — because 75% of the games will be played there — the continuing rise of soccer in the United States. But there is another, less familiar story woven through the tournament: the long, strange and often overlooked history of Jews in North American soccer.
Mostly that’s been in the United States where players and owners have included a larger proportion of Jews than in Canada and Mexico. By my count, no Jewish players have represented Mexico, and only two Jewish men have represented Canada at senior international level and one of them, Tomer Chencinski, only did so once, in a friendly game where Canada lost 2-0 to Belarus in Doha. (Daniel Haber played 5 international games in his career).
For whatever reason, whether more closely linked to Europe, denied entry to other sports, or just arbiters of excellent taste, Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of soccer in the United States for over a century. The first American to play for a major European team was Eddy Hamel for Ajax Amsterdam in 1922. Hamel was a New York-born winger who became a star for Ajax in Amsterdam during the 1920s. An injury forced his retirement in the 1930s and, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. His story remains one of the most tragic intersections of Jewish history and world football.
Jews also comprised the largest soccer crowd in America when 46,000 New Yorkers watched Hakoach Vienna play New York All Stars in 1926. That record stood for over 50 years but it also encouraged a number of members of the Hakoach team to emigrate to the US and start a New York team that was a crucial part of the American Soccer League of the era.
Later, in the 1970s, the National American Soccer League — the glitzy NASL — became a success thanks to the glamorous New York Cosmos. As head of Warner Communications, their CEO Steve Ross, born Rechnitz, was the person who brought Pele over and made the league the star-studded affair it became. After Herman Sarkowsky co-founded the Seattle Sounders, the continent was almost ready for football.
When the NASL faded and folded, soccer dwindled as a major sport in the United States. Alan Rothenberg saw an opportunity to revive the sport by hosting the 1994 World Cup and founding the MLS as a reset. As president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and the chief executive of the World Cup USA 1994 organizing committee, he made both of those happen and laid the foundations for the current shape of U.S. soccer.
The success of the MLS was not a foregone conclusion, though; indeed, it barely survived to the millennium. It was founded in 1993 but only started playing in 1996 — losing an estimated $350 million between its founding and 2004. The league initially turned to Don Garber, a former NFL executive, in August 1999 but even he couldn’t turn it around. By late 2001, it looked like the league would fold like its predecessors but it was able to secure new financing from owners Lamar Hunt, Philip Anschutz, and the Kraft family to take on more teams. Over the past 20 years, it has become robust, enjoying the general boom of all things soccer, riding the coattails of the English Premier League.
Without Robert Kraft and Anschutz, Major League Soccer might not exist today. During the league’s precarious early years, the two billionaire owners absorbed enormous losses to keep the fledgling competition alive. Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was also a central figure in bringing the 2026 World Cup to North America. As chairman of the United Bid Committee, he played a crucial role in securing the tournament for the United States, Canada and Mexico.
If Kraft represents one side of the Jewish soccer story, Chuck Blazer represents another.
The larger-than-life American soccer executive helped expose corruption inside FIFA, serving as a key witness in the investigations that ultimately toppled some of the most powerful figures in world football. Yet Blazer was a product of the very system he later helped unravel. His spectacular rise and fall remains one of the strangest chapters in soccer history, a tale of luxury apartments, exotic pets and global corruption.
Unlike baseball, basketball or boxing, soccer never became known as a major arena of Jewish achievement in the United States. Perhaps that has been due to the historic lack of status for soccer in the country. Despite the excellence of Yael Averbuch West for the USWNT and a number of Jewish players for the USMNT including Jonathan Bornstein, Benny Feilhaber, Dan Calichman, DeAndre Yedlin, Kyle Beckerman and the maverick Yari Alnutt there have been no soccer equivalents of Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg.
The stalwart defender Jeff “Goose” Agoos came closest with 134 international appearances and six more for the U.S. soccer Olympic team. But playing with a mediocre USMNT, he enjoyed few legendary moments. In fact, arguably no professional moments outshone the bizarre story of his 1989 NCAA championship ring in his junior year, the season that he played in the Maccabiah. On Dec. 3 of that year, his Virginia Cavalier team (playing for future USMNT coach Bruce Arena) met the top ranked, undefeated Santa Clara team in a freezing cold stadium in Piscataway, N.J. The teams were still tied 1-1 after FOUR overtimes and, with no penalties on the books, they shared the spoils. It was the third time that two teams shared the championship and has never happened again.
This year’s USMNT squad does include the only Jewish player at this summer’s tournament — reserve goalkeeper Matt Turner. If, as coach Mauricio Pochettino plans, Turner exclusively warms the bench, he will take his place alongside many of America’s notable Jewish soccer figures who have furthered the game, even if not on the field.
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‘Remember the Liberty’ has become code for ‘Israel Is Evil’
The first tragedy of the U.S.S. Liberty attack is that it happened at all. The second is that Israel’s critics have weaponized it to spread hate.
When Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood on the House floor on June 8, the 59th anniversary of the attack, and called for a Congressional probe into the incident, he wasn’t seriously trying to bring the truth of some long-buried historical secret to light. Massie, who in 14 years never once brought up the U.S.S. Liberty on the House floor, was using the latest cudgel in the Israel-haters’ arsenal to level one last official blow at a country he loathes.
“I’ve got a call to action for everybody here,” said Massie, speaking of attack survivors who were in the audience, “Honor these individuals. Quit ignoring that they exist. Let’s have an investigation. It’s long overdue.”
Let’s put aside the fact that there have been numerous official investigations into what exactly happened on June 8, 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the Liberty off the Sinai Peninsula, killing 34 American service members.
These investigations concluded that the tragedy was a friendly-fire incident. The Israelis initially mistook the Liberty, an intelligence-gathering vessel, for an Egyptian warship. After the smoke cleared, they accepted responsibility, apologized and paid $12 million in compensation to the victims.
Of all the explanations, it’s perhaps the least satisfying but the most logical. During the Vietnam War, happening at the same time, an estimated 11% to 15% of casualties were from friendly fire.
Massie’s call for a new investigation would be more believable if he then didn’t go on to recite the alternative one-sided narrative of the incident long pushed by some survivors and now taken up with gusto by Israel haters Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and others.
To them the attack was deliberate: The Israelis ignored the large American flag the Liberty was flying and began shooting.
“It was intentional murder by the country of Israel,” said Massie on the House floor, “either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”
What Massie and his fellow conspiracy theorists are alleging is a crime, but none of them has sufficiently proven a motive. Why would Israel attack the ship of its most important and powerful ally?
The false flag theory — the idea that Israel wanted to sink the Liberty, blame Egypt or the Soviet Union for it and draw America into the war — makes no sense.
The war was all but won by June 8. Moreover, as the historian and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren relates in Six Days of War, the Israelis actually stopped firing initially when they suspected the ship was American.
The Israelis sent helicopters to investigate, but heavy smoke obscured the ship. Meanwhile, as Israeli torpedo boats closed in, a U.S. Navy crewman, perhaps not hearing his commander’s orders, opened fire.
The Israelis, now convinced it was an enemy ship, unleashed torpedoes, killing 25 Americans.
Massie left all this out of his narrative. He quoted then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who said at the time, “the attack was, quite literally incomprehensible,” implying that a murky conspiracy underlay it all.
But he didn’t include the rest of what Rusk said: That what happened was “an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life.”
In other words, Rusk’s full quote doesn’t suggest intention, but gross carelessness, which is a far cry from premeditated murder. It was chaos, miscommunication, uncertainty, incompetence, fear — the fog of war.
But to Massie and others, there’s no need to establish a coherent motive for why Israel attacked its harmless friends, because in their minds that’s just who Israelis are.
If Massie wants another investigation, fine. But I find it hard to believe that any investigation that doesn’t find Israel guilty of murder in the first will ever satisfy him or the people for whom “Remember the Liberty” is shorthand for “Israel is evil.”
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