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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.
The post A new documentary challenges stereotypes about Orthodox Jewish women — and their wigs appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Student Leader Targeted in Two Antisemitic Incidents in Berlin
Graffiti reading “Kill all Jews” was discovered on a residential building in Berlin-Pankow on April 26, 2026, part of a wave of antisemitic vandalism reported across the German capital over the past week, including swastikas and other hate-filled slogans scrawled on multiple sites. Photo: Screenshot
Amid a relentless wave of hostility toward Jews across Germany, the president of the Union of Jewish Students revealed he was targeted in two antisemitic incidents in Berlin within a single week, intensifying alarm within an increasingly embattled community.
In an interview with the German Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine, Ron Dekel described a string of confrontations that began last Thursday after he left a discussion on antisemitism at the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, marking the start of a troubling sequence of incidents.
While walking near Berlin’s government district, he and another union member were allegedly followed by a car blasting loud music. Inside the vehicle, the driver and two female passengers reportedly shouted “Free Palestine” and “To hell with Israel,” while also making obscene gestures.
After Dekel shared a video he recorded of the incident online, it quickly drew hundreds of thousands of views before being taken down, with him also facing a barrage of insults and threats demanding its removal.
At the time, Dekel said one of his friends filed a police complaint in connection with the incident, but authorities have yet to identify any suspects.
A few days later, Dekel recounted encountering the same group of people again outside a synagogue following an event at a Jewish community center, where they approached him and demanded he delete the video.
According to his testimony, the group remained in a car outside the synagogue, while one of the women sat at a nearby café appearing to monitor those entering and leaving the building.
Dekel said the woman even attempted to enter the synagogue, trying to persuade security guards to let her inside before a rabbi intervened and asked her to leave.
“I still do not know how she knew where I was,” Dekel told Jüdische Allgemeine. “It makes me uncomfortable.”
Even after reporting the second incident to police, Dekel said he no longer feels safe, describing what he sees as a broader pattern of harassment since he began openly wearing a kippah earlier this year.
Despite the intimidation, Dekel said he would continue visibly wearing Jewish symbols, underscoring the growing sense of unease surrounding Jewish life in Germany.
“It has religious meaning for me,” he said. “But it also hurts my sense of justice that Jews in Germany in 2026 are being advised not to appear visibly Jewish. I do not want to hide, and more young Jews today feel the same way.”
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, Germany has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to recently released figures, the number of antisemitic offenses in Berlin reached a record high in 2025, totaling 2,267 incidents, including violence, incitement, property damage, and propaganda offenses.
By comparison, officially recorded antisemitic crimes were significantly lower at 1,825 in 2024, 900 in 2023, and fewer than 500 in 2022, prior to the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Officials warn that the real number of antisemitic crimes is likely much higher, as many incidents go unreported.
In one of the latest antisemitic incidents in the country, a synagogue in Cottbus, a city in eastern Germany, was defaced on Monday with a swastika painted on its facade, marking the second time in just four days that the Jewish house of worship had been vandalized.
Separately, authorities also discovered antisemitic graffiti on Sunday across several apartment buildings in Berlin-Pankow, including messages reading “Kill all Jews,” a swastika, and the statement “Only a dead Jew is a good Jew,” in a series of disturbing incidents over the week.
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Duke University Lifts Suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine Despite Acknowledging Group’s Antisemitic Post
April 22, 2026: The entrance to Duke University campus, located in Durham, North Carolina. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect.
Duke University’s Office for Institutional Equity (OIE) has reversed an earlier decision to suspend Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for sharing an antisemitic political cartoon on Instagram, arguing that the action fell short of violating the school’s code of conduct despite acknowledging that it “alludes to antisemitic tropes.”
The puzzling move was first reported on Monday by The Duke Chronicle, the official campus newspaper. In correspondence between the office and SJP shared by the outlet, OIE official Sharon Gooding told the group that “the post, while offensive, in that it alludes to antisemitic tropes, does not violate the Policy on Prohibited Discrimination, Harassment, and Related Misconduct because there was insufficient evidence to support the existence of a hostile educational environment.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the illustration depicts a pig labeled “Zionism” hoisting a Star of David as its arm interlocks with another pig, labeled “US Imperialism,” hoisting the Torch of Liberty. It is the work of political cartoonist Emory Douglas, a Black Panther party official who harbored hostility toward the US and Israel.
Word of the social media post spread across the Duke Jewish community, the Chronicle said, prompting no fewer than 10 Jewish students to file formal complaints with the university on the grounds that its evocation of anti-Jewish hatred is obvious. Historically, depicting Jews as pigs has been done to reduce them to the status of animals and mock the fact that dietary restrictions forbid Jews to eat pork. The Nazis notoriously did so, but the practice reaches back further back into time, when medieval Germans proliferated the Judensau drawings which portrayed Jews drinking pig’s milk and excrement.
However, despite the context of the image, as well as SJP’s history of harassing and intimidating Jews on campuses across the US, Duke University has told the group it is closing its investigation into the matter and returning the organization to “full status.” The decision unfreezes thousands of dollars in funding and allows SJP to operate unfettered for the remainder of the academic year.
Speaking to the Chronicle, SJP argued that the group is a victim of censorship and expressed doubt that the university even has the authority to sanction it for breaking the rules.
“It took over a month of written correspondence, legal counsel, and public advocacy for our organization to access the basic procedural rights Duke’s own policies guarantee to every student organization,” the group said. “The fact that we had to fight at all is the problem.”
Meanwhile, Jewish advocacy groups and students told The Algemeiner on Tuesday that Duke University has missed an opportunity to send a clear anti-hate message.
“Since ancient times, Jews have been compared in derogatory terms to barnyard and wild animals,” the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law said in a statement. “Such disturbing discourse has long been markers for antisemitism and there should be no tolerance for it at Duke. It is essential that university administrators, faculty, and students on campus understand the types of tropes that characterize antisemitic discourse.”
Said Shira Shasha, a third year Duke University student and co-president of the school’s Students Supporting Israel (SSI) chapter, “They [SJP] used imagery rooted in Nazi-dehumanization. Regardless of the purpose behind it, it causes real harm and unequivocal hostility to Jewish students on this campus. And that harm does not disappear because an intent was disclaimed.”
Carly Gammill of StandWithUs Saidoff Law, a legal nonprofit based in California, told The Algemeiner, “Universities must be clear-eyed about contemporary attacks against Jewish peoplehood, which merely repackage historic forms of antisemitism, and how this misinformation fuels anti-Jewish bigotry.”
While Duke University has not seen the most extreme examples of campus antisemitism that became a near daily occurrence in higher education after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, it has been accused of selectively practicing its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion before. In May 2021, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict of that year, the Duke Student Government (DSG) refused to grant recognition to Students Supporting Israel, a status which qualifies student clubs for funding and reserving space in which to hold events.
DSG had originally voted to confer recognition to SSI, however, but then-DSG president Christina Wang vetoed the decision after an SSI member responded publicly to criticism that its presence on campus represented “settler-colonialism.” No hateful statements were uttered by SSI, but Wang cited the exchange as cause for preventing the establishment of a pro-Israel club on campus. Throughout the conflict, the university refused to intervene even as Jewish advocacy groups maintained that Wang had confected a false pretext to justify discriminating against a Jewish group.
Five years later, Duke Jewish students are seeing that same double standard again, SSI National president Ilan Sinelnikov told The Algemeiner.
“It just shows the reality we’re in,” he explained. “They’re just going to get a little tap on wrist.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iran Has Executed At Least 21 People, Arrested Over 4,000 Since Start of War With US and Israel, UN Reports
A February 2023 protest in Washington, DC calling for an end to executions and human rights violations in Iran. Photo: Reuters/ Bryan Olin Dozier
The Islamic regime in Iran has intensified efforts to oppress the civilian population through arrests and executions since the beginning of the conflict with the US and Israel, according to the United Nations.
On Wednesday, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) revealed that Iran had executed at least 21 people and arrested more than 4,000 over the last two months, following the launch of joint US-Israeli strikes on Feb. 28.
Allegations which resulted in death sentences included espionage (two), opposition group membership (10), and involvement with protests (nine).
“In times of war, threats to human rights increase exponentially,” said Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Türk called for regime officials to “halt all further executions, establish a moratorium on the use of capital punishment, fully ensure due process and fair trial guarantees, and immediately release those arbitrarily detained.”
Iranian courts have reportedly fast-tracked convictions and sentencing in recent months, citing the war as justification.
According to the OHCHR, those detained face brutal conditions, overcrowding, and even torture to coerce confessions. The bodies of some detainees who have died in custody appear to show possible torture. Those detained also experience weaponized medical neglect, a human rights violation which has reportedly led to the deteriorating health of imprisoned Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi.
In addition to forced confessions, Iranian judges can also resort to the principle of elm‑e‑qazi, a concept in Iran’s Islamic Penal Code which allows a guilty sentence based solely on circumstantial evidence.
Last week, Maryam Rajavi, president‑elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), spoke about the regime’s executions at the European Parliament in Brussels.
“The mullahs are exploiting wartime conditions to resort to relentless executions to block the path of popular uprisings. Today, political prisoners face the threat of mass killing,” Rajavi said. “The silence of European Union leaders and member states is unjustifiable. And today, I wish to once again raise my voice in protest against this silence in the face of these executions.”
Rajavi added that “a number of young people have been arrested in recent weeks on charges of alleged contact with or support for the Mojahedin Organization,” referring to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), an Iranian opposition group.
“The names of a group of them have been submitted to and communicated to international bodies,” she said. “By order of the regime’s judiciary chief, pressure and torture on political prisoners have intensified, and their sham trials and the issuance of criminal sentences have been expedited.”
Stating that 11 political prisoners alleged to be members of the MEK face execution, Rajavi implored that “urgent action must be taken to save their lives. Our position is that a halt to executions in Iran, as a demand of the entire Iranian people, must be included in any international agreement.”
Last month, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), an independent group monitoring, released a report documenting that from March 2025 to March 2026, police had arrested 78,907 people on ideological or political grounds.
Executions in the last Iranian year (covering much of calendar year 2025) reached at least 2,488, according to HRANA, with 63 of them women and two children. Drug offenses accounted for 955 executions, approximately three killings per day on average.
The Islamic regime chose to conduct 13 of the executions in public.
Earlier this month, the European groups Iran Human Rights (IHR) in Norway and Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) in France released a separate joint report finding that Iran executed at least 1,639 people in 2025, a 68 percent leap from the 975 killed in 2024 and the highest seen since tracking began in 2008. All known executions were reportedly conducted by hanging.
Differences in methodology partially explain the discrepancy in tallies. IHR warned in its report that the full body count is likely much higher, as the group requires two sources to confirm an execution.
Iran’s penal code offers a variety of options for killing a human being, including hanging, firing squads, and even crucifixion or stoning. Hanging was the only method used from 2008 until the firing squad execution of Kurdish political prisoner Hedayat Abdullahpour on May 11, 2020.
In executions for murder under a sentence known as qisas, the Islamic regime encourages the family members of the victim to carry out the killing themselves. IHR has received reports of family members taking advantage of what is regarded as a “right” to do so.
In cases of public executions, prison officials use cranes. This brutal method leaves the condemned suffocating and strangling, lifted above the crowds for as much as 20 minutes before their suffering can conclude.
Photographs have documented children in attendance at public executions in Iran to watch the violence and cruelty. A 2006 study found that 52 percent of 200 children who witnessed public executions in Iran later showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with “88 suffering re-experiences, 24 avoidance and 62 hyperarousal.”
IHR has not found any executions by stoning since 2010, following the international outcry of the sentencing of Sakineh Ashtiani whose sentence was commuted, allowing her 2014 release.
Given the historical impact of the global community’s condemnations, Iranian officials have sought to hide human rights abuses from the world, imposing an internet blackout for 61 days since the war with the US and Israel began.
“This is denying people across the country access to vital information, silencing independent voices, and inflicting enormous social and economic harm,” Türk said. “It is exacerbating an already precarious humanitarian and economic situation and must be lifted immediately.”
Concluding her address to the European congress in Brussels, Rajavi called on the gathered representatives to implement a new policy toward Iran.
Rajavi advocated an approach that “provides the necessary technical means to ensure the Iranian people’s access to a free internet. Conditions relations with the clerical regime on an end to the execution of political prisoners and the killing of protesters. Brings the regime’s leaders to justice for crimes against humanity and genocide.”