manic pixie dream feygele

I've never seen an orthodox character in a movie, or book, or tv show, outside of the very niche genre produced BY us, FOR us.

"But what about Unorthodox--" No. That's about someone who used to be frum. That's a completely separate thing.

Do you have any idea how much that would have meant to as me a kid? To see or read about even ONE character in mainstream media who was like me? To know that someone even knew people like me existed?? And accepted it??? It would have meant the world.

And so, to the authors and screenwriters and character designers and podcasters and animators and EVERYONE working in the entertainment industry, I say:

Give me Chaya's and Perel's and Basya's and Devorah's. Baruch's and Chaim's and Avi's and Tzvi's.

Give me girls wearing long-sleeved shirts and skirts that go past the knees.

Give me boys with yarmulkes and tzitzit.

Give me characters saying "Do you wanna come over for shabbos/yuntif?"

Or, "hang on, I need to go daven shachris."

Or, "Is it Kosher?"

Give me bubbes and shuls and cholent and tehillim.

Give me explicitly orthodox representation.

And if you won't do it for me, then do it for all the others who feel invisible.

We're in the theaters and the bookstores and spread across all the internet, and we see you.

I grew up Orthodox. I went to private religious schools. The people I knew personally almost all had Hebrew names, including me and both of my siblings.

But the characters I wrote didn't, because nobody did in any of the books I read or the TV shows I watched or the movies I saw, and little me wanted to write like a real writer. And that meant English names.

Coming to understand this as an adult was painful. It still is. I don't know if I'll ever be over it.

I also grew up Orthodox, going to all-girls Orthodox schools, in an entirely Orthodox community. Nearly everyone I interacted with on a day-to-day basis was an Orthodox Jew.

But I never, NEVER, wrote Orthodox characters, and I still haven't. I had that same mentality - I wanted to write something real. Writing an orthodox character like myself would have been weird and cringey, and I wanted to write something like the media I was consuming.

I never realized this was something I had to unlearn until this very moment. Even now, when I write Jewish characters, they're almost never orthodox, even though I myself am orthodox. I'll write secular jewish characters occasionally, because they just feel like they fit into the story better.

but that's probably only because I've never SEEN an orthodox character in a story like the ones I write. Of course it doesn't feel right. I have nothing to base it off of.

This is also probably why the book Spinning Silver felt like such a revelation, to the point where I'm still thinking about that story months later. It affected me so much because I had never read anything like that before. This mentality has been affecting me for my whole life, and I didn't even consciously realize it.