36 The Times MagazineHendler, chosen for her by a matchmaker, and
tried to adhere to the Haredi ideal that a woman
should be pregnant every year, which resulted
in her four children, but also six miscarriages.
By her early forties, Monsey had become
intolerable to Haart. She planned suicide by
starvation, then in 2013, aged 42, following
a chance encounter in a restaurant with a
man who offered to invest in her dream
of a fashion design business, she decided
to do a runner and live the rest of her life
in 21st-century New York.
My Unorthodox Life finds Julia Haart (the
name she gave herself on escaping Monsey;
she’d lived as Talia Hendler until that moment)
seven years into life outside Monsey, and
miraculously remade. She and her three eldest
children are resettled in glossiest Manhattan
(Aron splits his time between Manhattan and
Monsey). Haart is unfeasibly rich, remarried
to Silvio Scaglia, the entrepreneur with
whom she founded Elite World Group,
with whom she seems perfectly happy in the
show – although, by the time I meet Haart
over Zoom to discuss her memoir, Brazen, she
and Scaglia are in the throes of divorce.
But you guys seemed so happy, I wail (I
binged My Unorthodox Life when it first came
out, in July 2021). What happened?
“It’s a legal thing,” she says. “I can’t really
talk about it.” She is birdishly delicate, very
pretty, swigging from a Starbucks cup so
huge, it dwarfs her head. “It’s not the firstHer existence in Monsey was proscribed, controlled.
‘I spent the first 42 years of my life in utter misery’
he opening scene of Netflix’s
surprise hit reality show My
Unorthodox Life shows Julia
Haart – its linchpin, its lead,
50-year-old mother of four, CEO
of a multimillion-dollar fashion
enterprise, Elite World Group- interrogating her oldest
daughter, Batsheva, 29, and
Batsheva’s husband, Binyamin,
on their sex life, with particular reference
to how much pleasure is being had and by
whom. And could there be more? It is, at first
glance, predictable reality TV fare. Everyone is
gorgeous, expensively dressed with great hair,
the conversation – conducted in the plush
boardroom of Haart’s New York office - is outrageous, hilarious, salacious, exposing.
You could be forgiven for thinking you’d
stumbled on a new offshoot of the Real
Housewives franchise, starring the Jewish
answer to Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner.
But you’d be wrong.
Julia Haart is in no sense your standard-
issue reality TV star. She was born in 1971
in Soviet Russia to parents of Jewish descent,
who defected to the US before Haart was
four, and began to investigate their religious
heritage. They decided to embrace it wholly.
From the ages of 11 to 42, Haart lived in the
ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jewish community
of Monsey, 30 miles north of Manhattan.
Batsheva was born there, along with Haart’s
other children (her elder son, Shlomo, now
26, her youngest daughter, Miriam, 22, and
youngest son, Aron, 16). Haart’s life in Monsey
was proscribed, controlled and punitive to the
point of causing her great distress. She felt
“itchy within my own skin”, convinced by her
community that “[my] innate desires, innate
nature, the things that make me unique
and extraordinary, are bad... Who I am,
intrinsically, is what God hates.”
Haart was told, as all the girls and women
in Monsey had always been told, that her
brain could not compare to that of a man’s,
that education was wasted on her because
“my mind wasn’t capable”; that she must dress
in a way that covered her entirely, did not
draw attention to her body in case men grow
sexually excited by it, that even the walls of
her home could not see her naked; that her
hair must be covered by a sheital, a traditional
wig, at all times, even when in bed with
her husband; that she was considered impure
for seven days after the first day of her period,
after which she must prove to the rabbi she
was no longer menstruating by showing him
her unbloodied underwear.
Haart – by nature “not quiet, not demure,
not good at staying in the background”,
affectionate, curious, clever, an excellent
dancer – spent decades trying to comply with
Monsey’s demands. At 19, she married Yosef
T
IMAGES COURTESY OF JULIA HAART
Haart with, back row, her mother
and father on her wedding day in- Below, from top: her wedding
day make-up; her graduation day,
having forbidden mascara removed