The Not-So-Mysterious Logic of the Shiddukh System

Thanks to Netflix, the mysterious world of Ḥaredim, or at least a certain framing of it, has been screened into millions of Jewish and non-Jewish homes via the series Shtisel and Unorthodox. These two shows are linked by their shared focus on what many consider the most intriguing and perplexing aspects of ḥaredi life—namely love and marriage—and are also neatly emblematic of two dominant forms of media discourse about Ḥaredim. The first, exemplified by Shtisel, generates sympathy for Ḥaredim by domesticating them: showing that beneath the weird clothes and even weirder customs, they struggle with the same human challenges and dilemmas faced by the viewer. The second, by contrast, emphasizes the otherness of Ḥaredim in order to caricature them, arousing the righteous indignation of the audience.

This repetitive dichotomy—one side obfuscating the very real distinctions between Ḥaredim and everyone else, and another side distorting these distinctions by removing their human context, might make for some entertaining TV—but it doesn’t help those who want to genuinely understand the dynamics of the ḥaredi community.

The dance between the two approaches had another iteration recently, with a debate in the pages of the Forward between the Reform rabbi Robyn Frisch, who insisted that her ḥaredi son’s marriage was not “arranged” and likened the process instead to a more thoughtful version of a dating app, and the British activist Yehudis Fletcher, who countered that many ḥaredi, and particularly ḥasidic, marriages are not merely arranged but actually “forced.” While both sides of the debate can score points by highlighting the untruths and misrepresentations inherent in the other, it illuminates little about what is really going on inside the typical ḥaredi home.