YouTube Orthodoxy

Allison Josephs: Trying to “re-brand” Orthodox Judaism.

by Sharon Udasin

Allison Josephs sits in her bathroom in a green facial mask, relaxing in dark blue towel-turban and peeling cucumber slices off her eyes.

“Dear Jew in the City,” she recites. “My friend just told me that Orthodox people consider women dirty when it’s their time of the month. And that’s just so horrible — I mean, it’s a natural bodily occurrence. How could they make it into something so negative?”

Josephs, 30, is single-handedly trying to “re-brand” Orthodox Judaism, and in doing so has just finished broadcasting her first season of “Jew in the City,” a Web series (JewintheCity.com) that attempts to dispel negative myths often associated with religious Jewry and give it a hipper, more modern cast.

Many of these myths Josephs herself firmly believed as an adolescent, before she made the gradual switch from Conservative Judaism to Modern Orthodoxy during high school and her college years at Columbia. Among other questions, her series of two-minute Webisodes explores whether or not Jewish women are considered dirty during menstruation, whether woman in Orthodox Judaism are treated as inferior and the idea that Orthodox couples are never sexually intimate. The infamous “hole in the sheet” is one of her favorite topics.

“I’ve gotten asked that question by so many people,” said Josephs, who wears a trendily highlighted sheitel, chandelier earrings and a perfect manicure in most of the videos. “I wanted to handle the question in a modest way, but not dealing with the question doesn’t help either.”

In that particular episode, Josephs makes clear that Orthodox Jews are certainly not sexually “oppressed” and explains that “knowing someone in the biblical sense” is actually one of the holiest mitzvahs in Judaism. She surmises that the “hole” myth probably arose from a pair of tzitzit hanging on a clothesline, because tzitzit resemble a sheet with, well, a hole in the middle for the head.   Continue reading…

I will now be blogging for Jewlicious.com, in addition to writing posts for my own Web site. I’ll cross-post everything I blog for them here on my site as well.

There’s me on their “Who the hell are you guys?” page:

Sharon
Sharon Udasin is a lovably neurotic 25-year-old journalist, who is currently working as a staff writer at The Jewish Week in New York. After being ridiculously afraid to set foot in Israel for over 22 years, Sharon finally went on a Birthright trip in June 2007 and found such a deep connection to the country that she’s been back five times since. Sharon graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 and then received her M.S. in journalism from Columbia the following year. She has seen Les Misérables seven times and could probably host a one-woman performance of the show if it wasn’t for her horrible singing voice and inability to dance. Some of her other guilty pleasures include the Harry Potter series, the television show Gossip Girl and an inordinate addiction to Tasti D-Lite. See all of her work here, follow her on Twitter or write to her at sharon@sharonudasin.com.