As her family joined the Orthodox community when she was 12, Alex Fleksher has always been aware of the perceptions of her adopted community. Now, she works to break those perceptions by showcasing real Orthodox Jews on social media.
What started with creating the viral hashtag #MyOrthodoxLife in response to Netflix’s 2021 release of “My Unorthodox Life,” a series centering on Julia Haart who left the Orthodox community, led to working with the Orthodox Union to create Faces of Orthodoxy, a social media initiative featuring the faces and stories of real Orthodox Jews.
“As someone who is very community-minded and who cares very deeply about the Orthodox community, I was concerned about Orthodox people who would be watching (“My Unorthodox Life”),” Fleksher told the Cleveland Jewish News, criticizing the show for its use of tropes and stereotypes to depict the community.
“I had heard about young Orthodox women who were watching the show and binging it, and what you see influences you. And if we are being put down like this and shown as these crazy fundamentalist people, I wanted to almost in a way provide a platform to strengthen ourselves.”
Faces of Orthodoxy launched in March 2021, taking Fleksher’s initiative of asking people to share their photographs and story under the viral hashtag to creating a platform to sustain the idea. Using social media, it has highlighted 64 Orthodox Jews, with a new face each week.
“That was sort of the idea, tell the world who you are as an Orthodox woman and write #MyOrthodoxLife,” said Fleksher, creative director of Faces of Orthodoxy.
A collage of those who have been featured in Faces of Orthodoxy
Divided into “seasons,” the project spends time with six to eight Orthodox Jews in a U.S. community as professional photographers take their pictures and Fleksher interviews each subject to write about their story. So far, the project has been to Cleveland, Los Angeles and Atlanta – where Fleksher grew up and Haart taught her in high school Judaic studies. Next, it plans to launch the South Florida season, with the hope of reaching Chicago next, she said.
“As Orthodox Jews, as a minority group, there seems to be a lot of shows made about us, but very poor, accurate media representation,” Fleksher, a University Heights resident and congregant of Young Israel of Greater Cleveland in Beachwood, said.
Some are working toward better representation, like “Jew in the City” founder Allison Josephs’ efforts to create a Hollywood bureau for Jewish representation, and Netflix’s “Jewish Matchmaking” (2023) with Aleeza Ben Shalom, which Fleksher hails for its representation.
“We’re in the space of social media just being ourselves and telling our stories and whoever wants to hear can hear,” she said. “But it’s just doing our part to represent us accurately, and it’s a big issue – media misrepresentation – and we’re just utilizing social media to try to represent ourselves.”
The target audience for Faces of Orthodoxy goes beyond educating and informing the secular non-religious community and the non-Jewish community about who Orthodox Jews are and what they believe. Recently surpassing 10,000 followers on Instagram, the account also aims to strengthen and inspire its own community and has been received well, Fleksher said.
“Especially when we’re being denigrated in the media, let’s provide role models for each other and remind ourselves of the amazing people and their journeys in our communities,” she said. “I believe we’ve achieved both goals.”
Her next goal is to create a coffee table book to take the photographs and stories beyond social media, but for now, Faces of Orthodox can be found on Facebook, and Instagram and Tiktok @faces.of.orthodoxy.
