From Rebel Teenager to “Off the Derech” Filmmaker

Did I ever think that I’d be making a film about leaving the Orthodox Jewish community? Putting my most personal memories—my home videos, excerpts from my diary—on the big screen?

Definitely not.

I began the film when I was a sophomore in college. If you’d met me then, you wouldn’t have known that I’d grown up in the Orthodox Jewish community. I had dreadlocks, wore sleeveless shirts in the summer, ate bacon, and didn’t observe a single Jewish holiday. You wouldn’t have known that you were looking at a girl who once placed nationally in the Chidon ha-Tanach, who could read a daf of gemara like a champ, and who, despite not having picked up a Hebrew book in years, could hold her own in any Torah debate.

But anyone who knew me as a teenager knew my story. There were words for people like me. Words like “questioning,” and then “troubled” and “at-risk,” and, finally, “off the derech.” And if you’re off the derech as a teenager in a Jewish community in suburban New Jersey, it’s not a private thing.

Everyone in the community knew that I switched, in the middle of eleventh grade, from my all-girls yeshiva high school to (gasp!) public school. What they didn’t know was how my initial doubts—doubts that there was a God, doubts that God wrote the Torah, doubts that the Torah should be taken literally—set off a tsunami inside of me, the full force of which only became evident much later, when the logical progression of these doubts shattered the foundation of my very existence. At age 16, my entire identity—from my name to the way I dressed, from the food I ate to the way I spoke—suddenly felt like it was based on a massive lie.

There was only one group of people who really understood what I was going through: other “at-risk” teenagers from the Orthodox community. We came from Teaneck, Flatbush, Stamford, Far Rockaway, Manhattan, Woodmere, Cherry Hill, and yet somehow we all found each other. We ate non-kosher, smoked cigarettes, got high, had sex, and with our eyebrow piercings and bleached hair, we looked like any other punk teenagers our age. Except that unlike them, we would leave our houses late Friday afternoons, and spend our weekends sleeping on park benches or subway cars. We were no strangers to police detectives, psychologists, rabbis, drug tests, or community gossip. In lieu of acceptance from our own parents and the community, we became a family, united by our rejection of Orthodoxy.

Some of us graduated from high school; others didn’t. But afterwards, the question came up: would we be going to Israel? Almost everyone from the community, rebellious or not, spent a year studying in a yeshiva there after high school. Most schools were geared towards mainstream kids, but there were special yeshivot targeted to “troubled” adolescents like us. Our parents, usually at their wits’ end, would readily finance flight, tuition, and living expenses for the year.

Anna Wexler, Director of “Unorthodox”

I never seriously considered spending the year in Israel. I was too angry: at the religion, at my parents, and at the community. All I could think about was my eighteenth birthday, which loomed magically ahead, the year when I could finally get my own bank account and credit card, without needing a co-signature from my parents. I planned to use the money I’d saved up to run away as far as possible from everything.

Which is exactly what I did. The week I turned 18, I purchased a one-way ticket to Katmandu and spent a year backpacking around Asia. Aside from once hearing the Chabad truck blasting “Mashiach, Maschiach, Mashiach!” while walking down a Bangkok street, for the entire year I had not a single reminder of my roots.

My friends, meanwhile, had spent the year immersed in their roots, and when we reunited in America, I was in for a shock: almost all of them had become religious. Suddenly my guy friends were wearing black hats, learning in yeshiva, eating kosher and keeping Shabbat. Some stopped speaking to me altogether, as they didn’t want to be “distracted” by women. Others were now shomer negiah, and would no longer greet me with a hug. Many of my female friends now wore long sleeves and skirts, and wouldn’t come out with me on Friday nights.

I tried to be happy for my friends. I told myself that I loved them and cared about them, and if they were happy, I should be happy for them. But deep down, I couldn’t shake a feeling of the betrayal: we’d been a family, and now the bonds that had held us together were broken.

What had happened to my friends was—and still is—such a commonplace phenomenon that there’s even a name for it: flipping out. I’d watched rebellious kids a few years older than me come back from Israel wearing black hats, but for whatever reason, I never thought it would happen to my friends.

As I started college, I couldn’t quite move past what had happened to my friends. I wanted to investigate the phenomenon of flipping out and write about it: what exactly happens over this year in Israel? Why do so many people go back to the faith, year after year?

But a chance meeting with a film producer caused me to rethink the proper medium for the story. The essence of documentary film, he said, was to capture change on camera. So I got my best friend from college, Nadja, on board and despite having no experience with filmmaking, we set out to follow three teenagers as they spent their year studying in seminary in Israel.

Still images from the film “UNORTHODOX”

Throughout the project, people told me that my story was part of the film. I stubbornly insisted otherwise: this was a movie about the year in Israel, not a movie about me. It was only years later, in the editing room, that I understood how much richer the teenagers’ stories would be if you watched their journeys through my eyes.

And so I decided to put myself in the film: to include the darkest moments of my adolescence, the wild highs of my rebellion, and my very personal struggles with religious belief. I opened up my own life in the same way that the three subjects had agreed to open up theirs.

This film contains different narrative threads: there are stories about leaving, stories about leaving and coming back, and stories of never leaving at all. In some ways, my story is different from those of other Unpious readers: I grew up in the Modern Orthodox community and so the scars of my painful departure from Orthodox Judaism are not visible on the outside. But on the inside—where it counts—I believe we suffered the same trauma, of experiencing the whole universe as a rug that has been suddenly been pulled from beneath you.

Finally, I have an appeal to make: I need your help in getting this film out there. Nadja and I have been working on UNORTHODOX for seven years now. The footage is shot, the story is laid out, and over the summer, I put together a first draft of the film. At this point, we need to raise the money to work with a professional editor to complete the movie. We are now appealing to the public, to people who are interested in the film and to those for whom our stories resonate. Our trailer is now up on Kickstarter.com. Please take a look, pledge if you can, spread the word, and please help us finish the film that contains your story as much as it contains mine.

Tags: Anna Wexler, documentary films, featured, off the derech, teenagers at risk