New York: Crown, 2022
405 pp., $13.99, Kindle

Freedom has been the single driving force of my life. —Julia Haart (398)

Imagine being unable to touch your spouse for twelve days every month because of an ancient superstition.1 Imagine spending an entire day every week not using electricity, traveling, or working in any way. Imagine never watching TV, and rarely, if ever, watching movies. Imagine having to cover your hair, collarbones, knees, ankles, and elbows, regardless of the weather. Imagine being permitted only to shop at certain stores, eat at certain restaurants, dance in certain ways, and read certain books.

This is the reality for women living in ultraorthodox Jewish communities such as Monsey, New York, where Julia Haart grew up (men are subject to similar restraints). Her parents brought her into that community as a young child after fleeing Soviet Russia, and in Brazen: From Long Sleeves to Lingerie, she tells in vivid detail the incredible story of her personal journey to freedom. It’s a story of personal achievement, in which she developed her love of clothes and shoes into a career as a fashion designer, overcoming the irrational restrictions of the religion in which she was raised. So how did she go from being covered head to toe to designing lingerie?

After Haart and her parents moved to the United States, distant relatives encouraged them to descend deeper and deeper into orthodox Judaism. Eventually, they moved to Monsey, an ultraorthodox community, where she went to an all-girls school that focused heavily on religious studies, prohibited the girls from playing sports, and strictly limited their activities in other fields, such as dancing. As she grew up, she learned that the most socially acceptable career for a man was as a rabbi and the only permitted jobs for women were as teachers or secretaries—and only in religious institutions.

Haart, like other women in such communities, was expected to want to have many babies (she would be considered biologically defective if she had fewer than six) and to support her husband’s prolonged studies of Jewish texts. Outside the home, she and the other women and girls were nearly always separated from the men; buses in Monsey even feature heavy curtains to separate men and women. Women are expected to dress modestly, in muted colors. The reason? Merely seeing a woman, even one covered from head to toe, could cause a man to become distracted from his Torah studies.

Haart was reprimanded frequently, from the time she was a preteen well into adulthood, for wanting to wear bright colors and high heels. And her questions challenging theology were brushed away, unanswered. After marrying a man chosen by a matchmaker and her parents, she had four children with him. Her life consisted only of a “woman’s” work; in addition to raising the children, doing all the cooking and cleaning (including following all the strict rules for the Sabbath), she at times worked two teaching jobs. She often asked why God would want her to lead a life that made her so unhappy. Her parents and teachers castigated her for even asking such a question. In heartbreaking detail, Haart illustrates how such shackling circumstances led her into deep depression.

But slowly, she began to break free. The changes were minor at first: She began reading philosophy and secular literature, watching old movies, and she allowed her oldest daughter to choose her husband. She began spending nights away from her home in Monsey so she could design shoes for her luxury shoe line, which she gave her chosen name: Julia Haart.

In Brazen, she makes clear how the ultraorthodox education she had received left her woefully unprepared to deal with the outside world. For example, her Jewish teachers had taught her only about historic genocides involving Jewish people, such as the Holocaust, and had taught her that such atrocities were God’s punishment for Jews mixing with non-Jews (188). It was only when she met an Armenian model who told her about the Armenian genocide that she learned otherwise: “I was so shocked that I could barely breathe. . . . I devoured the book Alin had suggested, and a giant crack in my connection to religious Judaism was created” (266). She had to learn about countless important things, from business to date rape drugs to how to stand up for herself.

She took her first steps outside the confines of Judaism slowly, cautiously, testing the waters as she began to wear pants instead of long skirts, to travel on the Sabbath, to go out in public without a wig or kerchief, and to eat unkosher food. Her process of experiencing all these firsts was that of a woman learning to love life and to live it to the fullest.

But the fear and guilt of her ultraorthodox upbringing had imposed mental and emotional shackles that took time to throw off, a process that readers from illiberal backgrounds might relate to. “It took me years to give myself permission to wear what I wanted to wear as opposed to what I was brainwashed to believe God wanted me to wear,” she explains (312). She also wanted to preserve her relationships with her children, which was difficult when they lived in a community that pitied them for having a mother who had strayed from “the right path.”

Haart’s writing is engaging as she details the process of challenging her most deeply held beliefs while traveling to fashion shows, meeting with manufacturers and buyers for her shoes, and making non-Jewish friends. Her journey was fraught with pitfalls and emotional roller coasters—but she persevered. Her drive to succeed is an inspiration for anyone with ambitious goals. “It didn’t occur to me that I would fail,” she recalls, determined to design “the most stunning shoes that anyone had ever seen” (385). And despite numerous setbacks in the form of embezzlement, low-quality manufacturing, betrayal, heartbreak, threats, and deception, she began designing shoes for an established lingerie company called La Perla, which at the time sold clothing in 127 locations worldwide—her first major success.

While breaking the isolation and immaturity that religion had imposed on her—experiencing true romance, traveling, tasting gourmet food—Haart began to realize how much of the world she had been kept from, and how cruel her upbringing was. This angered her, but she put her struggles, and those of others like her, down to well-meaning religious ideas developed in ancient times and not changed since. Unfortunately, as is clear in passages such as this, she doesn’t seem to see the fundamental problem with religion:

Like other religions all over the world, Judaism is about love and caring for one another and living for a purpose higher than your own self-interest. I think all religions are beautiful and have these moralistic concepts at their core. It is only when they are perverted by extremists who see any change to archaic laws as a direct defiance to God that something meant to improve the world and humankind becomes an intolerable prison. (vii)

Haart’s experience itself reveals the problem with this position. If God exists and wants men to spend all of their time studying the Torah, then friendships with women, watching TV, and working out are intolerable distractions. If God expects and wants his people to “be fruitful and multiply,” then, of course, women should have as many children as possible. These aren’t positions of crazy extremists that can be refuted by arguing that they’re archaic and make life miserable—they are positions of those who take their sacred texts seriously. To live a beautiful, full life, as Haart discovered, one has to explore and learn and decide things for oneself. And an honest exploration of the idea of a god reveals that there is no reasonable basis for believing in the existence of such a being. Haart, at least thus far, does not seem to have challenged that fundamental premise of her upbringing (though in fairness, she has challenged a great many others).

Despite this, Haart is now committed to personal success and happiness, determined to ensure that her children have more choices open to them than she had, and eager to soak up information about the world around her. She has created vast value with Brazen (and the related Netflix series that follows her in her fashion business today). The tell-all book details not only the deep misery that necessarily follows from attempting to live in accordance with religious scripture, but also the personal changes in mind-set needed to escape from that tradition.

Brazen is an inspiring story of a determined woman who fought against oppression and used her newfound freedom to build a life she absolutely loves, including a career in an industry that inspires her. Haart not only saved herself; she also went on to create opportunities for others to do the same. She set and continues to set an example with her bold independence; her previous role as CEO of a modeling company, which prioritizes the health, comfort, and careers of the models it works with, creating lasting, win-win relationships; and her clothing and shoes, which help women be comfortable and feel sexy. As she puts it: “The whole concept of women suffering for beauty was old, archaic, and abominable” (312).

Freedom is often taken for granted in the United States, but insular communities and strict religious groups such as Monsey make it nearly impossible for people living under them to exercise their individual rights. In Haart’s words, to lead flourishing lives, we must understand the importance of personal freedom, the freedom of “being yourself—not having to hide your curves, your personality, your opinions.” (397). Her book is a gripping testament to the essential value of personal freedom for an individual’s happiness. Her joy at wearing and later designing clothes she loved, traveling to get inspiration for her shoes, meeting people with whom she could discuss philosophy and literature, and becoming an independent-minded, life-loving woman, is a welcome reminder of how rich and beautiful the world is—and why everyone should be free to enjoy it.

Brazen, the story of how @JuliaHaart became an independent-minded, life-loving woman, is a welcome reminder of how rich and beautiful the world is—and why everyone should be free to enjoy it.
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1. Certain Jewish communities consider women on their menstrual cycle unclean; thus, they are not to touch their husbands for its duration, so as not to sully him. Some rabbis suggested women also refrain from touching their husbands for an additional seven days after the end of her cycle, to ensure purity. The practice has mostly, but not entirely, been abandoned in modern times; see Beth Wenger, “Mikveh,” Jewish Women’s Archive, June 23, 2021, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/mikveh#:~:text=The%20book%20of%20Leviticus%20declared,seven%20%E2%80%9Cclean%E2%80%9D%20days%20afterward.

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