“Deborah always jokes that she didn’t escape from a patriarchal culture, she escaped from a matriarchal culture,” Winger says by telephone from Berlin, where most of the series was filmed. “She was dealing with older women who were telling her what to do. That’s a joke. But it’s funny because women are also very strong in that community.”

What global issue is evident here? Is there anything surprising about this? Do our assumptions of patriarchy’s power sometimes elide what’s not so obvious?

Here, the global issue of patriarchal or matriarchal culture is evident. Patriarchal culture is a social organization where father is the authority figure in the family. On the other hand, matriarchal culture is a social organization where mother is the head of the family. This inequality in power can cause trouble as it is likely to put the recessive side under pressure and stress which eventually leads to bigger trouble such as depression or divorce. What I was surprised about was how young people in the community found mothers more stressful. I thought they stress more because of their fathers as men have bigger power in their culture. This can be observed in Ep 2 where Esty is being educated by another woman. The teacher teaches Esty to treat men like a god in their household. But actually, if you took a close look at it, men don’t really ask for things but women request a lot about how to behave, how to be a good wife, etc. In Unorthodox, it is clear that there are more scenes of Esty getting picked and being preached by women than men. Thus it can be said that women are the root cause of this strong orthodox culture where it sometimes violates the human rights of believers as they are the ones who are keeping and delivering this culture to the next and next generation.

It is also important to point that we wouldn’t be able to be aware of this fact if we didn’t watch Unorthodox. Sometimes, what we observe is just the tip of the iceberg. What we actually need to know is hidden much more below.