Just in case you missed her guest stint as a Hasidic Jew on Saving Grace last night — or, like me, you’re just too damn Orthodox to own a television* — there’s still plenty of Mayim Bialik love to go around. On the Jewish Wedding Network yesterday, she talked about her first experience going to a mikveh (and name-drops Aryeh Kaplan!). And she collaborates with Allison Josephs, better known as Jew in the City, to disspell some myths about Orthodox Jewish women:
It’s pretty awesome how Bialik is playing with her ’80s iconoclasm, but isn’t allowing herself to be a prisoner of it. And how she’s playing with her religious identity (dammit, I want to see Mayim in Hasidic drag on TV*) without making it as simple as a non-Orthodox person playing an Orthodox one, or an Orthodox person playing a non-Orthodox one.
* — but not to watch Buffy. OK, we just don’t have room for one. Caught.
Hasidic
Pronounced: khah-SID-ik, Origin: Hebrew, a stream within ultra-Orthodox Judaism that grew out of an 18th-century mystical revival movement.
