Esther Petrack, ANTM, and Top Model Agencies

JERUSALEM — I was try­ing to think of some­thing to write for Yom Kip­pur — the Jew­ish Day of Atone­ment, which begins this Fri­day at sun­down — and a few other news sources found some­thing for me that may also inter­est top model agen­cies.

Eighteen-year-old Esther Petrack is a con­tes­tant on the Amer­i­can real­ity show “America’s Next Top Model.” She is from Boston — where, inci­den­tally, I lived for nine years to study at Boston Uni­ver­sity and then work as a jour­nal­ist — and she is a mod­ern Ortho­dox Jew. Petrack even went to the Mai­monides School, and she was born here in Jerusalem.

Here is a clip from her intro­duc­tion dur­ing the first episode of the new sea­son (cau­tion for those who may not want to see, Petrack appears in only a bra and under­wear at the end):

Why am I writ­ing about her on the day before Yom Kippur?.

After Petrack tells Tyra Banks about what (mod­ern) Ortho­dox Jews can and can­not do on the Sab­bath — from sun­down Fri­day to sun­down Sat­ur­day — Banks replies that con­tes­tants on the show must work seven days a week. After just a moment’s pause, Petrack says that work­ing dur­ing the time will not be a prob­lem. (For the record, I have yet to under­stand why mod­els can­not forgo work one day a week.)

I once worked for a for­mer tele­vi­sion pro­ducer who told me that women had offered to sleep with him in exchange for a chance to appear on his pro­gram. Petrack is com­ing close to that offer. Women are gen­er­ally more con­cerned about pub­lic image than men — hence the com­pet­i­tive desire of girls, often as a result of their inse­cure natures, to be “famous” and have more “dat­ing market-value” than other women. After all, why else do women tend to be more obsessed about Hol­ly­wood celebri­ties and gos­sip than men? Girls want to be princesses. Men could care less — just give us a beer, a good girl, and the game on television.

And, unfor­tu­nately, Petrack decided in the clip to forgo thou­sands of years of tra­di­tion and her own stated beliefs in order to have a chance at star­dom. Still, in her defense, she is young and likely naive. Peo­ple in the West tend to mature much later than peo­ple in, say, Israel — where nearly all eighteen-year-old peo­ple are in the mil­i­tary after high school.

But my issue does not stem only from her dis­re­gard­ing of the beliefs that she her­self said that she has. In the short clip, she agrees to vio­late the Sab­bath and dresses in a way that is not mod­est in the least — both of which are vio­la­tions of (Ortho­dox) Judaism. (For exam­ple, Ortho­dox women must wear skirts that reach below the knees, not pants, and they must cover their upper bod­ies up to the neck­line and down to the elbows.) My gen­eral con­cerns stem from some­thing else.

Dvora Mey­ers writes in Tablet mag­a­zine:

It was wel­come that Esther was open about her need to fig­ure out her obser­vance through trial and error.

And per­son­ally, I think it’s a good thing to have a Mod­ern Ortho­dox woman on a real­ity show such as ANTM, not only to see her strug­gle with her own per­sonal bound­ary between reli­gious and sec­u­lar but to give The CW’s young view­ers a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on obser­vant Jews (though we are unlikely to see her doing any prac­tic­ing on the show).

I have no issue with any­one search­ing for some­thing to believe — as long as it is for the right rea­sons. (Those who know me per­son­ally will under­stand.) A per­son who pon­ders the the­o­log­i­cal, philo­soph­i­cal, and polit­i­cal issues that have per­plexed human­ity for thou­sands of years will hope­fully reach his own con­clu­sions. But Petrack, as we can see in her com­ments in the video, seems not to have done that — she is mak­ing her deci­sions based on what will allow or pre­vent her from becom­ing a model.

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