Unorthodox

The series is loosely based on Deborah Feldman's 2012 memoir 'Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,' with Feldman herself approaching writers Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski to adapt her autobiography for television.

While the American flashback scenes are based on Feldman's book, the Berlin storyline is entirely fictional, deliberately written to differ significantly from Feldman's real life in Berlin since she is a public figure.

Unorthodox is the first Netflix series to be primarily in Yiddish, with dialogue switching between English, Yiddish, and German.

Although the story is set largely in New York, filming took place almost entirely in Berlin over the summer of 2019, with the crew traveling to the US for only three days to shoot a few exterior scenes.

Interior sets depicting Brooklyn were built at CCC Filmstudios in Berlin and designed to visually match the New York exteriors, while other interiors were shot in a Reinickendorf parsonage and a Palestinian event hall in Moabit.

The fictional music academy in the series was filmed at the Musical Instrument Museum at the Kulturforum and was inspired by the real Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, where Jewish and Muslim musicians play classical music together.

The Wannsee lake location used in the story is historically significant as the site near where the Nazi 'Final Solution' was planned at a shoreline villa.

The two-day wedding scene was a complex shoot involving about a hundred extras who had to authentically portray the nuanced Hasidic cultural celebration.

Showrunner Anna Winger joked that on set the male actors required much more hair and makeup work than the female actors due to the elaborate traditional grooming and headwear.

Costume designer Justine Seymour sourced some clothing directly from Williamsburg, but the expensive fur shtreimel hats were specially made using fake fur by a Hamburg-based theater company instead of real mink.

Actor Jeff Wilbusch, who plays Moishe, was the only one of the four lead actors who is a native Yiddish speaker, having grown up in the Satmar community via Jerusalem's Mea Shearim neighborhood.

Yiddish specialist Eli Rosen was hired early in production to translate the scripts, coach the actors, advise on cultural details, and ultimately also played the role of the rabbi.

The production team took two research trips to the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, touring buildings and meeting members of the real Satmar Jewish community to inform the show's setting.

Unorthodox won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series (Maria Schrader), marking the first ever Primetime Emmy awarded to a German production.

The series received eight Primetime Emmy nominations in total and holds a 96% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 52 reviews, alongside a Metacritic score of 85 indicating universal acclaim.

Netflix released a 20-minute companion documentary called 'Making Unorthodox' that chronicles the creative process and filming, and discusses the differences between the book and the TV adaptation.

The series sparked debate among critics, with some praising it as an authentic empowerment story and others, including historian Michael Wolffsohn and journalist Alan Posener, criticizing it for allegedly reinforcing antisemitic stereotypes.