Shtisel is an Israeli soap opera incongruously set among the Haredim (strictly religious ultra-Orthodox Jews).
I've sat next to enough Haredim on long El Al flights and observed their insular and cloistered lifestyle over the decades to know that, unlike Kiva and his family, they don't act out of lust; they don't watch The Bold and the Beautiful on TV (or watch any TV, for that matter); they consider portrait painting idolatry, not art; and they don't hang out together in cafes shooting the breeze.
The secular Israelis who wrote and produced Shtisel do all of these things, of course, but they are as distant from the Haredim as Earth is to Tatooine. The behavior of the Haredim in Shtisel is as foreign and as absurd as them staging a production of Shakespeare in Elizabethan English. Simply put, the Haredim don't act this way.
I've sat next to enough Haredim on long El Al flights and observed their insular and cloistered lifestyle over the decades to know that, unlike Kiva and his family, they don't act out of lust; they don't watch The Bold and the Beautiful on TV (or watch any TV, for that matter); they consider portrait painting idolatry, not art; and they don't hang out together in cafes shooting the breeze.
The secular Israelis who wrote and produced Shtisel do all of these things, of course, but they are as distant from the Haredim as Earth is to Tatooine. The behavior of the Haredim in Shtisel is as foreign and as absurd as them staging a production of Shakespeare in Elizabethan English. Simply put, the Haredim don't act this way.