Miriam Anzovin may portray a ditzy character in her popular ‘Daf Reactions’ videos online, but the 36-year-old Massachusetts native recently surprised her followers by blasting the religious establishment’s treatment of women
By Allison Kaplan Sommer, HAARETZ
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Miriam Anzovin. “I’m saying to the people who are voiceless or silenced or afraid that it is not their fault.”Credit: Miriam Anzovin
One could hardly imagine the Talmud having an “It Girl” – until, that is, the charismatic Miriam Anzovin hit the scene with her comedic and expletive-punctuated TikTok videos.
Anzovin’s sweet, slangy style and flawless hair and makeup as she comments on the “Daf Yomi” – the daily study of a page of Talmud – across social media platforms grabbed the attention of the Israeli media and Jewish news outlets last month. Her 15 minutes of fame for the “Daf Reactions” videos (also posted on Instagram, YouTube and Twitter) spawned clickable headlines praising her “raunchy TikTok Talmud tidbits” for “making Daf Yomi relatable to millennials and Gen Z.”
Anzovin’s latest video demonstrates that she wants to do much more with her new fame and tens of thousands of social media followers than merely collect compliments on her eyeliner, outfit choices and ability to make Talmud study look cool by describing ancient sages as “frenemies.”
Opening with a content warning that “viewer discretion is incredibly advised,” Anzovin uses a Talmud text discussing rape as an opportunity to blast the religious establishment’s treatment of women. She highlights it as the reason she left the Orthodox fold and to come out as a survivor of sexual assault herself.<
Anzovin directs her hottest fire at Israel’s Chief Rabbinate and its policies on matters of marriage and divorce, hailing a women’s group fighting for change and ending her video with a direct message delivered in Hebrew and English – “to those who sustain their power through misogyny, and the sexual abusers who count on nobody believing their victims because they’re women and children.”
Looking unblinkingly into the camera with her carefully lined and shadowed eyes, Anzovin tells them to “go to hell, you fucking pieces of shit.”
The Talmud page that inspired her discusses the dire consequences of raping the wife of a Kohen (Jewish high priest). Anzovin interprets the passage as making clear that rape itself does not appear to be the primary transgression but raping a Kohen’s wife, after which the victim of the assault is forbidden to return to her home and husband.
In her trademark sarcastic style, Anzovin notes that while the assaulted wife of a Kohen “suffered unbelievable trauma,” she asks: “But won’t anyone center the feelings of the important men around her?”
Anzovin then pivots into an uncomic rant about how this Talmud passage relates to the “ethical and communal challenges around these issues today in Orthodox Judaism.”
Those challenges, she says, include the crisis of agunot – chained women whose husbands refuse them a religious divorce – the problem of mamzerut (stigmatized children born of religiously forbidden relationships), as well as the problematic, secretive attitude toward sexual assault in the Orthodox community.
“It is a very centering of male power and authority that we saw reflected from today’s daf [page] that hurts the modern-day Jewish community in profound ways,” Anzovin declares. “And it’s what drove me away.”
Without naming names, she decries the visit of Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, David Lau, to the shivah of Rabbi Chaim Walder, who committed suicide after a flood of revelations regarding alleged serial sexual assault and pedophilia.
“What a devastating message to victims: what you told us about this man, your suffering – it doesn’t really matter, we’re still going to honor him in death. To my fellow survivors of sexual assault, you do matter, you are important and it’s not your fault.”
Strengthening survivors
In an interview with Haaretz, Anzovin explains that she went public about her experiences to strengthen Orthodox survivors of sexual assault – particularly young women – who are often not believed or told to keep silent. Seeing men like Walder honored in death, she believes, rubs salt in those wounds.
“I’m saying to the people who are voiceless or silenced or afraid that it is not their fault. They’re getting the message from their community that, in the scheme of things, they don’t matter. To me, that’s the thing that’s absolutely horrible. And so that’s why I ‘outed’ myself. I don’t want people to feel alone, I don’t want people to feel like no one will believe them – because that’s the worst feeling and leads to feelings of personal meaninglessness: ‘I’m nothing and nobody cares about me.’
“And so that’s what I believed people needed to hear,” she says. “Not only that I care, but other people care, and that there are organizations trying to make things better and it doesn’t have to be like this forever.”
Anzovin, 36, may play a ditzy, superficial, makeup-obsessed millennial character online, but her off-camera life during the pandemic has been far more quiet and serious. She has been making videos from her room in her Natick, Massachusetts home where she lives with her family for her elderly grandmother, working from home for the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston as a visual artist and content producer on JewishBoston.com, running errands and walking her dog (a loud chihuahua).
Anzovin attended a Chabad school through eighth grade, remained Orthodox throughout her teens and received a degree in Judaic Studies from the University of Massachusetts.
Joking that perhaps the ultra-Orthodox are right in discouraging women from studying Judaism deeply, she describes her path away from Orthodox practice, explaining that the more she understood her religion’s attitude toward her gender, the harder it was for her to believe.
For all the lip service she heard from rabbis about women being venerated in Judaism and regarded as being even holier than men, “When you contrast that with how women are actually treated, then it becomes clear that it’s not because we’re actually holier at all.”
She couldn’t reconcile daily prayers thanking God for not being created a woman, or not being counted in a minyan, and the “catastrophic ramifications” for women of rabbinic interpretations of Jewish law.
“It was this snowballing of these questions – knowing there were agunot, and seeing how the power that was placed in rabbinic hands meant that it was only male views in Orthodoxy, only male views informing this issue. And I was thinking to myself, ‘Okay, if Hashem is real, why did Hashem allow this to perpetuate in such a way that it hurts people?”
After an ongoing struggle with these issues, and after a traumatic year at age 20 during which “my father died, my grandfather died, my dog died, I was sexually assaulted,” Anzovin felt as if her faith had been “chipped away” to the point she no longer believed.
“I looked inside and I did not find Hashem anymore. And so I stepped back” from observance. Doing so, she recounts, was easier than continuing to believe there was a God who designed a world in which so many terrible things could happen.
She stresses that she continues to have “extreme respect” for those who are observant – particularly women who continue to study and learn. And as her “Daf Reactions” videos show, her loss of faith has not been accompanied by a loss of interest in all things Jewish, which is such an “intrinsic part” of her professional and personal identity.
“I can’t deny how obsessed I am with Judaism,” she says. “I’m a nerd for a lot of things, from ‘Game of Thrones’ to ‘Lord of the Rings.’ But the thing that I’m the hugest nerd about is Judaism.”
Each “Daf Reactions” video is made after Anzovin studies the Talmud text with a partner and listens to the podcast produced by Rabbanit Michelle Farber of Ra’anana, central Israel, who has been credited with inspiring the international trend of women studying Daf Yomi.
No mission
The popularity and international success of Anzovin’s videos and media attention have come as a mostly enjoyable surprise. She never expected them to reach so far beyond her niche audience of fellow nerds, she says.
Her endeavor does have detractors, though, who believe that turning the Talmud into comedic TikTok videos is disrespectful at best. At worst, they charge that she is on a mission to seduce other women to follow her “off the path” of Orthodoxy.
“Some people really truly believe that this is a very deep and insidious plan that I’ve come up with,” Anzovin smiles. “Others think it’s to get attention and clicks. And I must say, this is something that really makes me laugh out loud – because if you’re looking at what’s going to get you social media notoriety, it’s probably not the Talmud.”
It’s important for her to stress that she is “really and truly” not encouraging anyone else to leave religious practice as she did. “Right now, in my life, I don’t find it within myself. I don’t know if that will change in the future. I doubt it. But everyone has their own path.”
In fact, she explains, the most “inspiring” part of her “Daf Reactions” hobby – and it is a hobby, she emphasizes; no one is paying her for it – is the feeling that she is inspiring interest in Jewish study, and encouraging young girls to value their own voices and opinions.
“I knew from the moment that teenagers started sending me messages and videos with their own ‘Daf Reactions’ – not in my words, but in their words – that there was nothing more powerful than that. I’m honored that, in some small way, I’ve encouraged people to go out there and learn something that maybe they didn’t think they could learn because it was going to be a challenge for them. Or they were told, ‘Learn it, but don’t talk about it in your own way.”
That feedback, she says, has been so “fulfilling” that it negates any criticism that comes her way.
“Any anger and pushback I’ve received tells me that what we’re doing is having an effect. The anger signals to me that they’re afraid and their fear means that something is changing, or could change,” Anzovin reflects, “so this has been worth it. Every hateful comment, every man who calls me a whore – I would take a million of those comments because I know that the positive impact has also been real.”
Good for her.
There are plenty of abuses.