Orthodox Jewish Women Can’t Sing In Front of Men. Instagram Is Giving Them a Voice

“It was very hard for me. I had to figure out how to feel about that,” she says. “My husband kept reminding me: ‘You are allowed to create kosher things. People will take anything from you and turn it into something that it wasn’t. You just have to live your life and ignore people.’

“I had gotten a lot of online harassment in the beginning because what I was doing was so daring and so different and so new,” Schwartz says, adding that she learned to immediately block accounts that harass her, creating a “curated” community online. “But now there is such a boom in the industry, people are used to it…they appreciate it.”

Three years later Schwartz now has close to 20,000 followers on Instagram, a series of music videos, a packed calendar with concerts, and a vocal lessons practice, in which young girls in long pleated uniform skirts and button-down blouses practice singing Beyonce’s “Halo.”

Much of Schwartz’s motivation is what she sees as a responsibility to a future generation of religious women. “If you look at pop stars today—it is not about the music,” she says. “It’s all about sex. But I have a different mission—to empower young girls and women. Can we give them something fun, pop, where they don’t have to go and watch and listen to the other music out there?”

Orthodox Judaism has always sent mixed messages to girls and young women interested in the performing arts.

As early as pre–World War II, theater was encouraged in Polish Jewish girls’ schools as a form of fostering self-esteem and creativity in young women, but it had to be done in strictly female spaces. This practice continued through the 20th century, when in some ways Orthodoxy became even more stringent: Beyond the school years, a talented (and trained) female voice was rarely heard. For nearly a century, then, these women have been faced with an agonizing dilemma: What do you do when you are born with a gift—but you are religiously forbidden from using it fully?

I first encountered this question when I met my sister-in-law, Franciska Kosman, who’s been singing and producing music since she was a young girl.

Kosman grew up in a rabbinic family in Moscow, where she was surrounded by a vibrant cultural scene. “Music was my second language,” she says from her home in Philadelphia. “But I always knew I had a cutoff when I would turn 12. As soon as I would be bat mitzvah and considered a woman, I would not be allowed to perform in front of men anymore.”

In the last decades, many young religious women were told that voice was a hopeless pursuit at worst, a secret hobby at best. “People didn’t look at it for women as having a career,” Schwartz says. “They always told us, ‘You only have half an audience.’”

But with Instagram, young religious women could begin taking initiative and performing and publicizing their own music online.

According to Jessica Roda, an assistant professor at Georgetown University who is writing a book about Orthodox Jewish women’s performance art, Instagram was a perfect platform for women’s music. “It became known as a necessary tool for building a business, and even in the most conservative of communities, social media is permitted for the sake of building a business,” Roda says. “That’s really interesting because art became business.”