Adrianne Jeffries Image by wearenytech.com

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen May 21, 2012

It’s Yentl for the 21st century. A female reporter from The New York Observer’s tech blog, BetaBeat, snuck into Sunday’s ultra-Orthodox, men-only rally against the dangers of the Internet by dressing up — apparently rather convincingly — as a man.

Adrianne Jeffries bought a pair of cheap loafers at Payless, borrowed her brother’s white dress shirt, black pants and striped rep tie and borrowed a kippah before heading to Citi Field, where some 40,000 Haredi men gathered to listen to some of this generation’s leading Torah sages inveigh against the dangers of going online.

“I have short hair already, so I didn’t do anything in addition to wearing men’s clothing and men’s shoes. I did tape my chest down a bit with duct tape and tried, not that successfully, to deepen my voice,” she wrote in an email to The Sisterhood.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

She didn’t find a hunky love interest at the rally, as Barbra Streisand-as-Yentl did with Mandy Patinkin’s character, Avigdor, in the 1983 movie based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer story chronicling a young woman’s journey into drag as she tries to infiltrate the male-only world of the yeshiva.

But Jeffries did find men interested in making her acquaintance. Her plan had been “to keep my eyes down and my mouth shut, or pretend to talk on my cell phone,” so that her woman’s voice wouldn’t give her away.

Yet even before making her way to a seat, an elderly rabbi “with long gray hair reached out his hand and started pumping my arm up and down. ‘What brings you here?’ he asked.”

She wrote, “I had not prepared a backstory at all. Maybe I could be a tourist, who spoke another language that no one would know? … ’Personal interest,’ I answered. The rabbi smiled. And kept asking me questions.”

She managed to melt back into the crowd without blowing her cover, and had a friend texting her translations of some of the key phrases mentioned during some Yiddish-language speeches.

Jeffries, whose mother is Jewish, whose father isn’t and who was raised secular (her response when asked if she’s Jewish) had never before had such a close encounter of the Haredi kind. Her undercover foray gave her an intro into some of the frum community’s dynamics, as she found men at the rally friendly and jokey. And before she could return home, a Hasid collecting donations for a hunger-related cause hit her up for money, promising, as she demurred, “You’ll be a big donor one day, young man.”

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount