There is a woman on the internet known to foment envy and righteous fury in other women, at levels few can achieve. Hannah Neeleman, proprieteress of Ballerina Farm, a multi-platform brand offering everything from tradlife posts of idyllic pastoral scenes, to opportunities to purchase unpasteurized milk. Neeleman gets heapings of press coverage, with profiles on both sides of the media pond. Momfluenced author Sara Petersen devotes a section of her newsletter to this apparently maddening influencer. The day after its Oscars party, Vanity Fair covered the launch of Neeleman’s sourdough-flavoured Substack.
In the abstract, I see why the Ballerina Farm lady would have this effect. She’s very beautiful (as attests the ‘Mrs. America ‘23’ in her Instagram bio), a former dancer (thus ‘Ballerina Farm’), and has eight photogenic children. (As in, she has eight children. I’m not making some sort of snide remark about a non-existent ninth child.) Her husband’s father founded JetBlue airlines, and all signs point to Neeleman being, shall we say, a woman of means. She owns a very-high-end, country-farmhouse Aga stove, whatever that is, but apparently it is something you’re meant to want.
For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why I, personally, felt unmoved by all of this. Neither mad at Ballerina Farm, nor seduced by it. The fact that there’s a blonde Mormon lady in Utah raising cattle but making it aesthetic is neither here nor there, as far as I’m concerned. She gave up a promising ballet career to be a tradwife, you say? Fine. I cannot summon the energies required to view this as a pressing concern, or even a non-pressing one.
And then I realized why none of this was resonating for me: Ballerina Farm is the least Jewish entity that ever there was. It’s not just that she ethnically and religiously non-Jewish, as is most of the planet. It’s that she’s an icon of a type of wholesome Americana that I, a Jewish New Yorker-turned-Torontonian, find unrelatable to the point it doesn’t even register as aspirational. I see her lovely home and think, where’s she getting bagels, where’s she catching the bus?
But it is for an extremely Jewish reason that I’m bringing up Ballerina Farm.
There is a Jewish answer to Hannah Neeleman, and her name is Lizzy Savetsky. The most comprehensive profile of Savetsky is quite possibly an article published by the Jewish outreach outreach organization Aish HaTorah: “Lizzy Savetsky’s Personal Battle Against Alcoholism,” and she was most recently interviewed by Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin on his Jewish outreach podcast 18Forty. There’s information about her challenges in the titular area, but also just a bunch of general stuff about her life, from her childhood in Fort Worth, Texas, to the influencer she is today. And it is not just the alcohol struggles that make Savetsky an unlikely Orthodox influencer. “She was a cheerleader, sang in country music shows every weekend, and participated in pageants like Miss Teen Texas.”
Yes, like Neeleman, Savetsky is a former beauty queen, one with youthful artistic ambitions. Both women are now in their 30s, raising families (Savetsky has three children) before the cameras. Neeleman has over 10 million Instagram followers, Savetsky a still-respectable over-400,000, and was once almost a cast member of The Real Housewifes of New York City. Both women are, in other words, influencers. More specifically, they are—in spirit if not in self-proclamation—two tradwife influencers.
A what now?
Tradwives, canonically, are not merely traditionalist women with social media platforms. Rather, they’re women who have one foot in and one foot out of whichever traditionalist world, be it Jewish or (more commonly) Mormon or whatever else. Maybe it’s that they didn’t grow up religious, maybe it’s that their academic or professional trajectory put them into contact with mainstream society. (Indeed, per her New York Times profile, a highlight of Neeleman’s time as a Julliard student in Manhattan was trying, for the first time, “fresh bagels.”) Whatever the source of their cosmopolitanism, tradwives have a kind of crossover appeal that allows them to connect with audiences that are not fully or even mostly composed of in-group members. They are promoting a traditionalist lifestyle—marriage, kids, faith—to followers who might not already be into that stuff.
‘Tradwife’ is, like ‘hipster’, not a slur, but also mildly derogatory, and thus not commonly a term someone uses to refer to herself. So that’s another layer to this.
Influencers, meanwhile, are people who post to social media with the hopes of selling something. What exactly that something consists of will vary by influencer. (Some even multitask and promote face powder while accusing Jewish journalists of being bad for the Jews! But I digress.) Tradwife influencers sell a lifestyle as well as specific products. Whether ‘lifestyle’ extends to politics—or rather, how explicitly it does—is a tricky matter indeed.
Savetsky, who lives in New York City, was raised Jewish but only became observant after meeting her now-husband, Ira Savetsky, aka the plastic surgeon who made headlines for offering free procedures to Oct. 7 victims. She identifies as an Orthodox Jew, but belongs to a heretofore unknown-to-me subset of religious observance that allows or perhaps encourages posting a bikini photo slideshow to Instagram with the caption, “Zionist thirst trap.” (Meaning? “Every single bikini was made by an unapologetic Jew and lover of Israel.”)
The photos on Savetsky’s Instagram might not evoke tradwife the way a prairie dress does, but in the convoluted world of ideological shifts, bikini photos of a conventionally attractive woman are well within the realm of social conservatism. It may seem a bit odd from a pious Jewish perspective, but from a MAGA one, it tracks. (I personally am not religiously observant, and couldn’t care less if someone posts such content.)
The sexy photos, however, are not what got Savetsky into hot water, but rather her jarring and disturbing decision to post, to her Instagram, a video clip of a speech by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, perhaps best described as a Jewish supremacist. A man widely renounced by self-identified Zionists as a hateful extremist, and whose living disciples have their groups listed as terrorist entities in Canada, not to mention most of the rest of the world. Most of the major Jewish media outlets dissected her decision to share the video, and then to quasi-backtrack but not really.
Moreover, on the subsequently published 18Forty podcast—which was evidently recorded before the blowback, while she also acknowledges it’s a problematic fave—she said she’s “extremely into Meir Kahane” and likened his legacy to Martin Luther King Jr. The original Instagram posting is also still up.
Mainstream women’s media has been abuzz for a couple years now about whether tradwives are secretly (or not so secretly) promoting regressive gender roles and far-right politics to unsuspecting normie audiences. But if you haven’t been following those discussions, it’s easy to see an attractive woman with long hair and a husband and kids, no office-wear in site, and assume there can’t be much going on. And that is the tradwife influencer’s superpower. Under the guise of this is just a pretty lady doing girl-stuff, political speech of all kinds—some sinister, some not—is taking place.
For more original Jewish culture commentary from Phoebe Maltz Bovy subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
