The new Netflix documentary series “Reality Check: America’s Next Top Model” presents the hit reality TV show, which aired between 2003 and 2018, as one of unscrupulous morals.
For those who never had the perhaps dubious pleasure to grow up on “ANTM,” the series, hosted and created by model Tyra Banks, pitted a group very young contestants (mostly aged 18 to 22) against each other for a chance to win a cash prize and a modeling contract with IMG.
In hindsight, the show did a lot of harm both to its young viewers and their body image, and to the contestants, who very rarely managed to wrangle a successful modeling career post-production.
In “Reality Check,” Israeli filmmaking duo Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan compile a myriad of horrors endured by the contestants on the show — a sexual assault turned into a cheating scandal by the production company; young women forced to have dental procedures to permanently change their appearance with little care for their health; multiple photoshoots that included blackface,;and models collapsing after under-eating and over-working.
ANTM seemed to ask everything of its physically and emotionally vulnerable young contestants. Including, back in season 15, when it demanded the show’s only Modern Orthodox Jewish contestant to give up one of the most holy of Jewish traditions, observing Shabbat.
Esther Petrack from Brookline, Massachusetts, was just 18 when she was cast in ANTM in 2010. In her first appearance on the show, she yelps with elation before introducing herself to the panel of judges, telling them she was born in Jerusalem, Israel, which makes Banks gasp with excitement.
“I understand that you were raised a Modern Orthodox Jew. Do you honor the Sabbath?” Banks asks Petrack.
“I do. From Friday night to Saturday night, you can’t use electricity, so like, no computers or cellphones or a TV and cars,” Petrack responds.
“With ‘America’s Next Top Model,’ the girls are working every single day, no day off,” Banks tells Petrack.
“So I would do it, I would do it,” we hear Petrack saying before the panel of judges moves on to discuss their distress over her bust (she’s a size G).
That’s basically all we see of Petrack in that first episode, but it was enough to cause a storm, at least in the Jewish world.
“‘Top Model’ contestant sells out the Sabbath” read a Jewish Journal headline. A Huffpost op-ed accused Petrack of leaving her Jewish beliefs at the door. Nathan Diament, the Director of the Institute for Public Affairs of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America at the time, asked Petrack to go back and open that discussion with Banks again, and to share her commitment to Shabbat more proudly.
The TV moment even made waves in Jerusalem’s Haredi Mea Shearim neighborhood.
Yet like much of the show, it turns out that the drama was caused through some creative editing.
“The fateful 4 words ‘I will do it’ in answer to a question about working on Shabbat were the result of EDITING,” Petrack’s mother shared in a letter to the Jewish Journal that year. “Esther never said, meant that she would give up Shabbat for the sake of appearing on a tv show; neither did she do it. These words were extracted from a long conversation Esther had about the laws of shabbat and the principles governing them and how she was planning to keep them while on the show. The producers then cut out these 4 words to create a more scandalous storyline.”
“It’s so frustrating,” Petrack later shared in a phone interview with LA Times.
“It’s just not true. And the people who are writing these articles, sitting in their rooms typing, well, good for them. I’m glad they feel good about themselves at night. But I still kept kosher; I’m still a good person; I still give money to homeless people. It’s not like I opened fire on a group of children or burned down a prison,” she continued.
Petrack not only observed Shabbat while on ANTM, but she also shared a lot of Jewish pride and traditions with viewers worldwide.
“I’m a Modern Orthodox Jew, so I’ve been raised in a religious community, and being here, I just have to make sure that I make sure that I stay true to who I am and everything I’ve been my entire life. It’s like a whole different world, but it’s fun,” Esther said during her makeover in episode two.
In a later episode, she talked about how she keeps kosher in the models’ shared apartments, keeping her own cabinet of kosher certified foods that she labeled with a sign: “Esther’s food, don’t steal me,” along with a smiley face.
“I can’t cook meat and cheese on the same thing,” she shared with the girls when they were barbecuing, as a fellow contestant told the camera she could never keep Petrack’s strict dietary laws at such a stressful time.
She even brought some Hebrew to the show. When a fellow contestant asked her to say “my name is Esther” in Hebrew, she agreed, saying with a perfect accent, “Shmi Esther.”
And unlike many other contestants, there are no clips of Petrack talking badly about her fellow aspiring models, keeping away from lashon hara, or gossip.
Despite her youth and relative inexperience, Petrack managed to stay on the show for quite a while, eventually getting eliminated on episode eight, when her walk on a Zac Posen runway led the Jewish designer to call her a “mess,” and where a lackluster commercial was described as “dreckitude,” a word incorporating the Yiddish word for trash, coined by judge André Leon Talley.
Banks was encouraging after the show gave Petrack the boot, asking her to keep practicing and doing what she does. Petrack told the supermodel she would, and left after giving everyone a hug.
After the show wrapped, Petrack moved back to Israel, served as a tank instructor in the IDF, and even briefly modeled professionally in the Jewish state before getting her masters in social work from Ben Gurion University. After working as a social worker for the city of Tel Aviv, she moved back to the States, became a mother, and now appears to work as a care coordinator for a company that helps coordinate autism services, according to her LinkedIn page, in which she describes herself as “helping people find the path to their better life.”
Judging from “Reality Check,” it certainly seems like she’s doing a lot more to better people’s lives than the hit show she participated in ever did.
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