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........

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