You had no formal role in the making of the TV show, but were you tapped for your insights?

We had a lot of discussions about when can you sacrifice accuracy and when not. We agreed you can sacrifice accuracy as long as it doesn’t impact the narrative. And so we could not get real shtreimels [a fur hat worn by many Satmar men] because the real ones are made of mink; they’re expensive, shops wouldn’t have sold it to us, and we just didn’t have the budget. I was constantly in touch with the costume designer to make fake ones that look real.

Making them look real was really hard, and at some point we thought, they’re never going to look 100 percent like the real thing. But the only people who are going to know that are going to be Hasidic Jews. And guess what? It doesn’t change the story if the shtreimels are fake.

What were you homing in on while watching the TV adaptation?

I was concerned about the dignity of Esty, which is also one of the things I was concerned about when writing “Unorthodox”; how do you write about the things that are most shameful and painful in a way that retains dignity? I was worried how Shira would manage to juggle the experience of humiliation and the kind of shattering of all hope while still maintaining some sense of dignity as a woman and human being. I was so scared for her the whole time as I watched the episodes. I felt really anxious because I knew that if she failed, then it would be like I had failed, like I would not have dignity anymore in my story. It’s scary to give someone your story for the screen because you can’t control it. On the other hand, I knew I didn’t want a part in controlling it.

In Episode 4, during the Passover scene, the grandfather leads the prayers and tells the story of Exodus. No women participate. Yet, if you look at the actions that move “Unorthodox” forward, almost all are taken by the female characters.

Men tell the story and women make the story real. Women make the story happen. You have the table where the man dictates prayer, belief and narrative, but if you look at the story of Esty, it’s women who are making the decisions. It’s the women she’s interacting with, who are basically the driving force behind community life, the engine behind the story. If you watch the series with this in mind, you realize that the men are actually kind of passive figures carried along by the story. They play the roles in how it’s been told, but it’s the women who make the story go on.