What explains Shtisel-mania? For starters, as many critics have noted, Shtisel, which has been streaming on Netflix since December, is marvelous TV. In two seasons, it won a slew of Ophirs, the Israeli Emmys, including for Best Drama and for Best Actor, Best Directing, and Best Script in a drama series. The show’s main characters include Akiva (played by Michael Aloni, who also appeared at Temple Emanu-El), a gentle ultra-Orthodox (in Hebrew, haredi) 20-something whose romantic and artistic yearnings conflict with his father’s expectations and the strict norms of the haredi world. There’s also Akiva’s recently widowed father, Shulem (Glickman), who is seeking love as well—and a hot meal, which he often obtains from neighborhood widows—but is haunted by visitations from his dead wife. A third protagonist, Shulem’s daughter, Giti (Riskin), struggles ferociously to keep her own family together and to maintain outward appearances after her husband temporarily abandons them.

But if Shtisel’s themes—the bonds of family, the pursuit of love, and the relationship between the living and the dead—are universal, its setting, the ultra-Orthodox Geula neighborhood of Jerusalem, is to most Jews (let alone non-Jews) mysterious. Shtisel re-creates it obsessively. One of the show’s creators, Yehonatan Indursky, grew up haredi in Jerusalem, and Shtisel employs mashgiachs (supervisors) to ensure that every detail is correct. At Temple Emanu-El, Riskin explained how—as a secular Israeli—she had to relearn how to walk in order to play Giti. “Walk,” her mashgiach told her, “as if you are trying to get somewhere as quickly as possible while being invisible.”

Another expression of this meticulousness involves language. As Shayna Weiss, the associate director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, has noted, the older characters in Shtisel—Shulem; his misanthropic brother, Nukhem (Sasson Gabai); and his riotously funny mother (Hanna Rieber in the first season and Leah Koenig in the second)—generally speak to one another in Yiddish. The younger characters speak mostly in Hebrew. But even haredi Hebrew is distinct. It includes Yiddish expressions, and many haredim use Ashkenazi (European) pronunciations that differ from the Sephardic (Middle Eastern) pronunciations that are normative in modern Hebrew. If that’s not complicated enough, the characters sometimes employ religious terms drawn from Aramaic.

Shtisel’s combination of radical particularity and radical universality lies at the core of its appeal. At Temple Emanu-El, Aloni quoted a fan who told him, “I’m a Norwegian Christian, and watching Shtisel makes me long for my childhood in Geula.”

Still, it’s telling that so many American Jews are eager to find universality in a form of particularity that, in the past, they found deeply unpleasant. In her 2009 book, Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination, the University of Rochester’s Nora Rubel notes that haredim have often been a “source of anxiety and embarrassment for ‘modern’ Jews.” In his 1959 short story “Eli, the Fanatic,” Philip Roth conjures Eli Peck, a prosperous, suburban Jew who fears that a nearby ultra-Orthodox yeshiva will imperil his hard-won status. Eli asks that the neighboring haredim only enter his town “provided that they are attired in clothing usually associated with American life in the 20th century.” But when a box with a haredi man’s suit is left on his porch, Eli—transfixed—begins wearing it; the story ends with him being dragged off to a mental hospital.