The Chabadniks, on the other hand, greet Oprah with the sublimely cheerful indifference you might display when meeting, say, the lady who does the restaurant reviews on the little TV in the back seat of New York City cabs. They know she has a TV show, they know her name is Oprah, but they have no idea what Oprah means, and one suspects that they wouldn’t think it was any big deal even if they did. After all, what good is worldwide fame to people this committed to eschewing worldliness? It’s telling, too, that of all the Hasidic practices Oprah interrogates—the arranged marriages, the husband-and-wife two-week no touching rule—the one she keeps coming back to is the fact that none of them have ever watched television. “You don’t know who Shrek is?” she, with increasing desperation, asks the Ginsburg children, who laugh good-naturedly at the nice lady making up the funny words. “Or Miley Cyrus? Or Beyoncé?” She even resorts to name-dropping her own achievements, hoping for some shred of recognition. “I have a magazine,” she tells Shterna, who responds with a blankly encouraging nod, like if you told your grandma you just started a Tumblr. “The kids love to read,” the husband offers gamely, and Oprah exclaims: “I had a book club!” “That’s good,” he replies calmly, encapsulating four millennia of nearly incomprehensible Jewish resistance to assimilation and conversion in an offhand two-word sentence. He might have been talking to Jesus Christ himself: “So you think you’re the Son of God. That’s nice for you.
