Leah Vincent
By Leah Vincent
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Opinion How My Daughter Helped Me Realize That Women Are More Than Just Victims
I will confess that when I found out I was pregnant almost exactly seven years ago, I prayed, in my furtive post-ultra-Orthodox-atheist way, that I wasn’t having a girl. Not because the happily-every-after-formula in all the stories I’d been told as a child was “and nine months later his wife gave birth to a healthy…
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Opinion After #MeToo, A Message To My Rapists
I, my friends, and women all over the country have experienced the #MeToo movement as something like a miracle and the women who have risen within it as beings akin to superheroes. As a teenager, I was raped by a boyfriend and then by a best friend. After writing a memoir about some of these…
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Opinion Ex-Orthodox Women Must Learn To Say No. Ex-Orthodox Men Must Learn To Listen
Recently, news broke that three women who had left the ultra-Orthodox community alleged that they were sexually assaulted by a man who also had left that community. As a woman who also left that world, I found the story devastatingly familiar. A few years ago I co-produced an informal survey of 59 women who had…
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Life ‘Kimmy Schmidt’ Is My Ex-Orthodox Life
Netflix After all the New York Times articles, PBS segments, NPR interviews and memoirs (including my own) about the Off The Derech (OTD) narrative, the long rumored OTD TV show has finally arrived. Well, the show isn’t exactly about a person trying to build a self-determined life after leaving ultra-Orthodoxy — but it still feels…
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Culture An Atheist’s Case for Talmud
When I recently wrote my memoir of leaving ultra-Orthodoxy, I spent days ravaged by sobbing fits, debilitating chest pain, and migraines as I reencountered the trauma my 17-year-old self had experienced after I was pushed out of my yeshivish family for my rebellion. Shaken, I was fearful that when I went even further back to…
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The Schmooze Why I Use ‘Yeshivish’
In my writing, I very purposefully label my ultra-Orthodox non-Hasidic community of origin the “Yeshivish” community or sect, although I know it is a strange label for some, like Ezra Glinter, who in a footnote to his thoughtful and thorough essay “Ex-Hasidic Writers Go Off the Path and Onto the Page,” questions my use of…
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Opinion Talking to the Rabbis About Sex
An ultra-Orthodox bride at her Jerusalem wedding in 2014. / Getty Images This past Sunday, I spoke about sexuality and modesty in front of a group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis. Both professionally and personally, it was a profound moment for me, a formerly ultra-Orthodox woman, to sit there and name experiences that the ultra-Orthodox community hasn’t…
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Culture A Daughter’s Letter to Her Father for Mother’s Day
When I was a girl, on Friday nights, I would compete with my sisters for the privilege of fetching my father’s slippers when he returned home from prayers. My siblings and I would beg for the seat to my father’s left or right at the Sabbath meal. I was often chosen for this honor. My…
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