There is something that seems slightly worrisome about Deborah Feldman. She has written a sensational first book, the memoir “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots,” which is newly published by Simon & Schuster and grew out of an anonymous blog she kept while trying to work her way out of life as a…
At first impression Deborah Feldman’s new memoir,”Unorthodox,” reviewed here in the Forward, feels like déjà vu all over again: Girl breaks away from her insular Hasidic sect after a youth of illicitly reading library books and sneaking into movie theaters. With subtitle like “The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” it’s tempting to consider the…
Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots By Deborah Feldman Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $23 Deborah Feldman’s memoir, “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” begins with Feldman describing her father, a mentally disabled Hasid employed by pitying community members to preform simple tasks, like picking up people from the airport. Sometimes…
“Unorthodox,” a documentary film by Anna Wexler and Nadja Oertelt, is named both for its subjects — questioning and rebellious Orthodox youth — and for its own production process. The film follows three Orthodox teenagers as they become more religious during their “gap years” in Israeli yeshivot, but their stories are filtered through Wexler’s own…
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