All Who Go Do Not Return

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Author by Shulem Deen
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Editor : Graywolf Press
ISBN : 9781555973377
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 288
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A moving and revealing exploration of ultra-Orthodox Judaism and one man's loss of faith Shulem Deen was raised to believe that questions are dangerous. As a member of the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the US, he knows little about the outside world—only that it is to be shunned. His marriage at eighteen is arranged and several children soon follow. Deen's first transgression—turning on the radio—is small, but his curiosity leads him to the library, and later the Internet. Soon he begins a feverish inquiry into the tenets of his religious beliefs, until, several years later, his faith unravels entirely. Now a heretic, he fears being discovered and ostracized from the only world he knows. His relationship with his family at stake, he is forced into a life of deception, and begins a long struggle to hold on to those he loves most: his five children. In All Who Go Do Not Return, Deen bravely traces his harrowing loss of faith, while offering an illuminating look at a highly secretive world.


Unchosen

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Author by Hella Winston
Genre : Hasidim
Editor : Beacon Press
ISBN : 0807036269
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 228
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When Hella Winston began talking with Hasidic Jews for her doctoral dissertation in sociology, she was excited to be meeting with members of the highly insular Brooklyn Satmar sect. Several Jewish journalists and scholars have produced admiring books describing the Lubavitch way of life and the groups outreach efforts, but very little has been written about the other Hasidic sects, despite their combined greater numbers. Unlike Lubavitch, members of these other groups do not engage in outreach and are raised to avoid all unnecessary contact with outside society. Winstons access was unprecedented.She never could have guessed what would happen next-that she would be introduced, slowly and covertly, to Hasidim deeply unhappy with their highly restrictive way of life and sometimes desperately struggling to leave their communities. First there was Yossi, a young man yearning to leave but, like most male Hasidim, a Yiddish speaker with only fourth grade English and math skills. Then she met Dini, a wife and mother called before the all-male modesty patrol because someone had spotted her outside a bar in a T-shirt and miniskirt. There were others still who had actually left.Unchosen tells the story of these and other "rebel" Hasidim, serious questioners who long for greater personal and intellectual freedom than their communities allow. In so doing, Unchosen forces us to reexamine the history of these communities and asks us to consider what we choose not to see when we romanticize them.


Cut Me Loose

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Author by Leah Vincent
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Editor : Penguin
ISBN : 9780698192676
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 240
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In the vein of Prozac Nation and Girl, Interrupted, an electrifying memoir about a young woman's promiscuous and self-destructive spiral after being cast out of her ultra-Orthodox Jewish family Leah Vincent was born into the Yeshivish community, a fundamentalist sect of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. As the daughter of an influential rabbi, Leah and her ten siblings were raised to worship two things: God and the men who ruled their world. But the tradition-bound future Leah envisioned for herself was cut short when, at sixteen, she was caught exchanging letters with a male friend, a violation of religious law that forbids contact between members of the opposite sex. Leah's parents were unforgiving. Afraid, in part, that her behavior would affect the marriage prospects of their other children, they put her on a plane and cut off ties. Cast out in New York City, without a father or husband tethering her to the Orthodox community, Leah was unprepared to navigate the freedoms of secular life. She spent the next few years using her sexuality as a way of attracting the male approval she had been conditioned to seek out as a child, while becoming increasingly unfaithful to the religious dogma of her past. Fast-paced, mesmerizing, and brutally honest, Cut Me Loose tells the story of one woman's harrowing struggle to define herself as an individual. Through Leah's eyes, we confront not only the oppressive world of religious fundamentalism, but also the broader issues that face even the most secular young women as they grapple with sexuality and identity.


Here And There

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Author by Chaya Deitsch
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Editor : Schocken
ISBN : 9780805243185
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 240
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A heartfelt and inspiring personal account of a woman raised as a Lubavitcher Hasid who leaves that world without leaving the family that remains within it. Even as a child, Chaya Deitsch felt that she didn’t belong in the Hasidic world into which she’d been born. She spent her teenage years outwardly conforming to but secretly rebelling against the rules that tell you what and when to eat, how to dress, whom you can befriend, and what you must believe. Loving her parents, grandparents, and extended family, Chaya struggled to fit in but instead felt angry, stifled, and frustrated. Upon receiving permission from her bewildered but supportive parents to attend Barnard College, she discovered a wider world in which she could establish an independent identity and fulfill her dream of an unconfined life that would be filled with the secular knowledge and culture that were largely foreign to her friends and relatives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. As she gradually shed the physical and spiritual trappings of Hasidic life, Chaya found herself torn between her desire to be honest with her parents about who she now was and her need to maintain a loving relationship with the family that she still very much wanted to be part of. Eventually, Chaya and her parents came to an understanding that was based on unqualified love and a hard-won but fragile form of acceptance. With honesty, sensitivity, and intelligence, Chaya Deitsch movingly shows us that lives lived differently do not have to be lives lived apart.


The Book Of Faces

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Author by Joseph Campana
Genre : Poetry
Editor :
ISBN : UOM:39015062628675
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 140
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In Joseph Campana's debut collection, starring Audrey Hepburn, icons of public consumption speak in the language of private devotion. Encourage emulation. Inspire idolatry. Be a muse, be a nymph, be a sprite, bewitch me. Rise from obscurity. Set trends. Break habits. Make statements. Count blessings. Distribute kindnesses. Arouse devotion. Devote yourself to nobility. Ascend, ascend, ascend. -from "How to Be a Star"


Foreskin S Lament

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Author by Shalom Auslander
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Editor : Penguin
ISBN : 9781101217634
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 395
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A New York Times Notable Book, and a “chaotic, laugh riot” (San Francisco Chronicle) of a memoir. Shalom Auslander was raised with a terrified respect for God. Even as he grew up and was estranged from his community, his religion and its traditions, he could not find the path to a life where he didn’t struggle daily with the fear of God’s formidable wrath. Foreskin’s Lament reveals Auslander’s “painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious” youth in a strict, socially isolated Orthodox Jewish community, and recounts his rebellion and efforts to make a new life apart from it. His combination of unrelenting humor and anger renders a rich and fascinating portrait of a man grappling with his faith and family.


Exodus

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Author by Deborah Feldman
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Editor : Penguin
ISBN : 9781101603109
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 164
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The author of the explosive New York Times bestselling memoir Unorthodox (now a Netflix limited series) chronicles her continuing journey as a single mother, an independent woman, and a religious refugee. In 2009, at the age of twenty-three, Deborah Feldman walked away from the rampant oppression, abuse, and isolation of her Satmar upbringing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to forge a better life for herself and her young son. Since leaving, Feldman has navigated remarkable experiences: raising her son in the “real” world, finding solace and solitude in a writing career, and searching for love. Culminating in an unforgettable trip across Europe to retrace her grandmother’s life during the Holocaust, Exodus is a deeply moving exploration of the mysterious bonds that tie us to family and religion, the bonds we must sometimes break to find our true selves.


Kids Speak

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Author by Ḥayim Ṿalder
Genre : Children's writings
Editor : Feldheim Publishers
ISBN : 0873067207
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 214
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Young people in Israel write about their experiences dealing with personal problems, handicaps, fears, and relationships with parents and others.


The Needle S Eye

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Author by Fanny Howe
Genre : Literary Collections
Editor : Graywolf Press
ISBN : 9781555979515
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 160
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A meditation on time, violence, and chance by "one of America's most dazzling poets" (O, The Oprah Magazine) Fanny Howe's The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth is a sequence of essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual logic. The book contains filmic images that subvert the usual narrative chronology; it is focused on the theme of youth, doomed or saved. A fourteenth-century folktale of two boys who set out to find happiness, the story of Francis and Clare with their revolutionary visions, the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston, the poet George Oppen and the philosopher Simone Weil, two strangers who loved but remain strange, and the wild-child Brigid of Ireland: all these emerge "from multiple directions, but always finally from the eye at the end." As the philosopher Richard Kearney writes, "Howe's ruminations and aesthetics are those of the fragmentary, but are unified by world thinkers like Arendt, Weil, Agamben, and Yeats." The Needle's Eye is a brilliant and deeply felt exploration of faith and terror, coincidence and perception, by a literary artist of profound moral intelligence, "recognized as one of the country's least compromising yet most readable experimentalist writers" (The Boston Globe).


Becoming Un Orthodox

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Author by Lynn Davidman
Genre : Religion
Editor : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN : 9780199380503
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 272
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Leaving a religion is not merely a matter of losing or rejecting faith. For many, it involves dramatic changes of everyday routines and personal habits. Davidman bases her analysis on in-depth conversations with forty ex-Hasidic individuals. From these conversations emerge accounts of the great fear, angst, and sense of danger that come of leaving a highly bounded enclave community. Many of those interviewed spoke of feeling marginal in their own communities; of strain in their homes due to death, divorce, or their parents' profound religious differences; experienced sexual, physical, or verbal abuse; or expressed an acute awareness of gender inequality, the dissimilar lives of their secular relatives, and forbidden television shows, movies, websites, and books. Becoming Un-Orthodox draws much-needed attention to the vital role of the body and bodily behavior in religious practices. It is through physical rituals and routines that the members of a religion, particularly a highly conservative one, constantly create, perform, and reinforce the culture of the religion. Because of the many observances and daily rituals required by their faith, Hasidic defectors are an exemplary case study for exploring the centrality of the body in shaping, maintaining, and shedding religions. This book provides both a moving narrative of the struggles of Hasidic defectors and a compelling call for greater collective understanding of the complex significance of the body in society.