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2015 Book Review #13: Unorthodox
Title: Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots
Author: Deborah Feldman
Genre: Memoir
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A Satmar Hasidic girl slowly grows disenchanted with her culture and longs to escape.
Thoughts: I had known there were issues with the Satmar community, a particularly fundamentalist, almost cult-like offshoot of Hasidic Judaism. Whenever a religion gets too obsessed with dogma, abuses occur, and somehow it's the women who always get the worse end of the deal. I hadn't realized quite how bad it was, though. Some of the problem is simply that Deborah doesn't fit in her community--her parents are a scandal and she's always a bit of a second-class citizen as a result. But so many traditions that, when I've seen them practiced by Jewish friends and acquaintances, are lovely and life-affirming become tools of oppression when taken to the extremes practiced by Deborah's community.
In some ways, it mirrors plenty of the fantasy novels I was particularly addicted to as a teen, in which a bookish outcast turns out to be special and escapes the narrow confines of their tiny village. The thing was, this actually happened, and continues to happen. I even lived in Williamsburg overlapping part of Deborah's tale, probably fifteen or twenty minutes from her grandparents' house. I very much support people's right to live as they choose, following whatever religious strictures they want as long as they don't interfere with others' right to do the same. But when those strictures impose social sanctions that trap their children into the same lifestyle, depriving them of the education or resources to choose otherwise, at what point does this become an unconscionable problem?
Author: Deborah Feldman
Genre: Memoir
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A Satmar Hasidic girl slowly grows disenchanted with her culture and longs to escape.
Thoughts: I had known there were issues with the Satmar community, a particularly fundamentalist, almost cult-like offshoot of Hasidic Judaism. Whenever a religion gets too obsessed with dogma, abuses occur, and somehow it's the women who always get the worse end of the deal. I hadn't realized quite how bad it was, though. Some of the problem is simply that Deborah doesn't fit in her community--her parents are a scandal and she's always a bit of a second-class citizen as a result. But so many traditions that, when I've seen them practiced by Jewish friends and acquaintances, are lovely and life-affirming become tools of oppression when taken to the extremes practiced by Deborah's community.
In some ways, it mirrors plenty of the fantasy novels I was particularly addicted to as a teen, in which a bookish outcast turns out to be special and escapes the narrow confines of their tiny village. The thing was, this actually happened, and continues to happen. I even lived in Williamsburg overlapping part of Deborah's tale, probably fifteen or twenty minutes from her grandparents' house. I very much support people's right to live as they choose, following whatever religious strictures they want as long as they don't interfere with others' right to do the same. But when those strictures impose social sanctions that trap their children into the same lifestyle, depriving them of the education or resources to choose otherwise, at what point does this become an unconscionable problem?