Life off the derech

Life off the derech

YIVO hosts conference about what it’s like to leave the charedi world

Dr. Zalman Newfield, left, and Dr. Naomi Seidman
Dr. Zalman Newfield, left, and Dr. Naomi Seidman

If you feel stifled by the community that you grew up in, if you feel that its assumptions are soul-crushing and its constraints are strangling, then there’s a good chance that you’ll try to leave it, even if it also has the comforts and sounds and smells and rhythms that always make you feel, no matter what, that you’re home.

But there’s a good chance that you won’t be able to leave all of it behind, even if you want to. It’s too deeply a part of you.

The community at the far right of the Jewish world — you can call it charedi, you can break it down further into chasidim and mitnagdim and the yeshivish and the Litvaks, or you can go for simplicity and call it the ultra-Orthodox, and no matter which label you pick, you’ll offend someone — always loses some of its members, just as it gains others. Those lost ultra-Orthodox Jews, often called OTD — off the derech, strayed from the one true path — sometimes leave the Jewish world entirely, but often they don’t. Sometimes despite themselves, sometimes quite intentionally, they still are drawn to it.

Those Jews, as well as their allies and anyone else who is interested, are invited to “After Orthodoxy: Cultural Creativity and the Break with Tradition,” a conference and festival set for September 15-16 and organized by leaders in the OTD world and hosted at YIVO’s Manhattan headquarters. (See below.)

The conference is the brainchild of Naomi Seidman of the University of Toronto; she’s organized it with Zalman Newfield of Hunter College, who lives in Hoboken, and who did most of the administrative work, Dr. Seidman is careful to stress. Both are OTD, although they come from different backgrounds and their lives have taken different paths, and both still are deeply part of the Jewish world.

Both recently talked to me on Zoom.

The conference will feature people “who have left, but come back in some way,” Dr. Seidman said. It’s a topic she knows well; as a formidable academic, she’s now the Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts at the University of Toronto and had been the Koret Professor of Jewish Culture and the director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She’s also the creator of a compelling, Hartman Institute-produced podcast, “Heretic in the House.”

Dr. Seidman grew up in a Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox family in Brooklyn, the youngest daughter of a notable Holocaust survivor, writer, and intellectual, Dr. Hillel Seidman, and now focuses on the intersection of Judaism, gender studies, feminism, and sexuality. It’s all very cutting edge. She’s also a product of the complicated, in some ways very traditional and in some ways revolutionary Bais Yaakov girls’ school system — an institution that she wrote about in one of her books, “Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition.”

She’s also warm, funny, sharp, and engaging.

She listed some of the speakers at the conference — they include Naftuli Moster, who’s fought to get children in charedi yeshivot in New York State the secular education to which they’re legally entitled; Basya Schechter, the musician and composer who leads the group Pharaoh’s Daughter; the filmmaker Pearl Gluck; Michael Wex, the writer whose best-known work is “Born to Kvetch”; Jericho Vincent, author of “Cut Me Loose” and now a “religious entrepreneur” who has founded the marvelously named Temple of the Stranger; Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, a member of the prominent Lau family in Israel, who founded StorahTelling and Lab/Shul, a downtown synagogue that he still leads; the prominent academic and writer Rabbi Shaul Magid, and Elad Nehorai, the activist and writer who formed, among many other things, the huge private Facebook group called Torah Trumps Hate.

All the speakers at the conference fit into at least one of four categories. “They’re all activists, artists, religious entrepreneurs, or scholars,” Dr. Seidman said. “They all left and continue to engage with Judaism in some way.”

This piece, “The Holy Spirit,” is by Sara Erenthal, at instagram.com/saraerenthalart. “As a teenager living a sheltered life in an Ultra-Orthodox society, I had minimal information about the human reproductive system,” she wrote. “This reflects how I imagined babies are conceived.”

Neither the speakers nor the intended audience for the conference all would have grown up the same way. “Most they were chasidic, ultra-Orthodox, but some grew up yeshivish or more mainstream,” Dr. Seidman said. “There are so many stripes, and there are no entrance requirements.”

Dr. Schneur Zalman Newfield — that’s his full name, but he prefers Zalman to Schneur — grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch world. He left, earned a doctorate in sociology from NYU, and now is an associate professor of sociology and Jewish studies at Hunter College. He and his wife, Dr. Jenny Labenz, whose doctorate in Talmud comes from the Jewish Theological Seminary, are active members of the United Synagogue of Hoboken; they and their two daughters are there absolutely every Shabbat, Dr. Newfield said. No matter what.

“The target audience for this conference and festival is a wide spectrum,” he said. “It’s for everyone who is interested in reconnecting with our fellow exiters. It’s also for secular, liberal Jews who want to learn more about ex-ultra-Orthodox Jews.”

She also stresses that she hopes that conference — and festival-goers would be interested in OTD participants in general, not just in the drama around their leaving. No matter how dramatic the story — and some are far more dramatic than others, which involve more drift than explosion — a person is more interesting than any one episode. That is the point that she makes strongly in her podcast as well.

Although the program is overwhelmingly for and about Jews, there will be a panel for people who have left other faiths; one panelist is a former Scientologist, Dr. Seidman said.

Dr. Newfield and Dr. Seidman have different feelings for the worlds in which they grew up. Dr. Newfield remains close to his family and feels much love; Dr. Seidman “still is angry,” she said.

“My mother died at 101, almost a year ago, and I didn’t even know if my siblings would let me know. But they did, and I went to her funeral. I was sitting in the front row, just totally angry that there were no women speaking. My brother’s grandson-in-law gets up to say a few words, but my mother’s daughters — two of us have Ph.D.s — may not speak.

“I have a niece who is a professor of electrical engineering at NYU. She is particularly interested in bringing underserved populations, especially women of color, into STEM fields. There are pictures of her, in her sheitel, all over the internet.

“My sister asked us if we thought that the eulogies covered everything that we should have said, and my niece said yes, I thought they did. And I said to her, ‘Don’t you think it would have been different if a woman would have been allowed to speak?’ She said no.

“It is a kind of schizophrenia; she is a very educated person who sees the value of bringing women of color in STEM fields but thinks it’s okay to have no voice.

“That continues to remind me of why I left.”

Dr. Newfield hopes that although the conference is aimed primarily at OTDers, “we also want to welcome people who are ultra-Orthodox. We want to say, “Look, this is who your brothers and sisters who left are. This is who we are. This is how we’re living our lives. These are the things that we’re concerned about. These are the artistic, religious, and scholarly contributions that we’re making.

Malky Goldman: “Sea to Shore”; she’s another OTD artist who will be at the conference.

“You should know about this, because you want to know what your brothers and sisters are up to. You want to know how we’re functioning in the world, and how we’re contributing to the world. And we want to be in conversation with you as well.”

Dr. Seidman talked about how she has reconnected, tentatively but unmistakably, with at least part of the Jewish world she’d left.

When she first moved to California, she said, she dropped all contact with her family. She grew so remote from her past that she didn’t even learn the term OTD until it was well-established in the former frum world’s lexicon. But she was a professor of Jewish studies — it was easier to get a job in that field than in German literature, where she’d earned her doctorate — and so she had at least one academic toe in the Jewish world.

“But then, around 12 or so years ago, I ran into a group of Beis Yakov girls in Krakow,” she said. “I was teaching at the divinity school, and I took the students, who were mainly Christian, to a Jewish cultural festival, and we ran into a group of Beis Yakov girls.

“I could recognize them from a mile off,” she said. “They have a look.” What’s the look? It’s highly specific but hard to explain, she said, but because she was one of them, she always knows it when she sees it. They were there on a pilgrimage to the grave of the schools’ founder, Sarah Schenirer.

That meeting led to her speaking about the schools, its founder, and its students, to the festival in Krakow the next year, and that led, seemingly inexorably, to her becoming “knee deep, then waist deep, then neck deep in Orthodoxy.”

And then she was back. Sort of. As herself — always unorthodox – but reveling in the OTD world she discovered.

Dr. Newfield is a sociologist. “I spent years hanging out with sociologists who were looking at everything under the sun,” he said. “A lot of them were interested in structural Marxism, capitalism and the state, all sorts of things that had nothing to do with Judaism. But for my Ph.D. I looked at people who left the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world, so it seemed like I was far away from that world in some ways, but I ended up studying things that are directly related to it. And now my joint appointment at Hunter College is in sociology and Jewish studies — so sort of belatedly I became a professor of Jewish studies.”

He knew that he wanted to remain actively Jewish, but he didn’t know how. “I always felt very connected to Judaism, but was worried, after I left the Lubavitch community, about how I would find a religious home.” After some searching, often in Brooklyn, in independent minyanim, he found that home in Hoboken.

“I’m very religiously observant,” he said. “I go to shul every Shabbat. We have Shabbat dinner, we do all the holidays — right now we’re planning who we’re going to invite for our Rosh Hashana dinners.

“And I’m an atheist. It’s very simple. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe that there is a supernatural being watching over us, making sure that we follow every jot and tittle of Jewish law.

“I do it” — the observance, the mitzvot, the learning — “because I find it personally meaningful. It is emotionally, psychologically, culturally, a meaningful thing for me to do. I don’t do it out of a sense of obligation. I do it out of a sense of love and affection and appreciation.”

To many people in the world from which he came, this makes no sense, he said. “If God exists, you have to follow every single last detail of Jewish law. If God doesn’t exist, we could just throw it out the window. It’s useless. It’s meaningless.

“I don’t feel that way. I find it deeply meaningful, as I know that Jews today who engage in Jewish ritual and Jewish practice to various degrees do — because they find it emotionally, psychologically, culturally, socially, esthetically meaningful, even though they don’t believe that there’s a God who’s watching over them and going to punish them if they don’t follow every single detail of Jewish law.

“And it’s beautiful.”

Dr. Seidman also finds beauty and value in Shabbat dinners — eating and singing do it for her, she said. And she has, somewhat reluctantly at first, and somewhat surprisingly, joined a Conservative synagogue. “I started teaching Torah study there, translating my father’s Yiddish columns,” she said. ‘There is a bunch of Holocaust survivors I taught there — really, there were a bunch of them, there are fewer now than there were 20 years ago — and it is a way to connect with my father. I used to wear my father’s old black hat when I taught there.

“So yes, Judaism has been an incredibly meaningful part of my life. For me, now, it’s belonging without belief.” It works for her.


What: A conference and festival called “After Orthodoxy: Cultural Creativity and the Break with Tradition”

When: On Sunday, September 15, from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and on Monday, September 16, from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Where: On Zoom, and also in person at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research at 15 West 16th Street in Manhattan

How much: Free

Reservations: yivo.org/After-Orthodoxy

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