Leah Vincent
By Leah Vincent
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News A Visit To Germany Reawakens Fears of an Ultra-Orthodox Childhood
On my first trip to Germany, as I traveled to the town where a friend of mine lives, everything reminded me of the Holocaust. The pink-cheeked travelers in my train car seemed to morph into Nazis. T-shirts shimmered into gray-green uniforms. Cell phones looked like guns. As we rolled through emerald fields, I found myself…
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Culture For One Orthodox Teen, Writing Letters to a Boy Changed Everything
(JTA) — The call came one evening in August. I was in Jerusalem staying with my oldest sister, Goldy, for the summer. “It’s for you,” Goldy shouted from the kitchen. “Aunt Fraidy!” Aunt Fraidy had been my host in my last year of high school. My parents, concerned about the influence of my modern Orthodox…
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Life Marking the Exodus With Kukush and Calamari
What does the path to freedom look like? In the Haggadah it says: “Once we were slaves, now we are free.” That transition is recounted and celebrated in a “Seder” — literally an “order” of fifteen sequential steps. Freedom means different things to different people. My great journey to freedom was wresting myself out of…
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Life In Praise of the New Ex-Hasidic Reality Show
My friends and I are celebrating the news that a group of our friends — all former ultra-Orthodox Jews, or maskilim — are getting their own reality show. We maskilim have been living on the fringes of the Jewish world, many of us navigating dramatic journeys of self-discovery as we pull ourselves free of our…
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Life Why I’m Shopping Around My ‘Ex-Frum’ Memoir
Gavriella, I understand from this Sisterhood post that you don’t like the questions you’re getting in the wake of the publication of Deborah Feldman’s memoir and Pearlperry Reich’s television appearance about leaving the ultra-Orthodox world. I understand that you may feel attacked, when these women criticize their communities of origin. But to me, a writer…
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