Shulem Deen is a former Skverer Hasid, and the author of “All Who Go Do Not Return” a memoir about growing up in and then leaving the Hasidic Jewish world. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Salon, Haaretz, Tablet, and elsewhere. He serves as a board member at Footsteps, a New York City-based organization that offers assistance and support to those who
have left the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. He lives in Brooklyn.
Shulem Deen
By Shulem Deen
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Culture We Were Aliens in Egypt — and I Still Am Today
The first time I felt a pressing need to visit a synagogue after officially discarding religious observance was less than a year later, in September 2008, while passing through Nashville, Tennessee. My friend Mordy and I had set out on a road trip several days earlier, in anticipation of the first High Holy Day season…
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Culture Purim and Encounters With Bigotry — Including Our Own
Some time ago, I came across the Twitter feed of a prominent American Jewish writer in which I noticed several disparaging remarks about ultra-Orthodox Jews, with liberal use of words like “parasites,” “psycho Haredim” and other choice denigrations. Whoa, I thought, that’s a bit harsh, and I tweeted at the writer, saying so. Another writer,…
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Life What We Can Learn From Hillary Clinton, Mark Twain — and a Hasidic Master
On the wall of the administrator’s office at my Hasidic elementary school in Brooklyn’s Boro Park in the 1980s hung a curious sheet of paper with an English-language quotation, incongruous against a wall of Yiddish and Hebrew notices and talmudic citations. The sheet was an enlarged photocopy of comments written by Mark Twain. “The Jew,”…
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Culture Why We Want Our Plantings To Be Like Us
‘They say you’re smart,” my friend Chavi emailed me a couple weeks ago, “ “so solve my problem, please.” I wanted to hear more about the unnamed “they” — we could be friends, I was sure — but Chavi’s dilemma was pressing. A former ultra-Orthodox woman, Chavi is now the mother of two young children,…
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Life When My Hasidic Past Rediscovered Me
Just when I thought I was ridding myself of my past, it rushed back at me with a single phone call. It was late evening during the fall of 2012. I had been out of the Hasidic world for five years, now living in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and was making progress with forgetting, moving on….
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Life How I Kept My Faith in Faith
Several years ago, some friends and I gathered for a “holiday season party” in the days between Hanukkah and Christmas. We ate latkes. We drank eggnog. And we talked about the Maccabees. Around the table went a debate, about the Maccabees and the Hellenists in the battle for cultural supremacy in ancient Judea. I expressed…
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Life What I Learned From a Simple Act of Thievery
Ten years ago, at the end of a brief stay in Washington, D.C., I stepped into the gift shop at my hotel to buy a little something for my kids. I passed on the White House snow globes, Lincoln Memorial puzzles and sundry other souvenir-type tchotchkes. Then I noticed a glossy pictorial booklet with beautifully…
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Life Introducing: My Heretical Year
My first visit to a public library was at age 24 where I discovered, in the children’s section, a set of World Book encyclopedias. This was my first encounter with such a vast amount of general knowledge, and I immediately sought out the “J” volume; I wanted to see if there was an entry for…
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