A NYC conference celebrates the cultural creativity of formerly Orthodox Jews
YIVO hosts a two-day symposium on Jews who went “off the derech,” or religious path
(Getty Images by Nadia Bormotova; JTA collage by Joe Strauss)
By Andrew Silow-Carroll September 12, 2024
(New York Jewish Week) — A haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, leader once joked to me that “few people leave Orthodoxy, but every one of them writes a book about it.”
It was a sardonic comment about popular works by Jews documenting their break with the “frum,” or religious, lifestyle, including Shulem Deen’s 2015 book “All Who Go Do Not Return” and Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir “Unorthodox,” which became the basis for the 2020 Netflix series of the same name.
While the vast majority of the formerly Orthodox have not turned their experiences into memoirs, the last few decades have seen a growing body of artistic, theatrical, musical and academic work devoted to what their creators call “OTD” Jews — an abbreviation of “off the derech,” meaning an Orthodox Jew who has left the path, or derech, of religiosity.
On Sunday and Monday, New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is hosting a conference celebrating the OTD contribution to Jewish and general culture. “After Orthodoxy: Cultural Creativity and the Break with Tradition” will feature panels, performances, art and films.
The conference fulfills a vision of Naomi Seidman, the Jackson Humanities Professor at the University of Toronto, who organized the conference with Zalman Newfield, an associate professor of sociology and Jewish studies at Hunter College.
Seidman described her idea for the conference in an interview this week. “Let’s talk about what Jewish culture owes to this experience,” she said. “Let’s talk about what we’ve accomplished, not the sensational story of how we left, and not the curiosity about what we left behind, but who we are now, and what we make of having grown up in the way we did.”
Seidman and Newfield both grew up Orthodox in Brooklyn: Seidman, born in 1960, left the Orthodox world of Borough Park when she was 18 and moved to California. “I didn’t even know the term OTD,” Seidman said. “I didn’t know there was a community.”
Newfield, born in 1982, grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic community of Crown Heights, and left in his mid-20s. He connects with the OTD community through his scholarship: His 2020 book, “Degrees of Separation,” is about identity formation among former haredi Orthodox Jews. He is also a member of the board of directors of Footsteps, a New York-based organization that helps people who have left Orthodoxy.
Newfield says the YIVO conference has the potential to bring three different groups together: the formerly Orthodox; non-Orthodox Jews and other “outsiders” who want to learn more about them and what they are contributing to the Jewish world and the broader society; and people who are still Orthodox and who may be baffled by family and friends who left the fold.
Seidman says there is a growing curiosity within Orthodoxy about those who leave. For her 2022 podcast, “Heretic in the House,” she interviewed “believers and heretics” and found what she called “a kind of openness and respect that was not available even 10 years ago.”
“It has something to do with just the number of people who are leaving,” she said. “Many people in the Orthodox community have this experience, and there are these efforts to understand us.” Newfield estimates that as many as 10,000 people might describe themselves as formerly Orthodox.
In the other direction, many formerly Orthodox cultivate a connection with the communities they left. Seidman cites Frieda Vizel, who gives popular tours of Hasidic Brooklyn, and secular academics who study the OTD experience. Seidman’s award-winning 2019 book “Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement” is a study of the Orthodox girls’ school system that she, like her mother, attended as a child.
All these trends will be explored in the conference, which will include a performance by the singer-songwriter Basya Schechter; a talk by Berkeley scholar Roni Masel on the subversive reading habits of rebellious yeshiva students, and a panel asking whether the field of “OTD studies” needs its own think tank.
In a joint interview on Zoom, Seidman and Newfield spoke about the conference and what they hope it contributes to understanding on all sides.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Just to get our definitions straight: The Orthodox world includes the insular haredi Orthodox, who include the various Hasidic movements, as well as Modern Orthodoxy, whose members engage more fully with the secular world. Does “off the derech,” or OTD, refer both to people who are no longer haredi or Hasidic Jews as well as formerly Modern Orthodox Jews who no longer consider themselves Orthodox?
Newfield: People who grew up Modern Orthodox and then go to the left, so to speak — become, you know, Conservative, Reform or non-affiliated — they’re absolutely OTD. As a researcher, I think it’s interesting to look at which community or sub-community people grew up in, and what were the experiences that were distinct or unique to those specific communities.
Is there a common thread among the artists and academics in the conference in how they look back at their Orthodoxy or incorporate it into their work? Maybe I’m asking, is there a sense that they leave, but they can’t quite let it go, and they have to constantly negotiate who they are?
Seidman: I detected a whiff of the pathological in your question, like “we can’t get past it” — and I don’t want to get past it. Leaving was very difficult, but I feel lucky because I became a Jewish studies professor and I can walk into classrooms and explain what Shabbos feels like in an Orthodox home. For all the difficulty of it, it was a kind of gift, and I have a rich store of folklore and languages and knowledge of a unique community that not many people have access to. And I’ve made a career out of it. When people say, can’t you get over it? Yeah, maybe I could. But why would I?
Newfield: In my book, I actually talk about three different groups of what I call “exiters”: the disconnected, the trapped and the hybrid. Essentially, the disconnected are people who have really actively tried to fundamentally sever their relationship to their Orthodox past. These are people who maybe move to the other side of the country, maybe date people who are not Jewish and just really try to completely disconnect. But that, statistically, is very uncommon for this population.
And then there are the people who are “trapped.” They’re really in the middle, and they are suffering, in a way, because they no longer feel a healthy part of their, let’s say, Hasidic upbringing. They feel profoundly disconnected from it. At the same time, they haven’t found a kind of healthy space within the broader secular Jewish society.
The majority of OTDs, at least the ones that I interviewed, are hybrids. They managed to successfully move out of their ultra-Orthodox community. They managed to find careers, to find romantic partners, to have healthy relationships outside of their community, but they still sort of look back. They still connect willfully, intentionally, consciously with their upbringing, and in a sense, use parts of their upbringing in their new life. Like me: someone who grew up in the ultra-Orthodox community and then became a scholar of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. You see this also with artists, of course, people who use their material either explicitly or in a subtle way, to explore the joy of their upbringing, the trauma of their upbringing, or their leaving experience.
Seidman: There’s another category: We also have a panel of people who became rabbis or spiritual leaders or spiritual entrepreneurs. They become practitioners of a form of Judaism or some other spiritual teaching that draws from Orthodoxy, maybe, but is something new. They haven’t turned their back on religion, but they’re certainly not observant Orthodox Jews
I’m going to ask a question that I struggle with as a Jewish journalist: Do you worry sometimes that you and I are fetishizing the ex-Orthodox when we write about or study them? I think about a certain non-Orthodox reader who likes to read about the formerly Orthodox, or watch a series like “Unorthodox,” because it validates their critiques of Orthodoxy as backward, or cruel, or misogynist.
Seidman: I write about this so much. I wrote an article in which I tried to reverse the gaze, as we say in academia, which is, instead of the fascination with the Orthodox, let’s look at who’s looking and why they need to hear these stories about people leaving the Orthodox world. One theory is that it confirms that their ancestors were correct when they abandoned Orthodoxy, if they’re Jewish. Another way of referring to it is the secular gaze, which refuses to be self-critical in the way that I’m glad that you recognize.
Newfield: Naomi is referring to an article she wrote in Jewish Review of Books, which talks about the idea of “secular triumphalism.” It’s the idea that the secular want to feel that the ultra-Orthodox community is backwards, and that the secularists have it right, and what better proof do we have [than memoirs and television shows that depict Orthodoxy in a negative light]. I think it really does highlight the danger in how people talk about and frame the OTD experience.
I should just say that I’ve written my own OTD memoir that I’m working on getting published, and was very, very conscious the whole time of the kind of balancing act that I think is required. I mean, the mere fact that someone grew up someplace and then made a profound break with their upbringing obviously means that they had things that they disagreed about. But to go from there and say they hate everything about their upbringing and that everyone from their past is a monster? It is entirely unnecessary to make that kind of claim. One of the things we’re hoping to come out of this conference and festival is to highlight the vitality and the joy of the OTD experience, but also to not paint the haredi community in these sort of black-and-white, cartoonish ways.
Can you give me an example of how that might be expressed at the conference?
Seidman: Sure. We’re giving what we’re calling the “Righteous Frum Person Award.” We try to treat the Orthodox community with respect, and we want to recognize those people within the Orthodox community that treat OTD people with respect. I’m not saying there are tons of them, but there are some people in that world who have devoted a big part of their lives to that kind of openness and respect. It’s possible, and we want to recognize it and reward it, and I’m just not telling you who we’re giving it to, because it’s going to be a surprise.
“After Orthodoxy: Cultural Creativity and the Break with Tradition” will take place Sunday, Sept. 15 from 9:00 a.m.-10:00 p.m. and Monday, Sept. 16 from 10:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m. at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 15 West 16th St. Co-sponsored by the University of Toronto, the Jewish Studies Center at Hunter College, Footsteps, and Hillel (Israel). Find registration information for in-person and virtual events here.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
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