A version of this article originally appeared in the Texas Jewish Post. Just as God works in mysterious ways, so, it seems, do human beings grow in mysterious ways. Each Jewish person decides on a particular course, as well as to the degree in which they plan on committing and investing themselves in the observance…
As a writer, I’m always looking for material. Even after I made a life-changing commitment to live as an Orthodox Jew, though, it never occurred to me to write my story. In the past decade, however, telling my story felt not only important, but also urgent. Orthodox Jews are constantly trying to explain themselves to…
In his new novel, “The World Without You,” Joshua Henkin takes a close look at the interior life of the Frankel family as they come together for a weekend at their country house in the Berkshires. They are there for a memorial service for their brother and son Leo, an interpid foreign correspondent who died…
Secular Israeli documentary filmmaker Efrat Shalom Danon made “The Dreamers” as a way to better understand her sister and a close friend — both of whom are artists who became Haredi. She wanted to better grasp the conflicts these women live with in trying to express themselves creatively while operating within the strict confines of…
When I was a student at Tel Aviv University, during my second year of college, I spent a number of Shabbatot and holidays with new friends — young women who had, like me, grown up in the States, and were now newly Orthodox — who were learning how to be religious at Neve Yerushalyaim yeshiva…
Remember Shuli Rand, the actor who took the lead role in “Ushpizin,” an internationally acclaimed Israeli movie made in 2004? Well that role is pretty much the extent of the actor’s exposure outside Israel since he returned to the ways of his Orthodox upbringing and became ba’al teshuva, or newly religious, in 1996. But in…
When I was an 18-year-old yeshiva high school graduate from Brooklyn, one of the biggest questions on the minds of my female friends and me — right after, who will get engaged next? — was, who is going to “frum out” in Israel? You know, it’s what happens during that post-high school yeshiva experience in…
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