Judy Brown used to say her little brother was “crazy as a bat.” Nobody in her community or even in her family understood the boy who terrorized baby sitters and flapped his hands in the air. Even Brown wished he would go away. If Hashem performs miracles, she wondered, why couldn’t He “cure” her brother?…
Did NBC smear a prominent Chabad rabbi over his position on reporting child abuse to the police? The Peacock Network’s ‘Rock Center’ show on June 21 ran a story about Judy Brown, who has written for the Forward and whose bestselling book, ‘Hush,’ chronicles her spiritual journey away from the Hasidic world and discusses sexual…
As a man, I will never know what it is like to be a mother. I will certainly never know what it’s like to be a Hasidic woman expected to bear children year after year and withstand the challenges and pressures of motherhood — like the ones Judy Brown described so poignantly in her two…
On Monday on the Forward, Judy Brown shared her perspective on motherhood, based on her experience in the Hasidic community that she left. Now, I’d like to share my perspective on motherhood from within the Hasidic community of Boro Park. Having children was always important to me and I chose to remain steadfast to Haredi…
This is the thing you didn’t know: that motherhood is not all joy; that birth leaves scars forever; that often you will feel no love, only desperation. This is the thing you didn’t know: That pregnancy could fill you with that much dread, that you would weep from misery and they would call it postpartum…
When I was a little girl, there were things as clear as sunlight, as the sea God had split just for the Jews. One of those things was that dogs were despicable creatures. They were scary and dirty, with teeth like knives, and paws with claws, ripping flesh off bone, the way they’d done to…
Once, life in Brooklyn’s Boro Park was simple. There was the inside and the outside and an impenetrable wall in between. Then came the Internet, and everything changed. In the beginning, we did not fully understand. The computer seemed to be a rather innocuous box: glass screen; dark plastic, flat keyboard, and a cursor that…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis is joined by Forward Washington correspondent Nathan Guttman and Editor Jane Eisner to discuss Mitt Romney’s apparent dismissal of the two-state solution in a speech in May. Then, the group turns to Eisner’s recent editorial, in which she compares political party platforms from 2012 and 1980. They may…
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