‘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,…
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….
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…
100% of profits support our journalism
