Author Archive

He has not spoken to his wife in four days. This is tolerable. After 38 years of her mounting nervous energy, a little peace and quiet is not unpleasant.
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Can you ever go home again? Baila visits her family and makes one last effort to reconnect with a world that was once hers.

When I was eighteen years old, I met Derek in the recreation room on the seventh floor of St. Vincent’s hospital.

“Baila? Your name is Baila?” he asked, sliding down the orange plastic coach until he was beside me.…

When will we read of a comprehensive investigation into the dark side of Charedi Judaism?

Imagine opening the latest issue of the New Yorker, its bright and colorful cartoon cover capturing a quintessential New York moment in pitch-perfect irony, when suddenly you stop short, stunned. The week’s feature in our city’s foremost...
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Who are we, us refugees from the Charedi world? Are we victims, broken people? Or are we wholesome assimilants to secular society?

A. M. Yehuda gives us some food for thought.

Jonathon caught a stream of the sticky cream running down my pinky with his finger. My skin tingled at his touch. Fiction by A.M. Yehuda.
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His hands are wrapped around me, my breasts up against his chest. He steps, his hips nudging my hips forward and back and suddenly to the side, the crying guitar sends his hands swinging wide, sends me spinning under…

It used to be, you could trace my crazy years with your finger, from the melted skin on my right wrist across to the map of scars and burns and scrapes that dotted my left arm, my belly, my…

“My name is Baila Rothman, I’m from Ohio, I’m sixteen, I’m new here,” I said to each of my roommates when they wandered in to the dorm that night. Deborah Lee had the bed to my right. She was…

It is early in the morning, the Hampton air is still grey and soft with the end of night. The boardwalk, stretching along the beach’s edge, is empty. In front of me, the Atlantic Ocean rolls up, slapping the…