Essays

Let me tell you a little about Yossele. No, no, not the famous one who could sing a mile and even the opera-goyim wanted him to perform for them.…

Do ex-Hasidim serve themselves well by establishing a vibrant community? Or does such community only amplify the narrative of struggle and displacement, inevitably confining them to the fringes?

Samuel Katz, a student at Stony Brook University, examines some of the ex-Hasidic community's unintended consequences.

This weekend I read a book called Fiedler on the Roof, a collection of essays about literature and Jewish identity by Leslie Fiedler. I received this book from a cyber-friend who, unaware that…

Tzomo Lecha Nafshi,

Put away the book. Put it away and listen to Kiddush. Stand up, your father’s waiting. Shhh. Come on.  Nu. Nu!  We don’t talk before grape juice, you’re a…

Rievi and I sit on rocks near the shallow stream, the water cascading over tangles of rocks, branches, and fallen tree trunks, seeking its way, as water always does, to the lowest…

I push my way out when the pressure in my head becomes unbearable. There are voices, but I can’t really hear them. There is a lot of piety around me in this shul.…

We all love sex. We like it in the darkness of night when all we can hear are the strange house noises from electrical appliances, during broad daylight with the sounds of bustling crowds around us, or as the birds begin to chirp in the wee small hours of dawn. We like to vary...
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Chasidishkeit is not a way of life; it's a way of death. It manages to take everything exciting in life - food, sex, adventure, travel - and maul it, mangle it, distort it to a point where there's little left of their original allure. It has a particularly vicious stranglehold on sex. In high schools...
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Portraying the inner workings of a religious community provides for ample camera material. Judgement was an episode on the BBC TV series Silent Witness back in 2008. A team of pathologists investigate a…

In June of 2003, I met with a writer for The Village Voice in a kosher café in Midtown Manhattan. Over a diet coke, with the writer’s recorder on the table between us, I spoke about my blog, my views on religion, and Chasidic society. I’d been hesitant, apprehensive about the inevitable publicity following...
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