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Reviewed by:
  • The Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels
  • Roberta Rosenberg Farber
The Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels, by Hella Winston. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. 212 pp. $23.95.

Within the past five years or so there has been a spate of fiction and non-fiction books published about Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews. Most frequently studied are the Lubavitchers, the sect most open to outsiders. So when I saw advertisements for The Unchosen by Hella Winston, I optimistically expected an examination of a religiously observant community though the intriguing subject of rebellion. Winston is a doctoral student, and this book is part of the research for her dissertation. That she focuses on one of the most closed groups of all the Hasidim, the Satmar, a group descended from the Hungarian town of Satu Mare, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is presently located in Romania, made her work all the more enticing. As Winston notes, her choice of topics to examine within this community "fell into her lap" early on in her research when she found community members were willing to speak quite freely with her about their discontents. Understandably, this was a topic she could not resist.

After the Holocaust many Satmar were able to rebuild their lives and families under the compassionate direction of the Grand Rabbi R. Joel Teitlebaum in America. Today, it is estimated that there are approximately 100,000 members living in Williamsburg and Kiryas Joel in New York, London, and Jerusalem. Winston draws her subjects from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. She presents the narratives of five adults from the Satmar Hasidic community, one of whom she says is a composite of the 60 interviewees. Winston also interviews one young woman from the Lubavitch Hasidic community, who was previously interviewed by Stephanie Wellen Levine (Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls [New York University Press, 2003]). All are persons that have chosen either to live double lives, both religious and secular; or to completely break with their religious and communal roots. They are, as noted in the title of her book, rebels.

Winston is fairly successful at capturing the personal voices of her interviewees and thus, the stories are fairly interesting to read. They do, however, sound a lot like grumbling: Winston is not a skilled novelist. Of the six stories told only one is followed throughout the book. Because of the greater detail given to Yussi's journey, his is the most memorable. One senses that Winston befriended him. Winston's portrayal of Yussi's confusion when eating out in a restaurant and going out on a date outside of his community makes it clear how distinct and foreign to one another are the many cultures that overlap geographically [End Page 193] in New York City. This is perhaps the most interesting point in the book. Despite its intrinsically interesting subject, there are problems with this book.

First, Winston says she interviewed 60 persons, but there is no information about those not portrayed in the book; not even as background data against which to place the narratives she does present. While sociological analysis does not rule out the personal, it does require that the personal be placed back within the sociological context in order to illustrate and illuminate it. This is not done, and it greatly diminishes the contribution this study makes. A second problem is that in all instances, Winston takes the interviewees at their word: they are in rebellion against the constraints of their community. And perhaps they are. But the lack of context made me feel that I was listening to a series of disgruntled persons complaining about their personal lives rather than a critical analysis of life lived within a religiously observant community. What does come through are her own perceptions, which are obviously prejudiced in part by her lack of knowledge of religious life and in part due to the high regard in which she holds the qualities of individuality and freedom of expression. This would not have been such a problem if Winston had analyzed her interviewee's choices sociologically. One of her subjects for...

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