Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Becoming Un-Orthodox; Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews by Lynn Davidman
Lynn Davidman’s first book, Tradition in a Rootless World (1993), was groundbreaking for its sociological analysis of the unexpected return of secular Jewish women to Orthodoxy in the United States in the seventies and eighties. Davidman’s new book, Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews, is, some ways, a companion piece. Instead of examining women who return to Jewish Orthodoxy, she focuses on Hasidic men and women who have left their communities, those whom she calls “defectors.”
Becoming Un-Orthodox makes contributions to the social scientific study of contemporary religious life, gender, and social change. Davidman shows us how leaving one’s religious community is less about loss of belief per se and more about gendered embodied practice: unlearning old practices and attempting to learn new ones. From the accessible language and focused theoretical engagements to the narrative-rich interviews, students and a wider public are most likely the intended audience.
Davidman elegantly structures her book around the processes of leaving Hasidic Judaism. The introduction provides context for herself as researcher, the research methodology and Orthodox Judaism. The next four chapters trace out each phase of defection. Chapter Two discusses the initial “tears” in the “sacred canopy,” alluding to sociologist Peter Berger’s metaphor for religious communities. Chapters Three and Four discuss “first transgressions” and “passing,” respectively, and Chapter Five unpacks “stepping out,” or exiting the community. There is a conclusion in which Davidman discusses the impossibility of completely unlearning gendered religious embodied subjectivities. The book includes two appendices, one on theoretical frameworks and the other Davidman’s interview questionnaire. There is also a useful glossary for Hebrew and Yiddish words.
The introduction to Becoming Un-Orthodox begins reflexively with Davidman’s own compelling narrative of leaving Modern Orthodoxy as a young woman. Davidman shows how her history shaped the thirty-eight “conversations” or “narratives” she recorded and analyzed. Indeed, her voice, sometimes angry, is present frequently in the text in the roughly [End Page 439] eight stories she delves into the most. Though she recorded another forty narratives in Israel, she decided not to include these, which is understandable, but would have added fascinating cross-cultural comparison. The remainder of the introduction provides background to Hasidic Judaism, a way of life particularly enacted in gendered embodied practice. Davidman also discusses the theories of narrative and embodiment that shaped her methodology. She argues that for those who leave, the two key spheres of change are in “appearance” (including dress, demeanor and comportment) and dietary laws (kashrut) (16). Davidman writes that those who are “disinscribing” (her neologism) from Hasidic Judaism do so by rejecting “the gendered Hasidic ethical framework surrounding bodily action” to adopt a more fluid understanding of bodily practice (17).
The strength of the substantive chapters that follow is the rich narratives Davidman elicits. We hear strong, distinctive voices and get a sense of the magnitude of the struggle involved in changing embodied practice. Especially valuable is Davidman’s attention to gender. We learn that leaving Hasidic communities, like being socialized into them, is gendered. For example, a turning point for men is when they stop putting on tefillin (phylacteries), while women, by contrast, often stop shaving their hair under their wigs. The narratives themselves are remembered tellings, memories of how some formerly Hasidic Jews left their communities, some many years ago and some just a few. Because of this diversity and limited historical context, the narratives can seem ahistorical. Similarly, the Hasidic communities the defectors come from are portrayed as homogeneous and static. For example, we do not hear anything about Footsteps, the organization that supports Hasidic Jews seeking to leave, which has been around for more than a decade. There have been other big changes over the past two decades in Hasidic communities, such as sexual abuse scandals, political fighting over rabbinic succession, smartphones, and an explosion of memoirs written by those who have left. The term that those who leave call themselves, “OTD,” off the derech (path...
