A cottage industry of memoirs detailing their writers’ journeys from restrictive “ultra-Orthodox” upbringings into the embrace of resplendent enlightenment and freedom has sprung up in recent years. Reading samples of the genre always reminds me of my own abandonment of the Jewish religious tradition in which I had been raised. I was 12.
My apostasy didn’t last. But some of the same things that pushed the Ortho-leavers in the directions they came to take bothered me greatly, too, at the time: scientific facts, social mores at radical odds with those of the observant Jewish world, non-Jew-centric world events and, more prosaic but no less discomfiting, things like dress codes, in my case it was a looming post-bar mitzvah black hat and jacket.
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