A NYC conference celebrates the cultural creativity of formerly Orthodox Jews
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New York Jewish Week, via JTA — A haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, leader once joked to me that “few people leave Orthodoxy, but every one of them writes a book about it.”
It was a sardonic comment about popular works by Jews documenting their break with the “frum,” or religious, lifestyle, including Shulem Deen’s 2015 book “All Who Go Do Not Return” and Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir “Unorthodox,” which became the basis for the 2020 Netflix series of the same name.
While the vast majority of the formerly Orthodox have not turned their experiences into memoirs, the last few decades have seen a growing body of artistic, theatrical, musical and academic work devoted to what their creators call “OTD” Jews — an abbreviation of “off the derech,” meaning an Orthodox Jew who has left the path, or derech, of religiosity.
On Sunday and Monday, New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is hosting a conference celebrating the OTD contribution to Jewish and general culture. “After Orthodoxy: Cultural Creativity and the Break with Tradition” will feature panels, performances, art and films.
The conference fulfills a vision of Naomi Seidman, the Jackson Humanities Professor at the University of Toronto, who organized the conference with Zalman Newfield, an associate professor of sociology and Jewish studies at Hunter College.
Seidman described her idea for the conference in an interview this week. “Let’s talk about what Jewish culture owes to this experience,” she said. “Let’s talk about what we’ve accomplished, not the sensational story of how we left, and not the curiosity about what we left behind, but who we are now, and what we make of having grown up in the way we did.”
Seidman and Newfield both grew up Orthodox in Brooklyn: Seidman, born in 1960, left the Orthodox world of Borough Park when she was 18 and moved to California. “I didn’t even know the term OTD,” Seidman said. “I didn’t know there was a community.”
Newfield, born in 1982, grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic community of Crown Heights, and left in his mid-20s. He connects with the OTD community through his scholarship: His 2020 book, “Degrees of Separation,” is about identity formation among former haredi Orthodox Jews. He is also a member of the board of directors of Footsteps, a New York-based organization that helps people who have left Orthodoxy.
Content retrieved from: https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-nyc-conference-celebrates-the-cultural-creativity-of-formerly-orthodox-jews/.
