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Zalman Newfield, "Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey Out of Hasidism" (Temple UP, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I have the honor of speaking with Zalman Neufeld, Associate professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College. We're discussing his memoir, Brooklyn My Journey out of Hasidism. Zalman was born into a sect of Judaism, born in Eastern Europe more than 250 years ago, but it has since flourished in the diverse neighborhood of Crown Heights in New York City. Like every religion, Judaism is defined by its various sects, from Reconstructionist and Reform to Conservative and Orthodox. While most Jews celebrate the high holy days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the centrality of the Torah in daily life differs from Jew to Jew. Secular Jews, for example, often skip Shabbat, eat non kosher foods, and regularly interact with people of other faiths. More religious Jews, however, tend to stick to each other and make worship and Torah study the primary purpose of life. Personally, I have family across the spectrum of Judaism. My mother was raised Conservative and I was raised Reconstructionist. Moving between sex is not an easy thing. And along with the journey comes many challenges. Salman's story out of Hasidism is particularly honest and moving because it explores the challenges that come with questioning one's faith and discovering one's personal religious identity. To speak about his life and his journey as a Jew and a scholar, I'm pleased today to speak with Zalman Neufeld. Zalman, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
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Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
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B
I love getting the chance to interview New Books Network hosts in part because you know exactly how it goes. So usually it makes things a bit easier. But also I just find this book that you've written to be incredibly fascinating. I mean, I think that I find it fascinating on a personal level for, you know, based on my own personal connection. But I really think that anyone, whether or not they're Jewish, whether or not they're even religious, will find a lot in this book relate to because in many ways it's a buildings room and just about what it's like to grow up and become who you are. So I was wondering if you could just introduce yourself a little bit. Obviously we're going to get into the details of your life, but when you are giving an academic lecture, what do you say?
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Sure. Well, when I'm giving an academic lecture, I usually don't say much of anything that I'm about to say. But if you say, well, who are you? And Tell us a drop about yourself. I grew up in the Lubavitch Hasidic community in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. My parents grew up Jewish, but not Orthodox. And as adults, they joined the Lubavitch community and eventually made a home for themselves in Crown Heights. And I grew up. I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, and I grew up in Crown Heights. I was a part of, you know, the Lubavitch community. And as is typical in the Lubavitch community, which I should just say Labavic community is somewhat different and really distinct from other ultra Orthodox communities in that it has a strong kind of outreach agenda where based on theological beliefs about the coming of the Messiah and the need to help repair the world spiritually. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, the spiritual leader of the community, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, sent his followers all around the world to find and engage with less observant Jews and make them more aware of Orthodox Judaism. And so related to that, I spent time. I did a lot of different Jewish outreach activities around the world. I made a Passover Seder in Russia once. I spent a year in Singapore, I spent a summer in China, all kind of doing Lubavitch outreach activities. And at the same time, around the same time, I went through the Lubavitch educational system. And eventually, after I completed that, I took the kind of radical step for members of my community and pursued an academic, secular academic education. I got a bachelor's in psychology from Brooklyn College and eventually enrolled in the PhD program in Sociology at New York University. And after completing that, I became a professor. And so now I'm a professor of sociology and Jewish studies and at Hunter College, which is part of the cuny, the City University of New York.
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B
Right. Your life deeply enmeshed in New York. I feel like in many ways, your story is a classic New York story. Oftentimes what happens with people that are born and raised or live in New York is you just get exposed to all sorts of different ideas and culture. I want to get into a little bit about Hasidism, for those who don't know what it is. So I think that Jewish people have a decent understanding of what the different sects are. But for those who aren't Jewish, could you just give a brief overview of Hasidism and where it fits into the broader spectrum of Judaism?
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Sure. So since the modern period, since the 1700s to 1800s, with the advent of the European Enlightenment, there developed the kind of Jewish corollary called The Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment. And with that, along with the changes in the political and social status of Jews in Europe, becoming sort of full citizens, equal citizens, equal to their non Jewish neighbors, they developed a system of Jewish denominations. So for a long time before that, there wasn't this kind of clearly demarcated grouping of Jews. But over the past couple of hundred years, there's developed first the Reform movement and then the Conservative movement, which were both essentially liberal denominations of Judaism that tried to modernize Judaism and make it more in line with the kind of secular Western norms of society. And in response to that, there developed an Orthodox movement that really tried to hold on to what it saw as every aspect, even the kind of minute details of Jewish law. And part of the Orthodox movement is sometimes called the ultra Orthodox or in Hebrew, the Haredi movement. Haredi comes from a phrase in the Bible, those who tremble before God. But basically these are the kind of very devout Jews. And one part of the ultra Orthodox community is the Hasidic community. Hasidism was a movement in Judaism that developed in Eastern Europe, founded by the BAAL Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name. He developed this kind of pietistic movement of Judaism in the 1700s. And he had numerous disciples. And they had disciples. And one of the. The disciples of the BAAL Shem Tov's disciple was a man named Schneer Zalman of Liadi. And he was the founder of the Lubavitch sect of Hasidism. He also happens to be my namesake. I was named after him. This is a very common practice in the Hasidic community for parents to name their children after the Rebbes, if they're boys. The Rebbes, the spiritual leaders of the Hasidic movement, if they're girls, they name them sometimes after the Rebbetzins, the wives of the Rebbes of their Hasidic community. And so the Lubavitch Hasidic community was sort of centered in a town in Russia called Lubavitchi. That's where it gets its name, Lubavitch. And in response to all the developments in, in Europe with Stalinism and Nazism, many Hasidim members of the Hasidic community tried to escape Europe. And some of them eventually ended up in America. The sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe Yosef Schneerson, came to America in the late 1930s. And then his son in law, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, came and in 1940, and when Yosefsk Nirsen passed away in 1950. Eventually, his son in law, younger son in law, Menachem Mendel, became the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe. And when I was born in the 1980s, the Menachem Endo Schneersin was already sort of world renowned and had a very strong following that was centered in Crown Heights, but had had offshoots, had communities that were very vibrant in various cities around America as well as throughout the world. And that was the community that I grew up in.
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B
Right. You mention Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and for anyone who's walked around New York at all, they'll recognize that, you know, there's posters everywhere, seemingly of his face, you know, with, you know, saying that, basically referring to him as Mashiach, which is the word for Messiah. And your book begins in the introduction with this incredible story of your experience seeing him and just the excitement that he was going to finally reveal that he was the Messiah. What was it like growing up in this community with this person, this figure that people thought was the Messiah?
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Yes, and many labavichers still do think he was a Messiah, notwithstanding the fact that he passed away in 1994. Right. So, yes. I mean, a basic distinguishing characteristic of all Hasidic communities is that they have a Rebbe. They have a spiritual leader. He's not just a rabbi, a kind of religious legal scholar, but actually a spiritual person who is believed to be the kind of intermediary, the connector, if you will, between the devout and God. So that exists in all Hasidic communities. And there are many Hasidic communities. Some of them have a lot of followers, like the Satmar Hasidic community, which is now kind of headquartered in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, as well as in Kiryas Joel in Orange county and Monroe in upstate New York. But. But the. The Lubavitcher Rebbe seems to have been kind of uniquely charismatic and attracted thousands and thousands of people, mostly Jews, but also some non Jews, from all around the world into his orbit, including both of my parents, as I mentioned. And. And so that would have been, so to speak, exciting enough. But it got much more exciting because starting from when the Lubavitch rebbe took on the leadership of the Lubavitch movement in the 1950s, but kind of gaining steam, especially in the later decades of his leadership in the 1980s, and then in the early 1990s, they developed this idea that the Rebbe was actually the Messiah, the Redeemer, that Jewish people have been Waiting for for thousands of years. The idea of a messianic redemption was a very strong concept within Judaism that especially seems to have been embraced during periods of crisis in Jewish history. Jews during the Inquisition or during the Crusades, during the Holoc. This idea that there's going to be a messianic redeemer that will save the Jewish people from whatever they were going through was a very powerful idea. And so when this concept, this identification of the rebbe with the Messiah became solidified, it really had a tremendous impact on the Lubavitch movement and on my own life. Because we were not just going to the 770 Eastern Parkway, the Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights. We weren't just going to the synagogue to pray with our rebbe. We weren't just going to receive a dollar from the rebbe. The rebbe would give out dollars on Sundays for charity so people could engage in this Jewish ritual. They weren't just getting a piece of lekkach, a piece of honey cake before the high from our Rebbe. We were interacting with the Messiah, the one that Jewish people throughout history were waiting for, were praying for, were singing about, were crying about. And it was a tremendous thing that we actually were in the presence of the Mashiach. And then when the rebbe had a stroke in 1992 and became largely paralyzed and was unable to speak anymore, and also, you know, he was already in his 90s. He was already a very old man. And so the question of, you know, what's going to happen to him, to the Jewish people, became that much more acute. And growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as a Lubavitcher, I was told all the time that the rebbe would not die, that the rebbe could not die because the rebbe was Mashiach, and that any day now the rebbe would reveal himself as a Mashiach. And that's the episode that you're referring to was on the anniversary in the early 1990s, at the anniversary of the rebbe's acceptance of the leadership of Lubavitch, they developed this idea that the rebbe would reveal him himself on that day. And so thousands of labavators came from all over to be present when the rebbe would reveal himself as the Messiah. Again, this was after the rebbe had a stroke. The rebbe was unable to walk. The rebbe was unable to talk. But there was this tremendous belief that the rebbe would actually reveal himself on that day to us. And so I was There as a kid, 10 years old or so, waiting for the rebbe to reveal himself. And when and at that time, because the rebbe couldn't walk, there was this kind of platform that they set up that was jutting out of one side of the synagogue, and there was a gold curtain that would surround it. And then they would open up the gold curtain to sort of reveal the rebbe sitting there. And they did this every once in a while, you know, throughout that period. And then on that night, with thousands of Hasidim of his followers singing and chanting and praying and hoping that that would be the kind of magical moment that we were waiting for, the curtain swung open. The rebbe was sitting there, clearly in a lot of pain or seemed to be in kind of discomfort and surrounded by several of his aides, his lieutenants. And instead of standing up, as I kind of imagined that there maybe would, and suddenly, you know, like a young man revealing, announcing, proclaiming that he was the Messiah, he just sat there. And after a few kind of tortured moments, the curtain swung shut. And that was the end of the event. That was it. All of the buildup, all of the hopes and prayers were kind of dashed at that moment. And for me, you know, thinking back, you know, several decades about that moment, although I didn't fully appreciate at the time, again, I was like 10 years old or something, I think that was kind of the beginning of my sense that the messages that I had been taught, the beliefs that had been instilled in me were not quite right for me, that things didn't quite line up in the way that I was led to believe they would.
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B
Right. And I think it's very powerful, you know, beginning with that story. And it definitely communicates that sense, that sort of foreshadowing of how you would begin to think about your. Your own faith. I want to talk a little bit about your parents, because they were not born into this sect of Judaism. They're. They're what's called BAAL Teshuvas. So can you talk about them and how they found themselves joining this sect?
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Sure. So, as you said, they were not born Lubavitch, they were not born Orthodox. They really came from a rather typical kind of American Jewish background. My great grandparents came to America from Eastern Europe in the late 1800s, early 1900s, like hundreds of thousands of other Jewish immigrants at the time. They got involved in kind of left wing politics. They were so socialists, they were communists. They were trying to be, quote, you know, good American, you know, citizens. And they, they stressed secular education and that their children and grandchildren should, you know, learn English, should know English, should get advanced degrees, should become professionals and all that kind of thing. And then my mother, while she was in college, and then my. My father, while he was in medical school, the kind of got exposed to Lubavitch rabbis, and through those rabbis, got connected to the Lubavitch movement, and eventually kind of saw the Lubavitcher Rebbe at public gatherings. And it seems like they were kind of enamored by this lifestyle that was so different from their own upbringing and their own form of Judaism. And. And, you know, for me, as someone who grew up in Lubavitch community and then eventually left it, you know, I have a lot of kind of questions. And, you know, there was, for a time, a lot of, you know, anger and frustration. You know, why did my parents join this group? And, like, if they didn't join this group, you know, hypothetically, I could have been born in a regular kind of Jewish secular environment, and I would go to college, and it would be sort of an obvious thing that that's what would be my trajectory. And instead, I had all this kind of drama and trauma related to, you know, who I am and where I. Where I belong and should I go to college, and if so, what should I do with my life and all these things, you know. But the reality is, I mean, the way I think of it now anyway, is that my parents, you know, were like everyone in the world, trying to figure out what they should do with their life and what made sense to them. And for whatever personal reasons and social reasons, they felt that the best path for them would be to join the Lubavitch community and become devout believers in the Lubavitch Rebbe and accept all of the religious practices and obligations of the Lubavitch lifestyle. And that's what they did. And a lot of people, when they hear my story, they're kind of shocked, especially when they hear that I was the Shivas. The religious schools that I attended, they didn't teach any secular studies whatsoever. They didn't teach the ABCs. They didn't teach even, you know, a smidge of mathematics, let alone social sciences or physical sciences. And they say, well, how could your parents have done that to you? You know, especially your father. He went to, you know, a kind of fancy college, a fancy medical school, you know, and, you know, how could they do this? This seems like some kind of neg. And while I certainly understand where the question's coming from, to me it seems that they're missing the fact that they don't fully appreciate the fact that I certainly believe and understand that my parents always loved their children very dearly and only did what they thought was best for their children. It's just that they had a different kind of yardstick for determining what would be the best for their children. Because they joined the Lubavitch community and fully embraced the kind of doctrines and beliefs of the Lubavitch community. They believed that the most important thing for a Jewish person was not to get a fancy diploma or to become a professional and have a kind of secure source of income. The most important thing was to protect the purity of their soul and to ensure their spiritual security and safety. And they felt as a result, that for their children, especially for their boys, to be exposed to secular studies, as the Lubavitcher Rebbe taught, these were things that were spiritually contaminating and could endanger the Jewish soul. And so therefore, they wholeheartedly embraced the restrictive religious curriculum that was on offer. At the Lubavitch schools we attended, you
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went to quite a few different schools. You moved around a bit. Obviously, Crown Heights is where in many ways, it's the heart and center of Hasidism. But as you point out before, there's other communities in New Jersey and elsewhere. What was it like going to these different places? Was it just for you, like, you know, the same experience, but in a slightly different location? How did you experience this. This constant moving around?
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Yeah, so I should just say that a few things. Number one, just to explain to listeners, like, when I was very young, my family lived in Crown Heights. Then for three years, they moved to Morristown, New Jersey, which has a strong Labavic community there. Then they moved back. And ever since then, they, My parents and my family lived back in Crown Heights. But I, as was customary, is customary still for many Lubavitch boys. I attended Lubavitch yeshivas in various locations. I went to high school in Chicago for two years. I went to yeshiva in Miami. I went to yeshiva in Argentina. I went to. Then back to yeshiva in New Jersey. And this is very common. Some people think, oh, this is like a sign that I was like a. Like a troublemaker and I needed to get shipped around. But. But it had nothing to do with it. This was a very common practice in Lubavitch because there are Lubavitch communities all over. And it just developed this kind of pattern that especially boys, sometimes girls, but much more so boys would end up kind of touring around different Shivas but to your question, it's kind of interesting because, again, from the outside, all above, its kind of look alike. And in some ways, you know, they really do look alike in terms of their, you know, mandated long. The men have long beards, and the men wear these fedoras, these black hats, and they have. The men and women have certain types of clothing that they're required to wear. You know, so they look kind of on the outside, very similar. And certainly they shear a great deal with each other in terms of their reverence for the Lubavitcher Rebbe and other kind of Hasidic practices, Orthodox Jewish practices and so on. At the same time, there is local particularities because, you know, regionalism. There's, you know, there's Lubavitch communities in different places. And so they take on, in some ways, some of the flavor of the environment in which they're living. So even going from Crown Heights to Morristown, New Jersey, in a sense, was a. A real shift for me. Kran Heights is a very urban environment. Everything is, you know, the asphalt jungle. Whereas you go to Marstown, it's bukalik. There's trees everywhere. And it was very strange just having so many trees around me. Thought I was living in, like, Central park or something. And also the Lubavitch community itself the again, because there's all this land that they're living in. The boys would ride bikes all over town after school. There wasn't a lot of bike riding in Crown Heights when I was growing up. The kids in Crown Heights seem like New Yorkers in general, seem to speak very fast. The kids in Morristown were just kind of a little more, you know, slow down. And when I showed up, there was this kind of disconnect. And why am I speaking so fast? And why do I have this kind of thick Brooklyn accent? And I talk about water instead of water and my mother instead of my mother and things like that. So there's definitely a period of adjustment. There was a lot of sports playing baseball, things like that, where we had much less of that growing up in Crown Heights. And definitely when I went years later, like when I spent time in Argentina, in yeshiva in Buenos Aires, even though it was Lubavitch Yeshiva, and we were, in a sense, studying the exact same curriculum that Lubavitch Yeshiva students were studying in Crown Heights or New Jersey or other parts of America, because yeshiva was in Argentina, and the majority of the students in yeshiva were Argentine, even though they were Lubavitch. There were these differences. Some of them drank Mate, which is an Argentine kind of hot drink. They were very interested in soccer that they called football. I never heard of any of the players you were talking about. I knew nothing about that. They were obviously interested and connected to Argentine history and the history of the dictatorships in Argentina. These are things I knew nothing about. They talked all the time about the. The Falkland War with England. What are you talking about? I know nothing about this. So there's definitely an extent to which the kind of national history, politics, and just culture affects the particular Lubavitch community that you're looking at.
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B
And as you're traveling and being exposed, you also. That you talk about, too, that, you know, one thing that sets apart people that come, you know, that are their parents are Baltic shuvas, is that you don't have that same network of cousins that other Hasidic Jews will have. You know, you have slightly more secular cousins, more secular family members, secular uncles. What. What did this. You know, what was it like for you? Like navigating, learning about things outside of Judaism and your. And your interests. And then also, you know, the. The challenges, the sh. Came from being interested in things that weren't necessarily sanctioned.
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Yeah. So definitely, again, in some ways, I was just like any other Labavic kid in my class. Again, we looked very similar, we dressed the same way. We were taught all the same things. But there was something different about me because my parents joined the Lubavitch community from the outside. And in Lubavitch, there's this idea of gezha, which it's a kind of like a social class. Gezha comes from the Russian word. It means roots, and it refers to kind of the Lubavitch blue bloods, the Lubavitchers, that could chart their personal family history all the way back to Russia. And their great, great grandparents knew previous Lubavitcher rebbes and all this kind of thing. Obviously, I didn't have. And so instead, my parents were essentially called Zuge kumener, which is a Yiddish word for the newcomers. The Johnny come lately. And it's interesting, on the one hand, there wasn't necessarily kind of an explicit denigration of the newcomers. And if anything, there's at least on a kind of ideological level, a rhetorical level, there's all this talk about how baleshuva, the people who join the Lubavitch community, they have this very high spiritual social status because they overcame so many challenges to change their life and join the movement. But at the same time, there's certainly a Kind of privileging of the blue bloods. And definitely for a long time, the blue bloods were the main people who were running the Labavich organizations, and they were kind of the lieutenants of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. So they had that. But on a kind of daily level, day to day level, I didn't necessarily feel excluded. The idea that I was actually excluded or my family was in some way excluded or on a kind of a lower social status only became clear to me once my siblings and I started to date within the Lubavitch community. And suddenly it became very clear, oh, we have a kind of strike against us. And, you know, there's a complicated hierarchy in terms of dating. I could go into it, but definitely being not only a Balshuva, but the children of Bali Chuva, you definitely get a kind of a nick against you in the dating. Lulubavitch dating market. So that was that. But on the other hand, there's this part of what you were kind of alluding to. I had all of these. My whole extended family were non Orthodox Jews. And because my parents allowed us to kind of stay connected to them growing up, we would visit my great aunt, who had a place in Southampton in Long island, and she would have this big Thanksgiving dinner, and she'd invite all of our relatives and friends of hers. And. And of course, we didn't eat the food there. It wasn't kosher. We brought our own food from Crown Heights. But we were still in that environment. We walk around for hours, greeting everyone, talking to people. And we were definitely kind of exposed to this other culture, this kind of secular culture. And my aunt, that aunt in particular, she was a world traveler. She would go to India, she'd go to the Middle east, and she'd bring back all of these artifacts. And her houses were kind of full of these artifacts. And. And that actually caused some problems because she seemed to have a penchant for crucifixes, Buddha statues, naked figures, all of these things. Pigs. All of these things were problematic from Orthodox Jewish perspective. And so at least we would stay in the. My aunt had a inn, so we would stay at her inn. And my mother would. Every time we would go there, as soon as we kind of landed, she would scour the rooms that we were going to stay in and take. Collect all of these kind of forbidden objects, images, and hide them and then only take them out again when we were leaving. And so we didn't see much of them, but I kind of knew about their existence. And definitely knew of the existence and had, you know, real connections with my non Orthodox relatives. And it definitely gave me some sense of the outside world, even though, you know, we didn't hang out every week or something. But we did meet them, you know, on a regular basis throughout the year. And it gave me some window into the outside world beyond Lubavitch, beyond Orthodox Judaism. And I think that's the kind of exposure or the kind of awareness that most Lubavitchers, and certainly most Hasidic Jews from other groups where they're not interacting with non Orthodox or non Jewish people, really don't have that kind of exposure. And so for me, when I was in college already, when I was thinking about, or even thinking about going to college, it was still foreign to me, definitely, but maybe less foreign than it would have been without that earlier exposure.
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B
Could you talk a little bit about the experience of learning to read and write English? And I think as you talk about earlier, the experience in the yeshivas is you're studying the Torah, you're reading Hebrew, you're speaking in Yiddish even at home, you know, you don't. You speak a combination of English and Yiddish that you call Yinglish. How did you actually learn English? What age were you?
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A
Right. So this. This was a big issue in my life because as I alluded to before, the Labava charity felt very strongly that is that. That. That learning secular studies, including, you know, things as kind of seemingly benign as, you know, learning to read English, was actually morally problematic or corrupting. And so all of the Lubavitch schools, yeshivas that I attended up till sort of college age, my late teens, my early 20s, none of them taught any secular studies whatsoever. Not only that, but. But secular or English books, secular books were strictly forbidden. This was things that could get you in trouble in the yeshiva. So when I was kind of in my mid teens, I realized that this was a problem, that I don't know how to read English. And. And this was really. And I kind of lacked facility with the English language. This was brought home to me when I went with my father to get a passport. So as a good Lubavitcher, my father assumed that I would be doing traveling for Lubavitch outreach activities at some point in my life. And he figured, might as well get the passport now, and we'll just kind of have it whenever we need it. It. But in order to get a passport, there's a whole form you need to fill out. So my father helpfully filled out the form for me in Advance. But he left blank the section where you have to sign your name, because you're supposed to do that in front of the clerk when you submit the form. So he went to the post office to submit the form, and the clerk looks at it and says, oh, you have to sign it. And my father says, okay, you know, we'll. We'll go on to the side and we'll, we'll practice. And the clerk was having none of it. And she's like, she slipped a piece of paper under the bulletproof window, and she's like, practice right over here. Maybe she thought my father would just sign it for me. Whatever. So I looked at my father. I'm like, I have no idea how to sign my name in English. I can't even barely write it in English. And so my father very slowly wrote out in cursive my English name or my name in English. And then he gave me the pen, and I kind of wrote over his signature. I wrote over that a few times to kind of get the hang of it. Then he said, okay, that's good enough. And then he gave me the actual form and was like, well, just do it here. And so I kind of scribbled something. It was terrible, but maybe the clerk had mercy on me. And she's like, okay, good enough. And so she took it. And I did get a passport. But I realized, like, this is ridiculous. I was 15 or 16 and I couldn't sign my name. And I also really couldn't read English. So I asked my uncle, my mother's brother Jeff, who's not orthodox. I told him that I really wanted to learn English, and he said, oh, no problem. And so he actually arranged. He got me a kind of English workbook, like for second graders. You know, very, very basic stuff. Like the boy went to the store and he gave it to me, or he gave me pages of it, and then I would fill them out secretly. When I was at yeshiva, I needed do it in secret because I was worried that I would get kicked out of the yeshiva if it was discovered what I was up to. So I secretly filled out these papers. I'd mail it back to him. He would mail me more papers, more of these pages from the workbook. And eventually I got through a bunch of the workbook. And then slowly I started again in my mid teens to read children's books. The first thing I tackled were several volumes from the great illustrated series, which is really a wonderful series because it takes classics from Western literature. The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, White Fang, you know, Tom Huckleberry Finn or whatever, but they rewrite it for, you know, the children to be able to easily understand it. And also every other page in the book is a picture, so you only have to read half the amount of text in order to finish a book. And I found this very manageable. And so I read a bunch of these books, and then I read some other kind of children's books. And then I was like, 16, 17, and then the next thing I knew, I was reading history, Lucy Dwidovic's history, the War against the Jews, about the Holocaust. And then I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's one volume of Solzhenitsyn's the Gulag Archipelago, about the Stalinist gulags. And then I was just kind of off to the races, and I fell in love with reading and secular books and secular knowledge. And I have been obsessed with secular books ever since.
- [41:35]
B
Wow. Yeah. It's very remarkable, I think, think to hear that story and to. I think, in many ways, like, you know, it's easy to take books or reading for. For granted, especially in, you know, in an age where you can get. Seemingly get everything online. Like, you know, for you, it really was something that, you know, you, I think, fully appreciated because. Because it wasn't something that you were allowed to even interact with. And what I find so interesting, too, is, you know, part of your story. You know, you talk about, you've mentioned, you know, your experience in Argentina and your experience in New Jersey and elsewhere, but you really did travel around the world, and these experiences impacted you because of the types of people that you interacted with. And in particular, I was wondering if you could talk about your time in China, what that was like for you, and how it kind of helped to, you know, to impact how you thought about not just, you know, being exposed to secular ideas, but also just how you thought about your own Jewish faith.
- [42:41]
A
Right. So definitely, as I said before, it's common practice for Lubavitchers, especially boys, to go around the world for, you know, their yeshiva study, their religious study, as well as for these kind of outreach activities. And because Lubavitch does this, and they've been doing this for decades now, there is an understanding that when people are being sent all around the world and they're interacting with non Orthodox Jews or non Jews, they might be influenced by their surroundings. So there's this whole kind of discourse within Lubavitch about how, yes, we're going to different places, but we're going to bring them Our Judaism, we're not going to be influenced by them and that they think of it very much as a kind of one directional exchange. We're going to bring them the truth. We're not going to hear their kind of lies or distortions or corruption or whatever. But of course, things don't always work out as planned. And I'm certainly not the first Labavicher to be influenced in some way by their surroundings. I would argue probably everyone is to different extents, but definitely for me, the reading that I was doing secretly in the yeshivas, eventually this became my kind of primary occupation in yeshiva, while I was supposed to be studying the Talmud or Hasidic philosophy. I was really kind of just showing up to get marked off as present and then secretly running into my dorm upstairs to read my forbidden books. So all of this kind of forbidden reading coalesced and came together with my travels, because suddenly I was out in the world with various degrees of surveillance or supervision from the Labavic community. But I was out kind of in the world and seeing different people and cultures, and I found it all extremely enticing. And so. So for example, when I went to Russia with a friend of mine to make a Passover Seder, I had already read the Gogun Archipelago, and I knew a little bit about Stalinism and the Russian Revolution or whatever, and I really wanted to see there's a Lenin's embalmed body that's on display in the Krasna Pl in the Red Square. And so I was very eager to see that. But then my friend, who I call Alter in the book, my companion Lubavitch rabbinical student, once we heard that you need to take off your hat in order to go into the mausoleum. He was like, absolutely not. The Communists, they've spent decades trying to get Jews to take off their yarmulkes, their skull caps. The last thing we're going to do is give them this momentary victory of having yeshiva students take off their skull caps. So that was that. But then by the time I went to China several years later, although I was still very much Lubavitch, and we were on a Lubavitch mission to do Lubavitch outreach. But at the same time, I did want to kind of explore China somewhat. So once I had the opportunity, once I was there, I made friends with someone who was actually Jewish, a non Orthodox Jew who spoke Chinese, and I had him give me a tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing. And I also went to Tianjin, the Temple of Heaven, which is, I think, It's a Buddhist temple. And even though there's issues about statues and whether you could have graven images of people in the image, statues, the image of a person, and whether this is idolatry and all these kind of Jewish legal problems, but I was not concerned about that at that time. I just wanted to go to the temple. I wanted to see what was on offer, what was going on. And I think again, even though I was still very Lubavitch in all sorts of ways at that point, it became clear to me that I did want to engage sort of with the outside world, with the secular or non Jewish world. And even if there were these kind of Jewish legal questions, like those, you know, just didn't concern me. I wanted to know what was going on out there. I wanted to know what other people believed and how they worshiped. And that all of this was kind of fascinating to me in a way that I felt I couldn't and I didn't want to refrain from, or hold back from exploring.
- [47:50]
B
Right. Yeah, it's amazing in a way, the amount of travel that you did. And I think it's amazing to me that people do the amount of travel that they do and that more people don't become secularized. In a way, you know, it's pretty remarkable. I, I think you, you, you talk about how these travel experiences, you know, and, and just your curiosity about the world eventually leads you to want to pursue higher education, secular higher education. What was it like for you, you know, telling your parents that you were going to do this, that you were essentially going to, you know, begin the process of, of embracing, you know, the non aspects of the non Jewish world.
- [48:44]
A
It was terrifying. It really was, because I love my parents very deeply and, and I knew that they loved me. At the same time, I knew that they were devout labavichers and that they accepted the view of the Lubavitcher Rebbe that secular education in general and colleges in particular were morally corrupting places. And for me to go to college was really a real taboo, that this was something that we just didn't do, this was something that would be shameful to do do. And so I was terrified to kind of break the news to my parents, especially my mother, because my mother, she's sort of the defender of the faith within my family. I mean, my father is very religious, but he's just a sort of quieter person. My mother has a very strong personality and feels very much that she has to kind of protect her family religiously. And so I knew I would be going up against my mother, which I did not relish. At the same time, at that point in my life, having read so many secular books and had. Having had so many kind of close connections with various non Orthodox Jews, including one woman that I met in Singapore who was actually a Jewish American woman, non Orthodox woman, and she was a professor of all things. She was a college professor. And, you know, I think this is a perfect example of how, you know, meeting certain people could really influence your life. You know, the fact that she wasn't just this really smart and, you know, book smart and, like, knowledgeable person, but she was actually a professor. And she. We arranged, you know, I came and observed one of her classes once. And just having this kind of direct exposure to college, to professors talking about what college is like, it suddenly just felt like this was the thing I had to do. How could I not go to college again? At that time, I didn't think, oh, if I go to college, or I didn't have a plan, well, I'm going to go to college and then I'm going to stop being Orthodox or something like that. It wasn't part of this kind of total scheme or something, but I definitely felt like I needed to go to college. And so I told my mother on the phone while I was in Singapore doing Lubavitch outreach for the year. I told her that I was going to go to college when I came back to the States, and she burst out crying, and she was absolutely devastated and told me that this would ruin my life. What decent Labovich woman would want to marry a college boy? And, like, this was a really terrible moment for her. I mean, for me, it was very upsetting to me, but it was really a terrible moment for her that her son, one of her sons, who she had all these hopes that he would be a Lubavitch rabbi and he would be a kind of upstanding member of the Lubavitch Hasidic community, suddenly says that he wants to go to college and, you know, become a professional. And it was terrible. I mean, it was a really. It was a terrible time in my life, in a way. And I felt terrible the whole time that I was kind of putting my mother through this, that this was something that was obviously so upsetting to my mother and that I was sort of the cause of this pain that she was enduring. And at the same time, I felt like, well, I needed to do this for me and that I couldn't just live my life based on her lights and what made sense for Her I needed to do. Do what was appropriate for me, and that this was, you know, something that. That I wanted to do and I felt I needed to do. And so I eventually. Did
- [52:41]
B
you talk about this, this period of your life where, you know, there's various moments, you know, from the fact, you know, just the internal questioning, you know, mentally, you know, you don't feel, you know, Hasidic anymore. Outwardly, you look Hasidic. You're interacting with.
- [52:59]
A
With.
- [52:59]
B
With more liberal and secular Jews who have different ideas, different ideas about gender relations, different ideas about what's important versus following the law, versus a commitment to social justice. This period of. Of, you know, essentially like, becoming who you are today and the challenges of it. Could you just talk a little bit about what it was like and, and really like the, you know, the moment where you finally shave your beard and how that kind of then sets you on the path to your new life?
- [53:34]
A
Yeah. So I definitely think that shaving my beard was one of these kind of key moments in my life trajectory. Because it's one thing to have a secret stash of books in your home or in yeshiva and read things that you're not supposed to or even kind of visit something you're not supposed to visit, whatever. But you could always, so to speak, come back home. You could always come back to Crown Heights and kind of blend in to the rest of the Lubavitch population. But once you shave your beard, and again, in the Lubavitch community, in the Hasidic community, it's strictly forbidden for men to shave their beard or trim their beard at all. This is a very. This is considered, according to them, like a biblical commandment or a biblical injunction against doing something. This on par with eating pork or something like that, or desecrating the Sabbath. This is absolutely a kind of key rule in Jewish law. And so to do this is a kind of gross violation of Jewish law as well as Hasidic custom. But the point is that it's visible. It's something that everyone could see, even Khazr, even eating pork, which is been considered taboo for thousands of years in Judaism. Someone could eat pork and then turn around and go to the synagogue or whatever. Now, maybe in their own mind, they might feel different and what have you, but no one would necessarily know what they did. And it could potentially be kind of overcome. But when you shave your beard, this is a visible marker that you have changed, that you are different, that you are a deserter, or at least. Least someone who is no longer quite with the program the way you were before. And so I was absolutely terrified of shaving my beard. And then I was terrified of telling my parents that I shaved my beard. But again, I felt at that point, as you said, I had already gone through such a transformation in terms of who I was internally, how I thought about myself. You know, at that point, I was already a kind of confirmed atheist. I didn't believe in God. I didn't believe in the supernatural powers of the Rebbe that I was taught to believe. Growing up, you know, I had changed so much about my own thinking and morals, and it was just that externally I looked like a labavicher. I looked like all the other Lubavitchers. And that that itself caused a lot of pain for me because there was this kind of disconnect between how I appear and who I felt I actually was. And so this was a really important step for me to go ahead and shave. But it really took me several years. I mean, again, even for me thinking back, I'm like, what took me so long? Well, it took me so long because, a, I was just kind of terrified of doing it. This seemed like such a drastic thing to do, and I was terrified because I knew it would cause tremendous pain to my parents. And I love them and I didn't want to cause them pain. But eventually I just felt so strongly that I needed to live my life in a way that was in harmony with who I was and who I wanted to be, rather than what my parents wanted me to be.
- [56:55]
B
Yeah. And I think, you know, that's a story in a way that everyone can relate to. Obviously yours is a, is a more challenging, extreme version because it's so much tied to this community where there is this, this ethos of, you know, you have to, to, you know, look a certain way, you have to have certain practices, and any divergence from that is, is really seen as, you know, as, as the worst thing that, that, that you can really do. I, I, I, I think then in your story that you tell, once you've, you've kind of you, your, your new, your new identity, you then end up meeting someone who, who ends up becoming your, your life partner, your wife. Could you talk about what this experience is like and just a little bit about what dating was like is like in the Hasidic community compared to what it was like for you after leaving?
- [57:57]
A
Yeah. So dating, the Hasidic community is, is very, very different from sort of secular, mainstream American dating styles, you know, so for one thing, in the Hasidic community, Men and women are not supposed to even touch each other, even sort of shake each other's hand, whatever. Any other kind of, you know, touching is sort of strictly forbidden and related to that and also just to the purpose of dating. As far as the Hasidic community is concerned, the purpose is to find your life partner, someone who you're able to build a Jewish family with, with and have many Jewish children. And so that's really the whole purpose. It's not to have fun, to have enjoyment. Like, none of that is really part of or thought of as being central to the dating process. Also, because the Lubavitch community is really profoundly gender segregated, not only are men and women separated during prayer or in prayer services or, you know, at school or things like that, but even, you know, in the home, if, you know, if. For a Friday night dinner, if my sisters had friends over, they'd often be on one side of the table, and we would be on the. The men would be on the other, and we weren't really supposed to interact with them. Some families, they even put the women in a different room, you know, for a Friday night dinner, let's say, if there's men over. So. And if you're walking down the street, like, you're not supposed to. Young boy, you know, teenage boys and girls, or young boy. Men and women are not supposed to speak to each other. So in that kind of environment, it's just very difficult, if not impossible, to even meet, you know, a prospective, you know, date. So there's shatranim, there's matchmakers, and they're the ones who kind of, you know, pull this thing together. They have lists of names of men and women, and they kind of help people to try to set them up. It's not clear how much they know about these people. Sometimes it seems like they might just kind of pull their name out of a hat, whatever. But even if they do know something about them, you know, how much could they really know about all these people? And so they're just kind of setting up these men and women to go out on dates. And the dates, typically, you know, they last a few hours. They're in public places, like at a park, in a. An airport lobby or something, a hotel lobby. But the idea is you're not supposed to kind of go into a secluded place together, and then you meet each other a few times. And after that, you're really supposed to make a decision, do you want to get married or not? And if you go out more than five, six times, the shots can start calling you up, saying, okay, you know, make a decision already. Why are you wasting time? You know, so it's very sort of utilitarian. The whole structure is designed to get people who don't know each other at all to make a decision very, very quickly about who they're going to spend the rest of their life with. Obviously, things are quite different in the kind of secular dating world. And so I actually went on two of these kind of Lubavitch dates, and they were really disasters because I was in a totally different place at that point. Again, I had my Lubavitch beard. I looked the part. But I was in college, and I was already just mentally in such a different place and was really looking for someone who was much more worldly. And eventually, once I started grad school, I was trying to figure out how I'm going to find, you know, my life partner, because I had this complicated background, even though, you know, at that point I was living a kind of secular Jewish lifestyle. But I grew up Lubavitch. I had all these Lubavitch siblings, my Lubavitch parents, and my own, you know, adventures and, like, how. How would this work out? And I actually used online dating service. And I just happened to meet Jenny, became my wife. And it was really fortuitous because it's still not clear to me really, how this all would have worked out if we didn't just happen to meet, because I had such different experiences from this sort of typical secular American Jewish person.
- [62:37]
B
Yeah. The way that you describe your wedding and the whole, you know, you go into this, you know, talking about the ways that weddings occur in Orthodox Judaism, obviously, you know, in secular weddings, it can depend. It's very dependent on what people want. And, you know, it's very interesting how you describe that feeling and this kind of shift. And I'm wondering, you know, just to, you know, to talk more generally, too, just about your life now. You know, you're married, you have children, you know, you're an atheist, but you still are culturally Jewish. You know, in a way, how is it like for you now, you know, with your family and, you know, just with your own children, how you think about raising them, the way in which you feel connected to your Judaism, what has that been like for you?
- [63:35]
A
Right. So Judaism, my Judaism, my Jewish identity, my understanding of my Judaism has shifted a great deal over time. And as you say, now I would consider myself a sort of cultural Jew. But if Jenny, if my wife was here, she would snort because I'm very Jewishly. Observant in a certain way. And so basically, for example, we have Friday night dinner. Every Friday night, we light the. The Shabbat candles before the Sabbath starts. We go to synagogue, a kind of liberal Jewish synagogue, every Saturday morning. That's very observant for most kind of American Jews. We observe all the Jewish holidays and things like that. And so there's a few things I could say. One is, I could say it's Jenny's fault that Jenny definitely, when we were dating, was much more observant than I was. And I remember. So I do a lot of these Jewish rituals, but I don't do the fasts. And so I remember the year when we started dating. Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holiday, came around a day of repentance, and Jenny was going to synagogue, and I was staying home, of all things, to work on a paper about Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology, himself a noted secular Jew, French Jew, descendant of a long line of rabbis. Anyway, I was sitting at home working on this paper on Durkheim, and I had lunch. Like, anyone who worked a long day, then you have lunch. And so I had this chicken sandwich. And when Jenny got wind of it, she's like, like, what's going on over here? Like, everyone fasts on Yom Kippur. I'm like, well, not everyone. I don't, you know. So definitely Jenny was more religious than I was, religiously observant. And definitely, you know, I felt that essentially to be married to her, you know, it kind of made sense to go along with her sort of higher standard of religious observance. And so someone might say, oh, well, if you're doing all these things, how different is it really from your upbringing? And the answer is, for me, it's profoundly different. Aside from the fact that we've sort of jettisoned particular, you know, prayers or things that we find morally objectionable or whatever. But the general thing, I would say it's very different because. Because growing up, the basic understanding of Jewish practice, of Jewish ritual, was based on this idea of kabalos, o malchoshamayim, of the acceptance of the yoke of heaven, that religious obligations are obligations. These are things that you must follow because God exists. God wrote the Torah. God demands that you follow all of these laws and customs, and that if you don't, you know, bad things will happen to you, and so on. For me now, my whole engagement with Judaism is rooted or based on a completely different understanding. I feel like it's all based on my choice. So I do these things because I enjoy them. I do them because I find them meaningful. I do them because it connects me to my Jewish heritage, and that's a meaningful thing for me to do. But if there's anything in Jewish ritual that I don't find meaningful, for instance fasting, I don't do it. That's it. I just don't do it, even if other people around me are doing it. So I'll go to Yom Kippur services, but I'm not fasting ever, because that's not something that I find meaningful. So for me, I feel like regardless of exactly my kind of level of observance, I feel like it's experientially totally different because it's rooted in my choice and my own decisions about how to practice my Judaism.
- [67:51]
B
I think your story is really interesting for so many reasons. I think while I was raised in Reconstructionist Judaism, which is a pretty secular form of Judaism, I remember speaking with my rabbi once, asking him if he believed in God. And he said. He paused for a moment, for a while and said, well, I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out. He was in the 70s saying this. So, you know, there's many different. I think in many ways the type of Judaism I was raised in is probably quite similar to actually the type of Judaism that you practice now, which is that, you know, you pick and choose and, you know, you get to have the aspects of community that are really quite wonderful and the ritual, but at the same time, too, they're, you know, you get to explore. Explore things from the outside world. And. And I think also too, you know, you know, for different people, you know, I've had family that have done similar things as your parents where they've gone from being more secular to becoming much more religious. And for certain people, this is the right decision. You know, it makes sense for. For their lives. But I do think, you know, your story is just extremely interesting to think about how. How the sort of the journey that people go on, the spiritual journey that people go on, and the intellectual journey as well. It's obviously, this is something that for your work, you study this. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about just to sort of end things moving forward with your life as you're teaching students. If you ever encounter students in similar positions as you, whether or not they're coming from Hasidic background or just a more religious background, and thinking about how can they balance being interested in maybe more secular things alongside more, more of religious practices that they might have come from.
- [69:43]
A
Yeah, so I, I, I teach a course on contemporary Hasidic culture at, at my school, and most of the students are, are not, not orthodox, but we often get, you know, a handful of those who are, and we occasionally get into conversations about people's personal religious, you know, observance. And even though clearly that's not the focus of the course, like, you know, I tell them from the beginning, you know, we're not here. This is not a course to missionize people, to get them to, you know, believe certain things or not believe certain things. You know, the, the purpose is it's a, basically a, a course rooted in, in the social sciences, trying to understand the Hasidic community on its own terms, you know, but when, you know, occasionally speak, either in class or especially, you know, after class and office hours, you know, about people's personal religious faith or also just people in general, you know, because I wrote a book about, about academic book Degrees of Separation that was published in 2020 about people who grew up in the Hasidic community and left. So I occasionally get emails from people, oh, either they're going through something similar or a family member is going through something similar, and what do I think about it, or whatever. And I always say I have no ax to grind. I have no agenda. I made my own life decisions based on what I thought was best for me. But everyone should make life choices based on what's best for them. And if they feel that the best thing for them is to stay in the Hasidic community, then that's wonderful. If they think the best thing for them is to kind of migrate from the Hasidic community to a more liberal form of Orthodox Judaism like Modern Orthodoxy, you know, that's great, too. If they think that neither of those options are suitable for them and they want to kind of go farther afield, that's also great. Like, I really have no ax to grind, and I certainly don't think that because this is what I personally went through and these are the personal decisions that I made, that this is appropriate for everyone else or that this is what other people should do. So everyone needs to look into their own heart and their own soul and figure out what's appropriate for them to do and not kind of look at others and say, well, they did this, so therefore I should do that too.
- [72:23]
B
I definitely recommend that listeners, especially if they've made it to the end, you know, definitely read Brooklyn Odyssey. There's so much that we we didn't cover. And you really go in, in sort of granular detail, looking at the ways in which your views on certain topics changed, how your, you know, the structure of your own belief was modified by your life experiences, by things that happen with your family, people that you encountered, different ideas. And I think, you know, Brooklyn Odyssey is a great. Such a great title because in many ways, I think that your experience just so deeply describes, in a way, the full spectrum of Judaism within New York City. There are so many different types of Jews in New York. I think outside of, you know, maybe Tel Aviv, New York is the most Jewish city in the world. And it's, you know, it's pretty. It's. It's pretty remarkable. I think all that you can find in New York alone, you know, and. Yeah, I mean, Crown Heights is. I'm. I'm a mile away from Crown Heights. And it's just I'm always so fascinated by the culture, you know, the. The mitzvah buses that. That. That drive around. And, you know, it's really wonderful to hear your story and to. And to. To learn a little bit more about this, you know, this community that you came from. And, you know, that you still, you know, that you still are, you know, very much have been shaped by and have had a lot of experience with. So. Zalman, thank you so much for being a guest on the New Books Network. It was really wonderful to have you on and to hear about your. Your life and your story.
- [73:54]
A
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation.
- [73:58]
B
Me too,
- [74:04]
A
Sam.