I was turning the pages of a popular Jewish periodical when I got to the book review section. I inhaled deeply and thought, here we go again. The review focused on a new memoir about the author’s rejection of his Jewish religious upbringing and how he found happiness at last in a life liberated from the shackles of Orthodoxy.
I could hardly be surprised. With very few exceptions, the only memoirs published in recent years that have had the word “Orthodox” associated with them and that have captured significant media attention have been anti-Orthodox, written by people who left their communities in pain and sometimes, bitterness.
I have great sympathy for any individual who feels misunderstood and stifled in a life that feels inauthentic and constricting. The mission to discover who we are meant to be, and how best to fulfill our potential, can take years of soul-searching, as well as trial and error. I respect that the process can take us in varying directions.
However, as someone who chose a Torah life more than thirty years ago, and as a journalist attuned to the secular bias of most journalists, I was pained and increasingly frustrated each time I saw another such memoir reviewed or author interviewed. Even memoirists with no previous track record as writers – no “platform,” in the parlance of book PR – were able to capture prime real estate in some of the most elite media outlets. The Jewish Book Council, a major clearinghouse of new books of Jewish interest, reviewed nearly all of them, even though they are only able to review a small fraction of new Jewish book titles.