#shulem deen

[almondemotion]

Circle inside a Skver inside a cataclysm.

Ennui II

[andletforsakendidodie]

“You know anything about this blogs thing?” I asked a coworker one day. We were discussing a report in the news: Google, the search giant still barely five years old, had purchased a small start-up company that created a tool for something I had never heard of before. Blogs. It sounded like something out of a fantasy novel, vaguely Middle Earth-y. Frodo Baggins might get stuck in one. Or maybe fighting one. “They’re like diaries,” my coworker said. He was a fellow programmer, our workstations face-to-face, and he always seemed to know about tech things before I did. “But they’re online,” he added. “So they’re open to the public.” A public diary sounded both strange and intriguing. The journals I had kept through adolescence were filled with embarrassing ruminations, confessions of envy and shame and bursts of self-loathing. I would’ve been horrified had anyone read them. Yet I would write as if for an audience, crafting careful sentences, adding a literary flourish here, a flash of humor there, as if nothing was truly worth writing if it wasn’t worth reading. It turned out that blogs weren’t exactly diaries, at least not the blogs weren’t exactly diaries, at least not the blogs I would come across.

All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen

[jewishbookworld]

A River Could be a Tree by Angela Himsel

A River Could be a Tree by Angela Himsel

Foreword by Shulem Deen

How does a woman who grew up in rural Indiana as a fundamentalist Christian end up a practicing Jew in New York?

Angela Himsel was raised in a German-American family, one of eleven children who shared a single bathroom in their rented ramshackle farmhouse in Indiana. The Himsels followed an evangelical branch of Christianity—the Worldwide Church of God—which espoused a…

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[omgwtfbible]

OMGWTFIBLE on Unorthodox

I was the Guest Jew on this week’s episode of Unorthodox and it was superfun! You can hear the episode here:

Also, if you just listened to Unorthodox and came here, check…

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[jewishbookworld]

All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir by Shulem Deen

All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir by Shulem Deen

The book at Amazon and on Kindle

A moving and revealing exploration of ultra-Orthodox Judaism and one man’s loss of faith

Shulem Deen was raised to believe that questions are dangerous. As a member of the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the US, he knows little about the outside world—only that it is to be shunned. His marriage at eighteen is arranged and several children soon…

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[dr-treyf]

“Well, of course!” [the Satmarer] cried, spreading his arms wide and holding out his open palms. He knew of the Skverers and their ways. “Such meshugaas! Such fanaticism!” He wagged a bony finger in the air. “That’s what happens when you live among people so sheltered. You become an atheist.” He shook his head mournfully. “So sad.”

...

“One thing I don’t understand,” he said. “Why’d you have to go all the way to atheism? You could’ve become normal! You could’ve become Satmar!”

Shulem Deen on why he is not even modern orthodox

[thebeautyinthestruggle]