Rebels With a Cause
Hella Winston: Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels
Reviewed by Aryeh Zuber
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“Dressed in black pants and a tailored leather jacket, her pretty face framed by shoulder-length, golden-brown hair and a pair of funky, black-rimmed glasses, Leah looks as if she would fit perfectly at a gallery opening in Chelsea, or maybe a pool hall in the East Village. Indeed, it is hard to believe that she is the person in the photograph I am holding: a young woman dressed in a long, shapeless housedress, her shaved head covered with a scarf, a newborn cradled in her arms. But if you ask Leah, she will tell you that the woman in the picture was just a very good actress, maybe one worthy of an Academy Award.”
Thus Hella Winston begins one of the many tales in her book Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels. Engagingly written, Unchosen weaves in and out of multiple narratives—that of Yossi, whose stress from living a double life leads to a nervous breakdown; Yitzchak, whose thirst for knowledge drives him to secretly read secular literature; Leah, who was sexually and physically abused as a child and whose search for a more loving connection to Judaism eventually causes her to leave Hasidism; and many more. Some of the characters still live within Hasidic communities, and keep their doubts and rebellious acts to themselves; others have left the Boro Park bubble behind in search of more liberating lifestyles. All of the characters, however, are real—they represent a sampling of the fifty or so people whom Winston interviewed and befriended in her two-year-long research project for her sociology PhD.
Americans have always been interested in people with double lives—take twentieth century superheroes, for one. And this intrigue is definitely part of what makes Unchosen so hard to put down. Another factor is probably good old voyeurism—most of Unchosen’s readers doubtless have little experience with the Satmar world, and Winston provides a window into that different lifestyle.
The main aspect that makes Unchosen so gripping, however, is the basic humanity of her characters—and the connection that one feels with them when reading about their struggles. While these people are alien in the sense that their lifestyles are completely foreign to most readers, their personalities, fetishes, challenges, and desires are all incredibly familiar. Indeed, “giv[ing] a voice to those who have been left out of the literature”—i.e. the rebels—seems to be Winston’s main goal in writing this book.
And she achieves it.
However, trusting Winston’s lead is not that easy. For one thing, Winston seems, at times, overly harsh in her condemnation of the Hasidic community—for obvious reasons, she focuses on the negative side of Hasidism rather than the positive; the specific people whom she describes happen to be very angry at the Hasidic community, and also happen to share many of Winston’s own views regarding feminism and Hasidism. Winston even goes so far as to link the more fanatic Hasidim with Nazis (although obviously indirectly)—in her conclusion, as she discusses the impact of the Holocaust on these Hasidic communities that translocated from Europe to America, Winston writes, “Ironically, what began as a poignant and heroic effort in the face of utter devastation and loss has led, generations later, to communities in which nonconformity can subject members to the kinds of stigmatization and ostracism that have, throughout history, characterized the treatment of Jews by the outside world.” Instances such as these make readers hesitate, and question just how representative of the Hasidic community Winston’s work really is.
Yet, at the end of the day, Winston does seem to achieve her immediate goal—that of rendering “this phenomenon” (i.e. Hasidic rebels) “in its specificity and nuance,” and giving a voice to the fringe figures—if only for the fact that, when one closes the book, one is left feeling sympathetic towards the characters and indignant toward the depicted community.
The question remains, however, what is the long-term potential of this work. Winston brings up a lot of deep-rooted questions in Unchosen—not just the question of personal belief, but questions of what made Hasidic Jewry what it is today, and what its ultimate future will be. These questions, in turn, interlock with questions of the larger American Jewish identity, and our own versions of “tradition.” Winston points time and time again to the contrast between Hasidut as it was originally conceived by the Baal Shem Tov—a democratic, spiritual, open embrace of God, Torah, and love—and the narrow, fear-laced lifestyle it is today (at least in these specific communities). Is the Hasidic community’s metamorphosis in essence all that different, historically, from the changes other Jewish denominations have undergone in the past hundred to two-hundred years? Tell me I’m wrong, but the peer pressure of the Satmar community sounds eerily similar to social situations in our so-called “liberal” denominations of Judaism as well.
While Winston’s work does provoke these questions, the problem still remains—whom does she expect to hear this “voice”? Does she expect people from within the Hasidic community to read this book and rethink their treatment of nonconformists within the community? Probably not, as she recognizes that Hasidic communities “believe that reading books could be a dangerous thing.” Maybe she hopes that this book will appeal to a wider secular audience who might then impact the way the Hasidim behave as a community. However, it would be naïve of her to expect the Hasidic community to change the way they function based on pressure from an outside source.
It is possible that this book can do the most good simply by appealing to other members of the Jewish community—people like the “apparently nonreligious woman” who “saw Yossi buying a magazine in Barnes and Noble one Saturday and launched into a loud speech about how inappropriate it was for him to be using money on Shabbos,” or Jews like the secular Yiddishists Yossi encounters who “seemed to have regarded him like one of the stuffed animals in the cases at the Museum of Natural History”—to embrace, rather than shun, these “other” Jews. The primary contribution of this book depends on its most probable audience—Non-Hasidic Jews. These readers can react to Unchosen by feeling good about themselves for staying away from this “primitive and backward” society, or they can take away the valuable lesson that Winston herself learned—the lesson that “Hasidic people are, of course, people” and “are also individuals, who have thoughts and feelings and dreams and desires just like everybody else.” If they take this latter approach, then perhaps Yossi’s dream of a new type of community—one that celebrates the beauty in Judaism and is inclusive of all types of Jews—can be realized.
Aryeh Zuber is a Penn Law student, Class of 2006. He serves as the Comment Editor of the Journal of Labor and Employment Law, and he plans to begin working as a junior associate at the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell LLP in New York City this fall.