Young woman writes of her escape from a Brooklyn Hasidic Jewish community. [View all]

[pnwmom]

This looks like a fascinating memoir of a woman caught up in religious fundamentalism.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/hasidic-jew-runs-orthodox-roots-arranged-marriage-child/story?id=15540395#.T6Hf2-33AiE

At only 17, Deborah Feldman was unprepared for her arranged marriage to her orthodox Jewish husband Eli, a man she had only met for 30 minutes.

Like other young brides in the Hasidic tradition of Brooklyn, N.Y., she was whisked away to the "marriage teacher" and told about the "holy place inside each woman."

"I hear her describe a hallway with walls, leading to a little door, which opens to the womb, the 'mekor,' she calls it, 'the source'," writes Feldman. "I can't imagine where an entire system like that could be positioned."

Feldman, who had never even been allowed to look down there, had no idea she had a vagina and says she suddenly made the "shocking discovery" that she was designed for sex.

Now 25, Feldman has written a powerful memoir -- "Unorthodox: the Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots" -- about her escape in 2006 from the cloistered and misogynistic world of New York's Satmar Jews.

SNIP