I’ve also reaped a bit of the overflow from the book’s success many fans of Unorthodox wind up in Williamsburg on my walking tour because Feldman piqued their interest. I have much more distance from the story. I didn’t give the book a careful read that first time. Yes, all we were talking about were pieces of the book and the book publicity. I still hear about my unforgivable betrayal. I was among the critics, and that fact rained Feldman’s and other people’s anger down on me. Some tried to criticize Feldman, and some saw this criticism as a betrayal. I too was a cauldron of hot-headed opinion and “taking sides.” Soon, there were fault lines among ex-Hasidim. Everyone was talking about Unorthodox, raving, ranting, attacking, defending, calling her a James Frey or an Angela’s Ashes-fussing it all the way to the New York Time’s bestsellers list. Not before or after have I seen so much to-do about our little niche world of defectors of the Hasidic faith. When Deborah Feldman’s memoir hit shelves in 2012, all hell broke loose.
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