"I never felt female and didn't fit in that world" | Naomi Seidman - The Frieda Vizel Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
And I just was, I think a quite unusual child.
Let's just say I also dress funny. Wow, so I
didn't like a lot of you know, there's a lot
of attention to style in these girls' schools, you know,
and like tweezing eyebrows.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
You know. What I find in each world is there
is a lot of pressure to fit in, to conform.
If you're good at conforming, you can blossom. You can bloom.
If you're not, then you can suffer, you can have
a really hard time. What was the case for you
being such a misfit?

Speaker 1 (00:36):
How did you suffer it so much? Especially as an adolescent.
I was in such misery so much of that time.
I had such a complicated fantasy world about you know,
who were my real parents?

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Hello and welcome or welcome back to this channel. My
name is Freed Devizell, and here I explore topics related to
orthodox ascetic Judaism, covering culture, I do tours, life stories
and more. Today I'll be talking to Nomi Seideman, who
is a friend, a fellow ex Hussit, and who has
been on my channel several times. Some of you might

(01:12):
know know me from her hit podcast about leaving Hausidism
called Heretic in the house. She is the Chancellor Jack
and Professor in the Arts at the University of Toronto
and Nomi and I will be visiting Poland for a
video soon, which you should stay tuned for. So I
thought this was a great time to invite no me
On to talk about her life story so we can

(01:34):
get to know her a little better. Hi, Hi, thank you,
thanks for having me. I'm so excited to do this.
I've been looking forward to talking about your life story,
which I know some bits and pieces. Can we start
from the beginning? Where were you as well?

Speaker 1 (01:53):
So one a man loves a woman.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
We're going to keep that over this is this is
a pg ish.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
So we're gonna want to go there.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
We definitely don't want to go there. We're going to
start five years later. Okay, where do you live and
what is the context in which?

Speaker 1 (02:19):
Yeah, so I grew up in Burr Park, which is
one of the three I guess ultra orthodox. I don't
like the term ultra Orthodox because I think ultra orthodox
Jews don't like it. They don't call themselves that. It
sounds like it means way too orthodox.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Is that?

Speaker 1 (02:39):
So? Burr Park is in some ways the most diverse one.
Williamsburg is dominated by Summer, as your listeners know, though
my cousins were Pupa and I spent time in Williamsburg
with my Puper cousins. And Crown Heights is dominated by

(03:01):
but I also had Belzer cousins in Crown Heights, so
I spent some time in Crown Heights. And then Barr
Park is the one that if it has a dominant
Casidic group, it's probably a Bobbo. But it has many,
many different kind of groups, and it's the most cosmopolitan
in Open and that's where I grew up. Though my
family moved out of bar Park when I was twelve,

(03:25):
maybe to a neighboring, a neighborhood called Kensington, which is
right near by. You describe my family as Classidic, which
is true in some regard but not true in others.
So maybe I should explain all that. Yeah, so my
father grew up in a Hasidic family in Poland, actually

(03:46):
one of the richest Classidic families in Poland. He was
a Hutiatna Clacid, so in many of these not a
big Hasidic group, and it no longer exists so our
families are kind of like one of the last memories
of this. But in this group of Hassidic rebels, it

(04:12):
was often one family that was like the primary supporter
of the reba, and our family in Poland was the
primary supporter of this hasidam and moved to Tel Aviv
in nineteen thirty seven from Vienna. There were a lot
of Carsidic courts in Vienna and into our periods. People

(04:33):
might not know that he left Vienna in nineteen thirty seven,
moved to Tel Aviv, and my cousin in Tel Aviv
was the last person who had the key to the
Shatner steeble.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
How did you spell the rebe's name?

Speaker 1 (04:47):
It's his name was Israel Friedman, which is very reson.
There's also this, it's part of the region. The risioner
had five children, five sons, I believe in one of
the sons was and the whole all of a sudden
has had to go in different directions because of a murder,
and the police were after the rebe's' children, and they

(05:11):
all went in five different directions, and I think it
was the youngest son that was the ancestor of the
Huschagna reba that my father grew up in that classicism.
So my father didn't really have a Hasidic group to
belong to when he came to America after the war.
So and he himself was he identified as Classidic, but

(05:35):
he also was an unusual kind of Clussody, had a PhD,
he shaved his beard, he knew many Rebels as a
journalist and as a writer, like he would interview them
as opposed to be a Cussid. So I grew up
with a kind of unusual Classidic family, you could say.
And my brother went to a Carlin Stalin, which is

(05:57):
a different Classidic Yeshiva. All my siblings left the Hassidic
world and became yeshivash. Now I have many many nieces
and nephews that are they live in Lakewood. And my brother,
who went to Hassidic elementary school, ended up becoming a Brisker.

(06:19):
Like brisk is kind of like the Harvard of the
Yeshiva world. And he's most of the Yeshiva world no
longer speaks Yiddish like they speak English. But my brother's
an exception, and his Yeshiva they still speak Yiddish. So
my brother speaks only Yiddish to his children, but he's
not Casidic. And my mother's family, which was never Hasidic,

(06:42):
she was from Transylvania, they belonged to the non Hasidic branch.
Her siblings both married Cassidic men, so all the Hassidim
were now on my mother's side and my father's side. Whatever,
our family is no longer Cassidic. So complicated, But I
think you're viewers are so sophisticated. They now know that
not all ultra orthodox dus are Placidic. So my family

(07:06):
went back and forth in complicated ways through the Hasidic,
Noncacidic world, and now our my immediate family is largely
entirely non Facidic, though I have many facific cousins.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
But you grew up in the Hasidic milieu in Barbough Park,
would you say that's fair?

Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yes, yes, very much so. I mean it was more
diverse than, as I said, Williamsburg or Crown Heights, and
not everybody was Halcidic. But we actually grew up pretty
close to the My sister was friends with the Bubba,
a reba's daughter, and the bo Rebba, the bubber Hasidic
synagogue which was huge, like seats a thousand or two

(07:48):
thousand bordered our backyard. So in some times we were
very close to the Hasidic world, and we even knew
the Reba and his family, and I was friends with
but the rebel's daughter, my sister was friend was even
better friends with a different daughter of the Bubba Rebla,
So we were definitely in Hasidic millias. I taught at

(08:12):
I was a summer counselor at a Placific day camp.
But we weren't. As I said, it was an unusual family.
My father was different from almost anyone around him, I mean,
and it wasn't just that he had a PhD. It
was like well known that he had a PhD. And
that he was a writer. He was a kind of celebrity.
We didn't have money, and we didn't have I don't know,

(08:36):
the things that people have in bar Park kind of
Even though he grew up with a lot of money,
it was no money left and he never took any
money from like the German Holocaust reparations. But he was
a doctor Sideman. People always called him doctor Sideman, which
was very confusing because most of us just knew doctors
as the children would in the in the Bungalow colony

(08:59):
would is he going to give me a needle?

Speaker 2 (09:02):
So? Wow, that's what we called.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
It's he's going to give me a needle the doctor.
But my father was so sweet and he loved children
so much that they understood that he wasn't going to
give them a needle.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
Wow, aren't you you doctor Sidman? Now I'm doctor Sideman too, Yes,
are you going to give me a needle?

Speaker 1 (09:23):
Nobody calls me doctor though. No. It's funny because when
I got my PhD. I'm very, very very glad that
I got my PhD while my father was still alive,
which was nothing to you know, take for granted, because
my father was pretty old when I was born, So
the idea that he would live to see how old

(09:45):
was he, we don't exactly know. He was close to sixty,
he was around sixty.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
How old was your mom?

Speaker 1 (09:52):
My mother was thirty seven. Oh, so my father lost.
It's not entirely clear. He didn't talk about it either
a wife, maybe even a child, but certainly at least
a fiance which we didn't really know about. He didn't
talk about it. In the Holocaust so he lost the
generation and my mother did too. I mean thirty seven.
I said, it's true I was the youngest, but so

(10:16):
on the child Holocaust survivors. And my father was around
sixty when I was born. And when I got my
pH d, and I was on my way to my
first job, which was at Penn State, and I was
lying in my bed. I was visiting them, and I
was lying in my bed and reading and my father
I saw them. My father was standing at the door

(10:38):
and just staring at me. And I looked up and
I said, what what are you staring at? And he said,
do your students stand up when you teach? When you
walk into the classroom. I said, are you kidding? They
don't even shut up. I have to like scream with
them before they keep quiet. But it was so meaningful

(11:00):
to him because he got his PhD. I mean, this
is a crazy thing. He got his PhD in nineteen forty.
I always joked to my students that that was a
really bad year for the job market. I was complaining
about the job market from PhDs. And that's what his
dissertation says, nineteen forty, like somehow the war is going
on and he gets his PhD and never he never

(11:24):
had an academic position, and so for him the PhD
was so valuable and so such a bittersweet thing. And
so that I had a PhD. I mean, I have
a sister who has a PhD too, so it's not
such a big thing anymore. And lots of nieces and

(11:44):
nephews with PhDs, but which is a yeshiemish thing and
not a costish thing. So but yeah, it meant a
lot to him that I had a PhD. And it
was a kind of like a tcoon, like a fixing
of the wrong. Well he didn't have and you know,
they never my parents never had a dime, and that

(12:05):
I had a job in a university. Penn State was
such a great football team.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Where you from at the time. Were you religious at
the time.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
No, I left the religion behind at eighteen. I left
my house and that was it. I never looked back.
But I visited my parents periodically, you know, until the
end of my mother's life. I have sibling, I have
at least one sibling that's not in speaking terms with me.
But my parents always were and they didn't exactly understand

(12:40):
my life, but they welcomed me and they were proud
of me. I have a My mother just died at
the age of one hundred and one last year, and
she had a pack of things that she collected, and
one of the things she collected, you know, they kept
track of me, was there was an article in the
new paper about how UC Berkeley graduate students were on

(13:04):
strike and they had a picture of a graduate students
who happened to be me, and I was sitting like
in boots and you know, like I don't know those
boots they used to wear, hiking boots or whatever they're called,
those like lumberjack boots, and cross legged on a table.
And that was the picture that they took, and my

(13:25):
parents had it, you know, along with all their other things.
They were collecting my life. So they were certainly, you know,
it was it was devastating and upsetting for them and
that I left the Orthodox world, but they certainly were
proud of my academic accomplishments.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
Wow, something that's really I.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Know, we haven't talked about being five years old yet.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
I know, that's fine. We're flowing something that's interesting about
your life story, Particularly for me as someone who sort
of called stories, I'm interested in people's stories and how
they fill out. The general narrative of how things change
is that you are from a pre time from when

(14:11):
we started to hear the stories of people who left, right,
So when can we ask when you were born?

Speaker 1 (14:18):
I was born in nineteen sixties, so on sixty five,
and it was turned sixty five. I left in nineteen
seventy eight when I was eighteen, got and there were
very few stories of people leaving. I didn't really, I
mean I heard a few. I heard rumors of people leaving.
I mean, in some ways, I am sort of halfway

(14:41):
between the period let's say, people who were born in
the forties and the fifties. Maybe there were lots of
those people who left, many, many, many.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
I think I would imagine that people who survived the
Holocaust and didn't want to be religious anymore were like,
that's it.

Speaker 1 (14:57):
First of all, there was the whole generation of people
who had given up on Orthodoxy after the Holocaust, and
I think even people who who remained Orthodox had a
period of not being short that they wanted to keep
being Orthodox. And even my parents there's a picture of
my parents in Paris when they were dating, and my
father has his arm around my mother and he's not

(15:19):
wearing an armica.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
You know.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
I don't know what the story is, but it's like
I think it was just it wasn't clear to people
that Orthodoxy would continue, and if it continued, what would
it look like? And so I think my father was
in that, you know, and would I think he always
kept kosher, he always kept childis, but what American Orthodoxy

(15:43):
would look like and how you know, what it meant
to be Orthodoxy was still unclear in those years. And
my parents were like very unusual orthodox too. So I
think we lived in bar Park. But you know, my parents,
especially my father, was older than most of the other
parents around and way more worldly. My father had radio show,

(16:06):
he had a desk at the UN the United Nations,
and he went back and forth between the world of
bar Park and the world of Manhattan. I think he
often didn't wear yarmaca when he was in Manhattan. And
then he came back to Borrough Park and was like
and everybody knew that he was a little different, you know.
So and it wasn't that that we weren't Kosher or

(16:29):
that we weren't and you know, we were Yiddish speaking,
but there was just a kind of difference about the family.
My father knew poetry and my mother was interested in poetry.
They both had this kind of I don't know, worldliness.
They loved opera. They would listened to the opera, and
they weren't the only ones in Barr Park. The other
thing is that Barr Park was like anti Zionists, including

(16:52):
my school based Yakova bar Park, which my father was
on the board of, was anti Zionist, and my father
was a kind of Mozionist, was like an oak than
Leezion as person, and you know, against the roles, and
we were harassed for it. You know, sat Machlasidom would
harass my father. They call it my mother and tell
them tell her there was a terrible accent that my

(17:13):
father was dead. You knew that they did things like that.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Wow, it feels to me not to get sidetracked, because
I really want to talk about your life, but it
feels to me that the time after the Holocaust, the
people who survived and made the decision to become part
of the orthodox enclaves, let's say in Brooklyn, that they
were much more radical than what people are like today.

(17:41):
Like I cannot imagine that happening today.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yeah, so my father and my mother. My mother also
like they there were a lot of things that they
were very clear that they weren't going to be going
along with in the Orthodox world. They would make fun
of the Orthodox they were even while they were part
of it. So, for instance, I just random associations. My

(18:05):
father was in the Jewish Defense League. He was one
of the first members of the JDO, and I joined
him in it because it was fun and wild. When
I could talk about that a little bit. But also
there was there was a woman in our neighborhood who
had confided the Jewish Defense Oh my god, I guess
I'll start by talking about that. It was an organization
founded by America Honey in the late nineteen sixties.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
Oh okay.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
And it was a kind of I didn't even know
that it was right. I thought it was left. I
was like confused about the spectrum. And it was a
kind of Jewish self defense. I mean, they marched down
the street yelling every Jew at twenty two, and I
also marched down the street yelling every Jew at twenty two.
And I didn't know what a twenty two was, but
I said it anyway, And suddenly it was like Jews

(18:52):
have to stand up for themselves, they have to fight.
I got into street fights, like I remember being on
a fight on a bus.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
The foul Joy. When you got into these things.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
Maybe eleven twelve, and I had an underground newspaper in
my school, and my father thought all of this was
very cute. My mother was worried about it. On the
underground newspaper the cross dressing, and I was a cross
dressed when I was a kid, with my father's knowledge

(19:25):
and my mother's To my mother's horror and terror, I
put on my father's suit. My father tiny guy, he
was like basically my size when I was twelve, and
I would put on his clothes and try to sneak
into the men's section of the Bubba bur Showol did
you successfully? The one time I got all the way

(19:48):
in was on Zumcastero, which is already a kind of
like while dancing holiday, and I got pretty close, pretty
far in. I was like a good twenty thirty steps
past the door and this older guy. Everybody. It was

(20:08):
everybody's backs, so I didn't have to worry about being
looked at too closely. But somebody turned around and started
walking towards me, and as he walked by me, he went,
You're not fooling anyone, which is what I say to
my tiny little dog when she barks. You waved dead pounds.

(20:30):
No one's gonna be scared of you.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
It works. It worked on you better than it works
on the dog, exactly.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
So yeah, I understood that look, and I turned around
and I walked out, and there were, you know, at
the edges of a lot of these casidic scenes. There's
like the rebels and the single people, and the divorced
men and the alcoholics, and there's always like the people
who don't fit in. So I ended up going to

(20:59):
a party with a bunch of cross dress like at
the age of whatever. At that point, I think I
was fifteen with a bunch of these you know, renegade
causinum and in somebody's attic apartment in bar Park. So
that's as close as they ever got to.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Pelling them. I see. It's very interesting that many of
the stories of women who leave involve a desire to
be part of the male spaces, which makes sense because
that's where that's where the parties, that's where the party
is at.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
ASO. I also just didn't totally didn't relate to being female.
Like I think if I were much younger, i'd be
non binary or trans or something, because even though I
have like you know here, I'm basically just could never
identify as female. And I remember I wrote this paper

(21:57):
for high school and like, how beautiful it is that
we menstruwaight and we could have children? And I think
my teacher, there's another example of somebody noticing how full
of shit I am. She's like, really, I don't think so,
I don't believe this, And she was really right, she
like caught me. I don't believe a word of it.
I basically I was so non identified as female that

(22:19):
I actually surprised that I got my period. I thought
it'd be exempt. I thought it was like, it won't
happen to me.

Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, I hear you.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
I guess non binary is what I sort of am.
But it's like, you know, I've lived a lifetime as
she so go ahead call me she.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
Do you not relate to the experience of women and
womenhood after a lifetime.

Speaker 1 (22:49):
I've tried. I mean, I do in academically, but it
takes an effort. You know, I didn't want to. I mean,
in some ways. It's like, so what does that mean?
I grew up in a world full of girls, right,
this extreme sexual segregation. It didn't you know, really no
boys at all. And in some ways, gender doesn't exist

(23:11):
in those worlds, Like it's the world is just entirely female.
You don't have to think about being a woman. It's like, yeah,
you know, only exists when there's two genders. Yeah, otherwise
you're just whoever you are a person. But people understood
I was a freak. I mean, my mother understood I
was a freak. I was a freak.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
So why would you talk about yourself like that? Are
you Are you comfortable saying that that I'm a freak? Yeah?
Are you like, like, do you do you think it's
generous to yourself?

Speaker 1 (23:51):
You know, I teach in a university these days, Like
my students are all queer, every single one of them. No,
not every single one of them, but many many of
them are queer, And I almost feel like it's saying
that I'm queer is like what I should avoid doing.
So I don't step. I mean, I'm married to a man,
I have a child, you know, you know, the usual
way conceived and born, the usual way, So I don't

(24:13):
want to step on like queer identification by saying, boy,
we've gotten pretty far from orthodoxy.

Speaker 2 (24:19):
But wow, this life story is taking a life of
its own. But yeah, this idea of.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
Not knowing what gender I am or not feeling deeply
identified as a as a woman, goes way back for me.
But I think it's not that uncommon. I've actually, you know,
I think the first time I took LSD, I forgot
whether it was male or female. Very interesting, and I
didn't I am like to talk about ELST and I

(24:50):
didn't know which bathroom to go into. I was in
a at a concert, and I thought I had to
think about it, and I decided, I think I'm a women.
And I went into the women's room and there were
all these women putting on makeup in front of the mirror,
and I said, oh, excuse me, and I walked out again.

(25:11):
So that's how confused I am about gender.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Wow, there's so much to discuss here about gender because
I relate to a lot of things about women not
liking to be women. But I think I feel like,
ultimately I came to a place where I feel I
think differently from you and the sciense that I feel
a connection to womanhood, and I feel like my discomfort

(25:37):
with women who was born out of the lack of
privileges that came with being a woman and the expectations
on women that I didn't like. You know, we have
to be more demure, we have to be more contained
or whatever. And also, by the way, in that note
the word freak or crazy, I really am uncomfortable and
when people use it on themselves because I feel like

(25:59):
I come from a world where that could be so stigmatizing, like, oh,
this person is a freak, this person is crazy. They
don't fit the mole, they don't fit the box, be
it male or female. And that makes me like so
Uncomfortable's almost like you're empowering such anad marriage that.

Speaker 1 (26:16):
And maybe I have to think about it more when
I'm not zooming with somebody, but I'll avoid it for
the rest of this conversation.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
You can say whatever you want. You can say whatever
you want.

Speaker 1 (26:29):
You know, I recognize myself as different. Certainly, some of
it was just about the privileges that boys had. It
was open. First of all. I came from a family
with three girls and one boy, and the boy was
like prized and he didn't have to do chores because
he was the boy. And on the other hand, he

(26:49):
was like in yeshiva from morning till night, and I
didn't envy that. And I was also very very close
to my brother in the very I mean we shared
a room till he in thirteen. Wow, my past didn't
have enough part for everybody to have their own room.
And we didn't even have like a room. We lit
sucked in a fulled out I sipped in a filled

(27:12):
out share and he slipped like in the living room. Yeah,
my parents were like super poor.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
Your father had a seat at the un and a
radio show that didn't generate income, all of these positions.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
So my father had it was the Yiddish press correspondent
at the un. He had a press card which I
still have somewhere, and he wrote for a few Yiddish newspapers.
He wrote, wrote, wrote NonStop, and I would hear my
mother in Yiddish like arguing with the editors that he
hasn't gotten paid for months. The newspapers, you know, they

(27:46):
were like fly by night operations. My mother, when I
was a teenager, got a degree in bookkeeping and she
got a job at a factory as a bookkeeper in
a factory when she was happy for the first time.
Loved working, she loved getting out of the house. And
there were two bookkeepers in this factory, and the other
one was this gay Hispanic guy who was her best friend.

(28:11):
And she talked about him all the time, and she's
worried he should settle down, he should find a nice boy,
and et cetera.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
Wow, seriously, my mother, that was the nineteen sixties for
your mother. I mean, this is already seventies.

Speaker 1 (28:25):
But she supported the family after that. So my father
was a writer, but it was like, you know, it
wasn't lucrative, let's just say. And so my parents, you know,
struggled financially, but they never saw them. So, I mean,
they struggled financially, but we were filled with pride for

(28:50):
being like, Okay, we had no money and we lived
in a you know whatever, but we you know, it
was my father's PhD. And we were intellectual in our
house was full of books, and so we had that
and that was more important. And I'm still that way,
I mean, and I now have plenty of money, at
least for me, I mean, I guess for other people.

(29:13):
It isn't, but I still like have that. You know,
people talk about sexual orientation and I say, I'm just like,
I'm not attracted to anyone who makes a lot of money.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
I just like, for me, it's like twenty thousand dollars
a year.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
Right, that's my sexual orientation.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
Good thing you're married already, because it may a mess
on the dating scene for you.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
Yeah. So it's like my mother said the same thing.
She wanted to marry someone interesting. She wanted to marry
someone intellectual who would always and you know, we would
always have interesting guests to bring home, and we did.
We had fascinating people come to our house. And I
met Gulda Mayor when I was I think six years old,
and all kinds of other people. And you know, my

(29:55):
father was getting busy getting chained to the gates of
the un and getting arrest did and so it was.
It was an intellectually interesting environment. And I was very
close to my father. Also, my father and my brother,
my sisters and my mother not so much. Took me
a long time to reconcile myself to a female part

(30:18):
of their gender.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
Wow, that's very interesting. You know, I've heard your story.
Bits of your story of growing up and going to Basakov.
I never heard anything even remotely about, for instance, meeting
Golden Mayer and how incredibly marching to his own beat
your dad was. I did know that he was an

(30:41):
intellectual and that he was a doctor. What did he
have a PhD? In?

Speaker 1 (30:44):
His PhD was in Jewish economic history, which sounds dull.
I agree, economic history, but it was very, very charged
at that time because the Jews were kids have been
parasite economic parasites Polish economy. That was the excuse for
the anti Semitic boycott. So you had to deal with

(31:06):
all that. And my father also had a touch of
socialism in him. So there was a socialist Orthodox Party
that my father had a lot of sympathies for, even
though he himself wasn't a member for complicated reasons, but
there was a certain kind of so the Orthodox political

(31:26):
world that my father was very involved with in the
into war period in Poland, the Goods, which is kind
of the world political organization of orthodox Es. It had
a socialist branch, and along with the socialist branch, it
also had a kind of like Maverick left like were
all the people, the artists and the poets and the feminists,

(31:50):
let's call them Besiakov, I would say, is associated with
this left, and my father felt very comfortable in that
kind of maverick left. I don't mean left in terms
of politics necessarily, even though the socialists were in there,
but just left in terms of in terms of they
weren't so square. They weren't so they were unusual. And

(32:11):
that was my father's friend group. So my father's friend
group was all the I already talked about the renegade
classidium who get drunk and party. There's also a kind
of high culture godmensioned where you have the people who
aren't they're not necessarily in leadership, and or they're the
like the ballet Chuba, the people who've come back to Orthodoxy.

(32:34):
So those are the people we would have in our house.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
What was your everyday life like as a child in
this really interesting milium, Like, don't talk about when you
were five, when you were old enough to remember and
have a consciousness about yourself.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
I remember five pretty well. So my parents were, you know, older,
as I said, and there were Holocaust evers. A lot
of my friend's parents were younger, sometimes America and born,
so my parents were like, well, known as the most
lax parents around, Like we almost never got like hit,

(33:12):
you know, like sometimes my mother would get really mad
and chase us around the dining room table, but she
generally couldn't catch us. So my parents were like, for
whatever reason, my father was hard of hearing, he'd be
typing at the dining room table. So our house was
kind of like the place that it was like well

(33:34):
known you could get away with anything, So it became
a kind of I mean, first of all, there were
kids everywhere. So just in our block we were like
the heart of our park. Forty seventh between fifteenth and
sixteenth right forty eighth is like the bubble street, and
there were I don't know, forty fifty kids like within
a year or two younger and a year or two

(33:56):
older that were just always out on the streets, always
like in the backyards and from one house to another,
and when people wanted, like to snack, or they wanted
to get away with doing something crazy. Like one of
the things we did is we developed an indoor baseball
form of baseball that we played indoors. And the only

(34:17):
house where you were allowed to play not allowed, but
no one could stop you. Was like our house.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
Oh no, we would roll.

Speaker 1 (34:25):
The ball along the floor and then just like hit
it with the broomstick or something. And yeah, my father
would be like trying to write his articles and he
would like scream with us, spinoka. And they just were
like very gentle. They were more like grandparents than parents. Yeah. Yeah.

(34:46):
And also just even though they didn't have money, they
were like sort of loose with money. I don't know
how to describe it. Like my mother, I should want
send me to the grocery store with the five dollar
bill to pick something up, and I lost it on
the way home and on the way to the store actually,
and I went back and I don't know how I
managed to lose a five hour and I went back

(35:07):
into the house and I was crying so hard. She
couldn't understand what happened. She felt like I had been mugged.
And then I finally managed to get the words out,
and she's.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
Like, you're crying over five dollars, like you scared me,
Like she was just mad at scaring her, Like she
would never like it would never be.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
So there was just this feeling of yeah, I don't know,
my parents were unusual, feeling that other parents were stricter
and also was money. My mother just really didn't enjoy cooking,
and she would like she cooked for shavice. That was
like the big thing. We always said, exactly the same thing,
and that was it, and then the rest of the

(35:49):
time she was like depressed. When I was growing up,
she'd be talking to her sisters in Hungarian or her mother.
And if we said we were hungry, like there were
basically two choices, like raid the pantry yourself, and basically
what was in the pantry was cans of things, and
we would take the can and we would put it

(36:10):
on the stovetop and turn it on and the paper
would burn. And then you would sit down at the
dining room table and you'd take a spoon and that
tells you dinner.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
Oh, now, green beans are corn.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
I like beans like pinto beans, kent bean. So I
would have like a can of pinto beans for dinner,
and I was like supper as we called it. I
mean she cooked like a few times a week, but
a lot of times it was like go get pizza.
So we would go, My brother and I would just
run to pizza. And then when I was a teenager,
I worked at this kosher restaurant around the corner. It

(36:45):
was like a kosher Chinese restaurant, and it was like, oh,
just get dinner there. And so it was a kind
of I don't know, like like it's funny. My sister's
the same kind of parent, Like you walk into the house,
you don't even know where the grown ups are. There's
just there's kids everywhere. There's like a nine year old

(37:07):
making scrambled eggs in the kitchen for a three year
old and you look, you go, where's mommy, And they're like,
I don't know. And then she's in bed reading because
whatever she calls it. My sister, who has a pH
d in psychology, psychology, she calls it benign neglect, but
like firmly believes in benign neglect.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
That it's you're doing the kids a favor, your.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
Favor by letting them create their own lives, which I
mean there is there is an argument.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
There were a lot of kids which we.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
Don't and not to say that our parents. My parents
like love. I mean, there was so much love. But
it wasn't like strictness or attention or yeah it was,
it was it was unusual. It was an unusual and
I would say a kind of less a fear approached,

(38:02):
and certain things like really made an impression on me
my parents, like asking me for forgiveness before you gipper.
I don't know if your parents did that.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
I think so definitely.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
Yeah, he asked for forgiveness by your parents. And it
was so clear that my father, you know, it was
it was an old man like we and he it's
not like he looked young. And this is this is
this line in one of the songs you sing around
the shabas table a tak yemen, which means ancient of days.

(38:39):
And every time we sang that line a tak Yemen,
my brother would like elbow me.

Speaker 4 (38:45):
Father.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
Everyone was always saying, is that your grandfather? I see?
And it was very embarrassing for me, but yeah, it was.
He was. He was a I mean, he was a
character and he was famous, famous for blocks around I
don't know what famous and an orthos. But people go, oh,
hill else, I'deman's daughter. They still sometimes say it. People

(39:08):
still sometimes remember.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
Yeah, yeah, I've heard it. Also, I've heard it also
people have said that know me as Hilosidmun's daughter.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
Right like Hilotsydelin didn't wastn't be killed as long as
I'm like no, no, no, Hilod Cyplone and someone else Hellosideman.

Speaker 2 (39:23):
Yeah, I'm trying to imagine. I'm even surprised that there
was pizza and kosher Chinese and bar park in the
nineteen seventies.

Speaker 1 (39:31):
It was just starting and was so excited my parents, Like,
I don't want to give you the wrong impression. My
parents are like super strict, especially my mother, Like we
only ate from one butcher, and mostly she didn't trust
the hesher, you know, the kosher certification. She really wanted
to know that something was kosher before you could eat there.

(39:52):
But somehow she like we decided first, like one pizza
store I think was called Omnowns on thirteenth Avenue, Okto,
So that was like an immediate hangout and we were
pretty close to thirteenth Avenue and we could go there.
You know, it wasn't I think it was like a
dollar for a pizza and my mother was always like

(40:12):
happy to give us money to get us out of
the way. And so I remember it moved from a
tiny little storefront to the place that's like three times
as big, and now it's moved again. So, yeah, the
pizza stores were like a big thing. And then there
was this kosher Chinese restaurant that opened up around the corner.
I was when we moved to Kensington on Eighteenth Avenue,

(40:33):
and I was friends with the owner's daughter. The two
owners were both Holocaust survivors who had like a terrible marriage,
and they would get into these screaming fights, wave knives
at each other. They called each other mister B and
missus B.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
That's how they addressed each other.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yeah, and I mean there were no Chinese people that
lived there. There were, they worked there, there were. It
was all like Vietnamese people, Japanese people like it. It's
mostly Hispanish and yeah, so that was I think one
of my first jobs when I was like thirteen fourteen.
So I've been working basically since I was.

Speaker 2 (41:10):
You work so hard, and you're always working, and you
work so hard, and you've done so so so many
things in your life.

Speaker 1 (41:19):
But I mean, love, I'm also very lazy.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
I don't know, you work all the time, and you've
done a lot of different things, just speaking of academia
and the work you've done in terms of Jewish studies
and your podcast as well. Thank you do, I not
have a lovely visitor here. This is my cat Cloe.

Speaker 1 (41:43):
Actually a maze of my crazy little dogs. Aren't like harassing?

Speaker 2 (41:47):
Do you have two dogs?

Speaker 1 (41:48):
Now? I have my half late has a dog, So
you have a house late many ways, I still live
like a graduate student, including in that way. And so yeah,
we have two dogs. But that is a beautiful cat.

Speaker 2 (42:03):
Yeah she's purring like.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
You found the exact right spot to scratch under.

Speaker 2 (42:09):
Yeah, she's satisfied. She's purring. I hear her.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
Oop.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
You want to talk about what it was like to
go to bas Yakov?

Speaker 1 (42:18):
Yeah, so it's it's funny because now you know, I
wrote a book about the history of this Orthodox girls
school system that I went to, that my mother went
to in back in Europe, that my sisters went to,
that my nieces and great nieces now all go to
want to. And I very rarely think about my own
experience in bas Yakov. I mostly have an interest in

(42:40):
what it was like at the very beginning, like in
Poland when it was revolutionary, when it was revolutionary when
I went, it was already like it was a huge,
huge school. It was I don't know, one thousand and
fifteen hundred girls, and it was now I think, I
mean now they have two buildings, so and then it

(43:01):
was still there was still like these outbuildings. Like fifth grade,
we were in this like basically an apartment, like they
couldn't fit us in the main building. There were five tracks,
I mean there were five classes in every grade.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
Every grade. Wow, that's a big school.

Speaker 1 (43:20):
Thirty students per grade, per class, per class per class,
so one hundred and fifty students in a grade. And
there was still like a Yiddish track in a Hebrew track,
which I don't think exists anymore. And my parents sent
me to the Hebrew track, thank God. Like for me,
the Yiddish track was like the teachers were like older

(43:40):
and Edish and more like this word frakhnachtknacht, had you
pronounce it a little differently?

Speaker 2 (43:50):
How do you say? Yeah, we used to call someone
a knuk kragnac, yes, which.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
Is such an ugly word for like a like.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Two were Yeah, It's like it's very derisive. It's like
this person is so.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
Oh like like the image I have is like, you know,
the most intense, extreme modesty whatever. And I was never
interested in that.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
And so the party boopers like to.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
Actually have a Yiddish name, which is like Shandel or Steindel,
which is like the family name, like my grandmother. And
then my other name is is know Me, and know
Me is like not named after And it was like
a sign of my parents like Zionism and being a
little more modern that they gave me this Hebrew name.

(44:41):
So I was always really glad to be in Hebrew
and always kind of like didn't want anything to do
with Yiddish. So I was in the Hebrew track. I
was a very poor student. I was always in trouble.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
I was Do you make friends with other girls?

Speaker 1 (44:57):
Yeah? I did, I had I had my best friends
for a while. Where there's these twins that were just
insane trouble makers, like just over the top trouble makers,
and I was like their little accomplice. They were when
they were in eighth grade, they declared themselves independent. I

(45:18):
forget what it's called independent miners or something. Who they
had their own apartment. I mean it was partly because
their mother died in seventh grade and their father just
could not control them. And they had all these like
step brothers and stepsisters, and we used to go to
their house and try to like they had one of

(45:40):
their step brothers was like gorgeous, and we would like
trap him in his bedroom and try to get them
in bed. I mean we're talking about bad, bad, bad, bad,
bad bad things.

Speaker 5 (45:52):
Oh no, they were such wild trouble makers, but people
felt sorry for them because they were.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
You know, were orphans and like a broken family in
their mouth. So they got away. And they were twins
and when you ask them, like did they I remember
just people would ask them what they want to be
when they grow up, and they said, I want to
be rich. I want to marry someone rich. And they
both married like extremely rich people. So interesting, Yeah, they succeeded.

(46:27):
They were so that they were my wild friends. And
they were even when they were and I met them
actually at their mother shiva. I don't know if this
is interesting story, but I knew them because they were
so there were such trouble makers that it wasn't corporal
punishment in our in our school, but for them, there was.

(46:50):
It's sort of terrible. I just in first grade, I
remember seeing the the They were not in my class
that year, maybe they were not in the same class.
I remember seeing the principal drag one of them down
the hall, drag them physically down the hall. They were
just so yeah. I also had this friend, Connie Weisel,

(47:16):
who became a fashion designer Heidi Wiseel. She's like she's
no longer alive, but she was like a well known
She dressed people for the oscars. And so I had.
I had some friends, but mostly I just felt very different.
I think my friends tended to be you know, I

(47:36):
don't know, the the weirdos I'm allowed to say about
other people.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
You can say whatever you want, and I, somehow I
don't know.

Speaker 1 (47:51):
I was unlike my sisters and my brother. I was
just always getting bad marks and barely managing me had
adhd so they had they had level aside from the
Hebrew and the Yiddish tracts in English, they had like
the dumb class and the smart class. They didn't say,

(48:11):
they didn't call it the dumb class, but everybody knew
it was a dumb class. That's what we called it.
And I was in the dumb class, which is where
I like to be, because you spent a lot, like
coloring books, like for many more years after everybody else
was reading novels, they were doing coloring books, and they
gave us this I guess it was, I don't know,
an IQ test or like an aptitude test, and I

(48:34):
scored super high on it. And they had a meeting
and they said, you know, we've like misunderstood like you're
you know, you really could be in the smart class.
So they put me in the smart class. And I
hated it so much that I went back to the
dumb class without asking and there was a new teacher

(48:55):
and she didn't know, like, oh, I guess it's I'm there,
And so I got into trouble for going back to
the dumb class. And I don't know. That's what I
remember about Basiako, But I was also I just was
like I had such strange friends. I also had friends
that were like my friend Esther's parents owned the Chinese

(49:15):
the Koshi Chinese restaurant. And I also had this other friend,
Tia Rifka, who was like came from a super Holsitic family,
maybe Sotmer or something like that. She was really into
religion and she would learn with her father and we
would have like long conversations about God and we would

(49:38):
walk like we spent Javas together. I think it was
like fifth or sixth grade. I was just totally she
had no friends but me, and I would go to
her house and then she would walk me home, and
then we would get almost to my house, we would
turn around and walk the other way, and then we
would turn around and walk the other way, and oh,
we just she was so she was like this mystic

(50:02):
and she would just fill my head with such strange
ideas that I just myself became extremely strange. And at
one point I wanted to I like, I couldn't sleep
in a bed. I was like too something to sleep
in a bed. So like, for a while, when I
was in elementary school, I slept in a box on

(50:25):
the floor in my room and.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
Your parents had no comment.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
You know, my parents let me do it because I
told you what kind of parents they were. And then
for a while, like the only place I felt safe sleeping,
I mean, obviously they sent me to therapists was if
I would turn the couch facing the wall. So I
was like in this kind of and I just was,
I think, a quite unusual child. Let's just say I

(50:52):
also dressed funny. Wow, So I didn't like a lot
of you know, there's a lot of attention to style
in these girls' schools, you know, and like tweezing eyebrows
and and putting on you know, just a lot of
it was with that appearance. And I just like revolted
against that and started like wearing these like oversized men's

(51:17):
shirts and and basically this is all through until the
until I left. This is kind of how I dressed.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
I feel like we have a very vivid image of
little know me. What does that mean?

Speaker 1 (51:33):
You know?

Speaker 2 (51:33):
What I find in each world is there is a
lot of pressure to fit in, to conform. If you're
good at conforming, you can you can blossom, you can bloom.
If you're not, then you're you can suffer, you can
have a really hard time. What was the case for
you being such a misfit? How did you.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
Suffer so much? Especially as an adolescent, I was in
such misery so much of that time. I had such
a complicated fantasy world about you know, who were my
real parents? And I also, like I was then, I'd
sort of discovered reading and just went to the library

(52:17):
all the time and was read and read and read
and read and read. And I was kind of addicted
to these books about like childhood adolescents, and I mean
about its schizophrenia, and like I read Lisa Bright and
Dark and DIBs and Search Itself, all these I never
promised you a rose garden, all these all these books
about mentally ill children. And it was basically my ambition

(52:40):
to be a mental patient. I developed this fantasy and
of of like romantic fantasy about being a mental patient.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
And and there was some kind of escapism, yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (52:57):
Some kind of I don't know. I remember in eighth
grade my nickname was Abbi Hoffman. Ambi Hopfmon was this
hippie leader of some sort of student So it was
like clear, I was like a hippie. I was like
a And the other thing I was going to tell
you about is that my parents accepted into our family

(53:17):
quote unquote this woman who converted to Judaism. She wanted
to marry a Hasidic guy. And even though there's not
supposed to be prejudiced against converts, there is, as you know,
and she needed a kind of family to adopt her
and to seem like we're in the family, like or

(53:39):
where her family. So when I was a teenager, we
got this kind of new member of the family who
was a convert to Judaism. And she was kind of
in some ways my savior because she was like inside
outside she and even though she had converted, and she
ended up marrying a Hasidic guy, even though she had

(54:00):
converted and obviously you know, chosen this life for herself.
She was so devastatingly funny on how like crazy orthodox
he was, wow, and how like insane my family was.
And so she was like a lifeline to me.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
And my parents loved her. They marked they walked down
the aisle with her, like when she married this guy.

Speaker 2 (54:26):
So what happened to her in the like later did
you stay in here?

Speaker 1 (54:30):
She died very very young, suddenly, like of a heart attack,
when she was I think in her forties. But she
was basically considered me. Her sister came out to visit
me in California. We would go to these like hot
springs and she would be like fully covered from head
to toe and she would somehow figure out how to
go into the hot springs. So she was totally Orthodox.

(54:51):
You bring her own food. But she was just she
was like the person. And there was also my father
had a cousin who we called uncle Uncle Ansel, who
would always say to me, who was like an ally.
So I had these allies around me who were like,
you're so interesting and smart and do what you want to,

(55:12):
you know, just say I had allies and my father
too was an ally. My father all my crazy adventures
that you know where I put on his suit. So
my mother would be like, how can you let her
do this?

Speaker 6 (55:25):
Like you know, the seventeen reasons why you should not
be laughing and amusement right now, And my mother would
be grumbling to him, and my father would be like, ah,
let or whatever, and then off I'd.

Speaker 1 (55:40):
Go wearing my father's suit and my parents saw me
do it.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
Wow, very interesting. So what happened did you? Did they
try to get you to marry when you were like
eighteen nineteen?

Speaker 1 (55:52):
Yeah? So I actually started going on these shitto dates
when I was like sixteen or seven.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
Wow, they were rushing.

Speaker 1 (56:03):
No, it wasn't so much me then. I mean, the
first one I ever went to was I was at
Micholan and I was like, I graduated high school early
through the special program after getting kicked out of one
high school and going to another. It's another story. I
got kicked out of the baysiako that my father was
a president of the board of so you know, they

(56:23):
must have really wanted to kick me out. So but
then he got me into another day Siako in Queens
and they let me graduate after three years. So I
graduated around sixteen and I went to Michola this kind
of I tried really hard to get my parents let
me go somewhere a little more modern, and Michola was
mostly for eighteen nineteen year olds, and they would arrange

(56:44):
matches with boys. So I went on a date, maybe
even more than one when I was just sixteen or
seventeen in Israel, and I really I wanted to go
on the States because I wanted to meet boys, not
because I wanted to get married. And then when I

(57:08):
came back to Brooklyn, also a couple of should have dates,
which at this point it was like yeshivash type should
up dates. So it would come pick you up at
it in the house. Maybe the first time it would
be in the living room or the dining room, but
then you would go to a hotel and or I

(57:28):
don't know, I like I'm trying to remember. I once
went to a movie. I actually went to see Annie
Hall when it came out, on a date with Bubba
Burr cusset. It's only because there's a scene in Annie Low.
I don't know if you've seen it, where what are
you all? And turned into a cussin?

Speaker 2 (57:45):
Can you imagine?

Speaker 1 (57:52):
And but I was also at this point like hanging
out with my brother in law had gotten involved with
Saul Carlbach, sort of hipbie Rabbi, who was putting on
these concerts. So I was like going to those things.
I was actually meeting boys on my own. And by
the way, because I was such a gender freak, everyone
just assumed I was a lesbian, including my mother. Really,

(58:16):
and the reason why I know this that my mother
assumed I was a lesbian was it's in my whole life.
People have more or less assumed I was a lesbian.
So and sorry, I got alergies. So the my I
have this cousin and tele avi if I told you,
he's the one with the key to the Satner Study House,

(58:40):
which is now houses five hundred cats or something like that. Anyway,
he decided he wanted to marry me, which is really
crazy because he's my first cousin and my second cousin. Okay,
his parents are first cousins. That's how it is in
the classidic world, not so much anymore, I think, but
so in mind, it's like, sure, marry your first cousin,
Andrew said, cousin, and you came to Brooklyn. I met

(59:03):
him when I was in Michelan, and then he came
to Brooklyn to ask my parents if he could marry me.

Speaker 5 (59:08):
And my mother's response was, you want to marry know me?

Speaker 1 (59:14):
Are you gay? Wow?

Speaker 2 (59:20):
That's how you found out that your mother thought that
you're gay?

Speaker 1 (59:25):
Yeah? I think so. I mean that's how I made
sense to it, Like she didn't see me as like
why would a man be interested in me? And clearly
I can't be. So I had this like weird thing
of like intense interest in men and identification with men
at the same time, like like I had to be

(59:45):
taught in college to be a feminist and identify with
my sisters. You know, I just wanted to.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
Be around men.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
I wanted to get to know them. I wanted and
I wanted o sexpon. Like it was just all part
of the same crazy sexual orientation. But how it looked
to others was that I'm obviously gender something and identify
we want to have sex with women, which I can.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
See why because very often women who don't traditionally associate
it's a stereotype obviously type but more feminine women.

Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
Yeah, like, let me tell you what the case is.
This is who I am anyway, Yeah, I mean nothing.
You know, I guess I'm bisexual, but I'm mostly straight.
I'm most but I'm also queer. I'm like a queer
straight person.

Speaker 2 (01:00:32):
I'm very confused. No, it's very clear. It's very clear.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
So that was my Now, I forgot what we were
talking about when.

Speaker 2 (01:00:41):
We were talking about you. You were in the com
scene and you were going out.

Speaker 1 (01:00:44):
With boys to go out with men, and I went
out with men, and I would pretty much as soon
as I got the opportunity. I couldn't like because I
didn't have any other than my brother. I didn't know
any boys when I was growing up. I had a
hard time like recognizing who they were as people, like
just believing they were real kind of. But in any case,

(01:01:06):
I would say to them pretty much immediately, I don't
actually want to get married and be orthodox. I'm looking
for someone my male counterpart. My fantasy was that I
literally had this fantasy that there was someone like me
who was an orthodox boy, and I had this idea

(01:01:29):
of like who it would be, and like, you know,
I had all these visions. I don't mean massabatory visions,
just daydreams, and that this person would be my male
counterpart and the two of us would escape together. That
was my plan. And because I didn't quite know how
to talk to boys, and because I was kind of
a little weird anyway, sorry for saying that, And I

(01:01:51):
would just go out on a date and as soon
as we had any kind of privacy at all, I
would say, I'm not really interesting, they're being orthodox. I
just I'm looking for this. I'm looking for something very specific.
This is a job interview. Would you leave the North?
That's wrong with me? I was planning this escape and
I needed an accomplice and I needed someone to help me.

(01:02:14):
And just to make a long story short, basically, I
went out on a five or six dates and like,
whoever it is that I was on the date with
would turn around in the car and just take me
right back home, like what.

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
And one person bit, one person said, yes, one this.

Speaker 1 (01:02:39):
One guy, yeshievash guy. He was like, wow, you're different
from the others, Like you're kind of weird. And cool
and interesting, and I said, so you you mono leaving.
He's like, well, I wasn't planning to, but tell me,

(01:02:59):
you know, tell me more kind of thing. So I
ended up getting engaged to this guy Wow, and my
parents were astonished, thunderstruck because he was a good looking,
normal seeming male, dressing nice job that had a little

(01:03:20):
bit of a pernussa, like a good catch, and they
could not understand like how that went with me, and
they were like beyond themselves. And this is after like
basically it was one day, one day, one like no
one would ever ask me out again because of this.

(01:03:40):
First of all, I was dressed so oddly, and then
there was this good catch and then he backed out,
he got cold feet. But he firstly persuaded me to
get engaged to him. Wow. He said, we don't have
any money, you know, we'll get a whole bunch of
money and then we'll go to California. Like that was
my plan. We were going to go to CA. You Wow.

(01:04:02):
So basically it got to like a few weeks before
the wedding and I realized that he had screwed me
over and that they don't just let you leave like
we were looking for an apartment and I'm like an apartment.
I don't want an apartment. I want to bustick it.
And I was so depressed about this that I was suicidal. Wow,

(01:04:23):
I was like, I'd rather die. I just remember we
were like on the Staten Island ferry. I also wasn't
attracted to him, and I also realized he believes in God,
and it's terrified that it's ell. You know, it's like
before Young Kipper and he won't hold my hand because
it's before Young Kipper and he really is religious. And
it was just like and there was just nothing I

(01:04:45):
could do, and I felt like I had been trapped
and I had made a terrible mistake.

Speaker 2 (01:04:49):
And then you were very clear that you didn't want
to get married yourself.

Speaker 1 (01:04:54):
So clear. I had been scheming to escape for years
and years in years, and I thought I had found
the pair out and suddenly, you know what an engagement
party and look for you know how it is that
I'm just like, here's the cash, go be an adult.

(01:05:15):
That's not how it works. And I was so like
a weird like I was so and I also it
occurred to me that oh my god, there's something called
sexual attraction, and he feels it for me and I
don't feel it for him. Like I couldn't have said
it in those words because I didn't know what sexual
attraction was, but whatever, Like it was a totally weird

(01:05:36):
mismatch and seventeen different levels and it was about to happen,
and I was I was thinking I would kill myself
rather than do this, and then I thought, well, if
I'm ready to die, then what am I afraid of?
And I just left my house. Wow, So that's my
crazy escape from orthodoxy story.

Speaker 2 (01:05:58):
Did you tell your parents at some point?

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
Like? Nope, I walked out in the middle of the night.
How old were you? I was eighteen. I always thought
the legal age for runaways should be changed to like
at least thirty fourth at because boy did I need services.
I mean I needed footsteps. I had nothing.

Speaker 2 (01:06:19):
Yeah, there was nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:06:20):
There was nothing.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
What did you do?

Speaker 1 (01:06:22):
Why didn't you even know another person who had left?
I mean in my general environment, I had heard stories.
I just there was nothing and it was so I
had a pretty crazy six months that followed that. But
I escaped. Where did you go?

Speaker 2 (01:06:43):
Where did you go? That night?

Speaker 1 (01:06:46):
So that's that's like the part of the story that
I think I don't really want to talk about.

Speaker 2 (01:06:50):
Oh, we don't have to talk about it.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
We don't have to. I mean, I'll tell you personally,
but I don't want to tell Yeah, yeah, no, so yes,
I had the next six months of my life would
make a very dramatic story. But basically, I just I
think I had forty dollars in my pocket and I
had a pair of pants hidden behind my books.

Speaker 2 (01:07:12):
When did the scheming start? How old were you.

Speaker 1 (01:07:15):
The scheming started? Oh my god, I think I was
still in elementary school when I was like, it wasn't
even like I mean, it was just like an attraction.
It was almost like, you know, in a sexual orientation.

Speaker 7 (01:07:28):
Like non Jews, you know, like anything that wasn't Orthodoxy
was so or even like modern Orthodoxy was so appealing,
and anything that was ultra Orthodoxy was so gross not
so guilty. Because now I'm like I was you know
what I mean, I was like prejudice, but I just

(01:07:50):
was so like, you know, reading books about what it was.

Speaker 1 (01:07:54):
Like to be you know, like a normal American girl
and go to girl Scouts and a dog and eat
a donut, like it was all so appealing to me,
and I just, I.

Speaker 4 (01:08:07):
Mean, the only place I knew how to find it
was like you know, in Guara Park, where you like,
I didn't even have a conversation other than to buy
something from them with anyone who wasn't a fellow ultra
Orthodox Jew.

Speaker 1 (01:08:18):
I mean, it was just like I read about them.
I was just like it was like an overwhelming attraction
and an overwhelming revulsion from first of all, the idea
of being a married woman and having a bunch of
kids and putting on a scheitel. Now I think a
schittle would be an improvement.

Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
I I have.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
You know, I sit in a room full of ultra
Orthodox women and I'm the only one who has any
gray year and they're like in their eighties. They also
have friends either, they're like gorgeous, like laugh. Anyway, that
wasn't how it was when I was eighteen. I just

(01:08:57):
it was like everything that was and it's kind of
embarrassing to say, but everything that was good and appealing
and exciting and was in the secular world and everything
that was like ugly and stifling. And it literally feel
guilty saying that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):
But yeah, no, that's very very power. Yeah no, that's
I totally hear you. I actually find it really interesting
that you use the word attraction because it resonates with me.
I also feel like I had this attraction my eyes
lit up. But anything from the outside, and you know,
there'd be this like kickness, don't look, don't look, it's
not nice. It's like right, yeah, And I was like

(01:09:39):
remember magnetically holding her hands over my eyes. Yeah. And
and this this like primal desire to look and to
see and to be pulled to it. Would you say,
having joined that that space, that the attraction was an
illusion or would you say the attraction was thing innate

(01:10:00):
and real calling to you.

Speaker 1 (01:10:03):
Yeah, in some sense it was an illusion, but in
some sense it wasn't. I mean, I and I still
had like I go back to Brooklyn and now I'm
doing research and I have an academic take on you know,
the Orthodox world, and I find it interesting. And I
went on your tour, and oh, let me learn something
about this environment. It's also interesting, like on this level,

(01:10:25):
but part of me is still like the part that's
the emotional part is like I go even sitting shivel,
like I managed two three days of sitting shiva and
then I like, I couldn't take it anymore. I was
like I.

Speaker 2 (01:10:37):
Felt when your mother passed, when my.

Speaker 1 (01:10:39):
Mother, yes, and it was like a little bit of
a like just the revulsion. I mean I remember, you know,
just getting like a tray full of kosher food and
like getting to the airport and just like immediately dumping
all the food and like wearing skirt. Like it's all
just like I can't take it. It's not like I
you know, and everyone's like, oh, could I go back?

(01:11:02):
And I realized I just that revulsion is so powerful
in me. I mean it's so deep, and I just
at the same time, I don't want other people to
feel it. I don't want to contribute to anti Semitism,
and I don't want to romanticize, you know, what I
thought there was out there. I mean I had these
dreams of moving to California. I now live in California,

(01:11:23):
Like I know, it's not the hippie paradise that I
thought it was, And hippies anywhere are just obnoxious people.
I have to know a bunch now.

Speaker 2 (01:11:31):
I mean, I don't have.

Speaker 1 (01:11:32):
Any illusions anymore about the secular world. On the other hand,
it's like more than I hoped and dreamed that I
could find the life that I could, you know, as
I say in my podcast, monetize my unhappy childhood, that
I could take, you know, that I could write books.
That I could, I mean nothing stopping me, you know,

(01:11:54):
Orthodox women from writing books, but that I could. I
still get pleasure from the freedoms that I exercise after
all these years.

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):
No, if you find your place, that is such an
amazing gift, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:12:11):
Also not like like I have a friend here in Berkelyn.
We always talk about how it's a college town. People
come and go. I've had friends of mine or colleagues
die and then they're buried here, and I'm like, wow,
buried here, Like this is where you are permanently. It
always feels like it's not a real place. Like everybody's temporary.

(01:12:31):
There's no community, you know what I mean about a
place where people come and go. And then I think, oh, community,
that's back in New York. That's like the Jewish community
I left. But it wasn't that. I mean, maybe romanticize
that too. It wasn't. So everything wasn't so high in
Mesh all the time. It wasn't. I mean, you know,

(01:12:51):
I was in a huge, overstuffed classroom where the teacher
didn't even know whether I was supposed to be in
the classroom or not, right, So, I mean, and I
was lonely a lot of the time. So like what
home is and where community is. It's not like I
feel like I have it here, even though I've been
living here for so long and I teach here and

(01:13:14):
people know me. I'm kind of like a professional Jew.
So it's funny that I I mean, like for years,
I'd be like, do I want to have a sator?
And then I have a saintor and I'm like the
Rabbi of the sator because nobody else in the room
can even figure out what a sator is, you know,
or they really know, and I have like the you

(01:13:34):
know what I'm talking about. You're the expert in the room.
So it's almost like you're called upon to speak for
the religion. When how did that happen to me? That's
kind of funny. I remember my brother is saying, like,
you get paid to teach Jewish studies. You thought that
was very hilarious.

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):
It is and it isn't. Yeah it is and it isn't.
I get it. Do you want to share so we
can wrap up, because you need to go what you're
working on right now besides giving Satyrs and being a
professional Jew.

Speaker 1 (01:14:11):
So I'm as as always. I have so many different
projects in the air, But what are some of them.
I'm still working a little bit on the Orthodox girls
school system of Baisiyakov. I'm actually making a documentary film
that's partly based on my book with Pearl Glock, who's
another escape exitter from Basiakov. So I still work on

(01:14:36):
my website a little bit, not as much as I should.
I'm also I just proposed another research project, which is
writing a history of the New Testament in Yiddish called
When Jesus Spoke Yiddish? So one of my fieldest translation studies,
especially Hebrew Yiddish. So kind of a follow up of

(01:15:01):
my work on Freud and Hebrew and Yiddish translation. This
is Jesus in Hebrew and Yiddish translation. So what else
am I doing. I'm also working on for the first time,
I've sort of gotten a little involved in contemporary politics.
I'm working on immigration and translation. As a translation studies person.

(01:15:22):
I'm interested in the use of There's a Hebrew verse
in the Bible that says be kind to the stranger,
for you know, the heart of the stranger, for you
or a stranger in the land of Egypt. So I'm
interested in the use of that. First of all, the
translation from Hebrew into Greek, into English and other languages,
and what the word stranger means. And now it appears

(01:15:45):
in contemporary political discourse. So I think it would be
called something like migration translation and migration from exodus to
the Mexican border. So when things are going on that
are so intensely political and I have an academic angle
on them, and I feel like I should get that out.

(01:16:07):
So this is something that I started working on in
the first Trump administration when I saw people holding signs
with that verse on it, and I thought, oh, that's
so interesting. This is not only is it a translation
of a Hebrew verse into English, but you hold it
up sometimes in Nebro and sometimes in English. But also
itself is a kind of translational Biblical verse because it

(01:16:29):
says you once were a stranger, to now be kind
to other strangers. So that itself is a kind of
connection between the past and the president. What you were
in the past, you should be in the translation is
a kind of movement from the past and to the present.
Be kind to the stranger, for you or a stranger

(01:16:49):
is understood to continue to mean something today. You who
were strangers at Ellis Island should be kind to strangers
at the Mexican border. It is that certain passages of
the Bible seem eminently translational, I guess I would call it,
and what the connection is between the movements of people

(01:17:10):
and the movement of language. So that's one project that
I have in mind. I'm sure I'm forgetting three or four.
I guess I have a kind of academic ADHD.

Speaker 2 (01:17:21):
Yeah, No, it's good to and we're going to poland
that what that is. Yeah, that's going to be a
lot of very interesting. I don't know about fun because
we have an Airbnb six flights up without an elevator.
So yeah, we'll get and you'll get very firm bombs or.

Speaker 1 (01:17:40):
What an emergency and probably more than.

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):
We're not winding up in the emergency room in advance.
We're agreeing on that. What about a memoir?

Speaker 1 (01:17:51):
Are you working on a memoir? So a memoir? I
have such complicated feelings about a memoir. I know it's
such an OTD thing to do. And I thought I'm
on sabbatical this year. I thought maybe this would be
the year. I don't know, I find academic work less
anxiety provoke it. Like in some ways, why write academic scholarship.

(01:18:11):
Nobody reads it, nobody cares. But somehow it's like much
much easier for me to do. And I do get
rewards for it, you know, a little raise every time
I publish something. I mean, not really, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:26):
A lit'll bump in the world. Is that what it is?

Speaker 1 (01:18:28):
Like, I'm notching. You're about like Google scholar rated. I see, Well,
I still I mean, I have pages and pages of memoirs.
So maybe one of these days I do too.

Speaker 2 (01:18:40):
But I don't know that one of these days.

Speaker 1 (01:18:43):
Well, you're already out there. I've heard, I've heard you
do your memoir you produce it. It's a beautiful way
to do it, to just read it.

Speaker 2 (01:18:50):
Oh yeah, write some things on YouTube. Yeah, maybe I
do more.

Speaker 1 (01:18:53):
Maybe we'll do some memoir in while we're in Poland, noyll.
Probably we won't have a minute.

Speaker 2 (01:18:58):
We won't have a minute. We'll have to go to
retreat to do memorying.

Speaker 1 (01:19:02):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:19:03):
I love Okay, let's put it out there. Whoever wants
to host us absolutely all right, I'm looking forward. Thank
you so much Naoi for this, and I'm looking forward
to our trip to Poland. What do you look forward
to most?

Speaker 1 (01:19:15):
I just the festival is such an exciting, interesting phenomenon.
I'm really looking forward to introducing you to the person
that I think of as your counter your Polish counterpart,
the person who who does tours of Jewish Crackout. So
I think it'll be really interesting to be in Crackout
with you and having a tour with her, which is

(01:19:38):
one of the things I'm looking forward to. I'm just
looking forward to. It's always so amazing, you know how
you like you go someplace and like you don't even
have a minute to write in your diary because it's
just from one thing to the other, and you keep
bumping into people and you don't know. It's just like
life in its grandest, intense intensity, and and that it
should be happening in Poland. It happened to me the

(01:20:00):
very first time I was in Poland. It was like,
oh my god, so many interesting people, so many interesting conversations.
My book that Basiaco started in Poland, because I started
talking to these bashak of girls who I didn't know,
who were strangers in the Jewish quarter of Crackouse. So
just the way you travel, it's kind of like this
interesting way of seeing parts of yourself that you don't

(01:20:23):
see when you're in your everyday life. So I think
that's what I'm looking forward to, and I'm hoping it's
even better than i'm selling it to you now.

Speaker 2 (01:20:33):
It's gonna be wonderful. Well, thank you so much. I
look forward to it. Thank you, know me for sharing
so candidly.

Speaker 1 (01:20:39):
Thank you so much. Sure you're having me was a pleasure.

Speaker 2 (01:20:42):
And thank you to the listeners on the podcast and
the viewers on YouTube and everyone.

Speaker 6 (01:20:48):
Bye bye, Think any anything,

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"I never felt female and didn't fit in that world" | Naomi Seidman

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}"I never felt female and didn't fit in that world" | Naomi Seidman