These books offer the alluring prospect of gaining an unfettered, if subjective, glimpse into a world ordinarily sealed off by stringent codes of propriety and ideology and, somewhat perversely, the chance to be absorbed without consequence into a society governed by zeal. This is evidenced by the popularity of memoirs like Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (2012) and Leah Vincent’s Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood (2014). There can be a certain voyeuristic pleasure in reading accounts of those who’ve left extremist religious sects.
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