Deborah Feldman

Deborah Feldman is an American-German writer living in Berlin. Her 2012 autobiography, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, tells the story of her escape from a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, and was the basis of the 2020 Netflix miniseries Unorthodox.

Early life

Feldman grew up as a member of the Hasidic Satmar group in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. She has written that her father was mentally impaired, and that her paternal family had arranged a marriage for him to her mother, whom Feldman described as an intelligent woman who was an outsider to the community because she was of German Jewish origin. Her mother was born in Manchester to refugees from Germany, and upon researching her mother's family, Feldman discovered that one of her mother's grandfathers was of non-Jewish (Catholic) German ancestry on his father's side and had attempted to integrate fully into Gentile society. She was raised by her grandparents, both Holocaust survivors, after her mother left the community and came out as lesbian, and her mentally impaired father was unable to raise her on his own. Like all children in the community, Feldman was raised to be pious, spoke Yiddish, and was prohibited from going to the public library. Denied a typical American education, she hid books prohibited by the community under her bed. She entered an arranged marriage at the age of 17, and became a mother at 19.