Yuma Public Library

"As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read. Yet in spite of her repressive upbringing, Deborah grew into an independent-minded young woman whose stolen moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott helped...

In Uncovered, Leah Lax tells her story--beginning as a young teen who left her liberal, secular home for life as a Hasidic Jew and ending as a forty-something woman who has to abandon the only world she's known for thirty years in order to achieve personal freedom. In understated, crystalline prose, Lax details her experiences with arranged marriage, fundamentalist faith, and motherhood during her years with the Hasidim, and explores how her creative,...

"An arranged marriage is expected for Raizl, but she's not like the other young women in her Hasidic sect in Brooklyn. Raizl has a college scholarship to study accounting, a part-time job that supports her family, and a hidden computer making it all possible. That's where she finds the porn, through the slippery slope of an innocent Google search. As Raizl dives deeper into the world of porn at night, her daytime life begins to unravel. The porn is...

"New York City tabloid reporter Rebekah Roberts knows almost nothing about the mother who abandoned her as an infant. Aviva Kagan was just a teenager when she left her Hasidic Jewish life in Brooklyn for a fling with a college boy from Florida - and then disappeared. When Rebekah hears about a young Hasidic mother found dead in her bathtub in upstate New York, she thinks there might be a story in it. And as she looks closer, she discovers that the...

Living on opposite sides of their Brooklyn neighborhood, strict Hasidic Devorah and fun-loving nerd Jaxon forge an unexpected connection when they become trapped in an elevator during a hurricane, after which they pursue a secret romance.

"Abby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, profoundly isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of an eighteenth-century Eastern European enclave, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a rabbinical dynastic family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews. But Stein felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. Without...

The story of the clash of cultures that happened after a group of Lubavitchers, members of a strict orthodox Jewish sect, opened a kosher slaughterhouse outside of the small town of Postville, Iowa in 1987

The Bridal Canopy, Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon's mock epic novel, is an elaborate frame story encompassing dozens of Hassidic tales. Set in early nineteenth-century Galicia, the plot is part quest, part comedy of errors, progressively departing from its opening tone of realism. It is the tale of poor Reb Yudel of Brody (in today's western Ukraine, about 100 miles north of Agnon's native Buczacz), his long-suffering wife, Frummet, and their three modest...