Book Review
Brazen
"The autobiography of a lustful menopausal woman who was incidentally Haredi Jewish"
5/5 stars
*******

I had promised myself that I wouldn't read another one of these off the derech memoirs, but this one got so much publicity that I just had to take a gander at it.

Of the book:

-398 pages, and probably about 7 to 8 hours of reading time

-I happen to be Modern Orthodox, but for all of the words that others might not know..... they are defined in context.

-There is no glossary, but there are sources that point back to references to give a basis to the author's assertions about Judaism.

-About 373 references, or about one per page.

-Admittedly, the author has a wonderful sense of humor, and that makes the pages go by pretty quickly.

*******
Major takeaway lessons:

1. There's a time and a place for everything. If you are a lustful lady, the best time to get it out of your system is when you have a sample set of men who can keep up with you. (Because it is all downhill after 40, and you don't get a do-over.) When you play games as a 20-something, you are wasting your own time.

2. Too much of anything is not good. Everything in proportion, and nothing in excess. People who try to be regressively religious fail and they often fail hard.

3. The closer one is to the real Haredim, the less charming/quaint they seem.

4. It seems like only Privileged White People torture themselves about "White Privilege" / "whitemalepowerstructureblahblahblah" (and let's be clear that these are the words that Freaky Julia would have used if she had finished an undergraduate degree): She goes to all these places and rubs elbows with all of these fabulously wealthy people and just magically finds investors to put in a million dollars here or half a million dollars there in spite of the fact that she has less business acumen than my 9-year-old son (who has at least sat down and tried to learn his businesses' accounting).

Freaky Julia may have been of this world, but she did not live in it at any point during the second half of the book. (Or the first, for that matter.)

Am I the only one who sees the profound irony in her constant harping and complaining about being "confined" when she has all the freedom in the world that many others don't?

Can you imagine any Black Person Next Door pulling this off?
*******

This book has many resonances to a lot of the 9(!) other OTD memoirs that I've read--some of which narrated the stories of (relatively) healthy people and others of which did not.

For the record, they are:

¶Reva Mann --"The Rabbi's Daughter" (Severe/ poorly handled hypersexuality.)
¶Leah Lax--"Uncovered." (Grandiose lesbian.)
¶Deborah Feldman-- "Unorthodox"/"Exodus". (Drama Junkie.)
¶Leah Vincent--"Sin and Salvation." (Borderline personality, including self harm and hypersexuality.)
¶Abby Stein--"Becoming Eve." (Uncertain. Maybe genuinely transgender, but definitely with drama junkie tendencies.)
¶Rachel/Ruth Shilsky--"The Color of Water." (Sexual abuse. Teenage pregnancy.)
¶Shulem Deen--"All Who Go Do Not Return" (Normal guy with doubts.)
¶Shalom Auslander-- The Foreskin's Lament (Articulate but masochistic man driven over the edge by his family and Haredim.)

This (relatively mentally healthy) author puts me in mind of Shulem Deen in that: Julia Hart is also extremely well read and intelligent and introspective, and ultimately her relationship with Judaism collapsed under logical contradictions. (For some unknown reason, both she and Deen had broods of children before reaching their conclusions.)

Additional Resonances:

1. The author was suffering from an EXTREME case of concupiscence, and she just didn't have the right outlet for it. (See: Reva Mann, Deborah Feldman, Leah Lax.)

And ALL FOUR of these examples (after figuring out that they were not satisfied with their husbands' making a few hopeless thrusts and then rushing off to the mikvah) made their first, immediate order of business to go out and find some guy to slam into them like a crash test dummy.

When Freaky Julia purchased her first vibrator (p.224), she came close to losing her mind: ("Drenched in sweat, heart pounding, liquid and lethargic").

(p.261). Yikes. It got even more intense by the time she had her first (bareback!) sport-nookie--after she describes herself as "tearing the clothes off" of some guy that she met.

(p.283). By this point she has metamorphosed into a full-fledged hunter.

(p.335) "... as my body writhed with need"/".... came again and again. I thought I was going to have a heart attack"/"he'd never been with a woman who squirted before..... by the time we were done, there wasn't a single spot on the bed that wasn't soaking."

(p.366) FJ keeps incessantly blaming her conditioning for not allowing her to tell Lucas The Hung Boytoy to get lost when *he* threatened to shut off the you-know-what.

I think it was actually...... another part of her body that was making her behave in that way.

2. It seems like from a young age, the author knew that she didn't really believe the Jewish Party Line, and that made her try all the harder to be super-duper pious. (We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.)

3. A young couple that's absolutely clueless about sex and a young groom with a fresh, young 19-year-old wife that he doesn't know what to do with. (p.123). (Feldman book) Or, once he figured out which thing went where.... Instead of staying in bed with his young wife and Giving That Ass A Good Thrashing (like a 19 year old should), he would jump up and run off to the mikvah and then study hall right afterward. (Mann book.)

It happened a little bit later in this book (p.240) when the author's daughter got married and this lustful young couple had NO CLUE what to do (as in, what technically fits where) and they had to come back and ask for instructions.

4. Public sex (p.352), just like in the Leah Vincent book!
*******

There was a very negative reaction to the book by Haredim because they thought that they had been unfairly portrayed.

I tend to think that they might be more angry because they actually *were* accurately portrayed.

In reality:

1. The fact that people just get tired of living around Haredim (because they cannot repurpose Two Minutes of Hate of everything and everybody into an entire life philosophy/ mission) is not unknown or unknowable, and it certainly is not new.

In reality, Black Hat houses have been having litters of children for many decades now and manage to stay a small minority of all Jewish people--and that is because there is a significant amount of attrition.

Quiet as it's kept: Julia Hart's case was not neither a rarity nor a miracle.

Here are a few other names:

Noam Chomsky.
Saul Alinsky.
Barbra Streisand.

All of these are examples of people who grew up religious or had religious parents and became... something else, and not in spite of their religious background but *because of* their religious background.

As frequently as it happens, some people are just more articulate at using their voice to describe it than others.

2. Yes, Haredim are some morose/judgmental/ignorant/corrupt/generally unpleasant people, and the only reason that a given person occupies position rank number X is because he can find somebody to occupy rank (X + 1). So, if you come from a family of baalei Teshuva or converts (or Russians, whom they despise for some reason) you can expect a certain as the sun will rise tomorrow that there will be someone who wants to mark his/her territory by pissing on you.

And the judgment never ends.

Second order thoughts:

1. I can't even say that this book is interesting in the sense that it shows people living in a very bizarre way. There are so many episodes of history where people choose to live some way and it goes on for several hundred years, and there's no real reason why it starts nor why it stops. (Foot binding in China was for about 5 centuries; The Japanese shogunate was for about 7. All of the Spanish/Portuguese former colonies have been going through cycles of instability and coup d'etat for many centuries. The 18th century came and went and no one told the Amish.)

Some people like to live in a strange way for some amount of time, and they just happen to be practitioners of the cult of Haredism torturing each other / themselves (incessant bullying / sexual abuse).

And so now what?

2. I've known this since reading Hoffer, but: really all mass movements are the same--Ultra Orthodoxy included.

The point is to have a sense of community and to be free from freedom. (We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom.")

3. Heretofore, I have been reading books like this because I wanted to find a way to keep my children On The Derech, but in reality:

a. The great majority of Jewish people both in the United States and Israel do not live that way;

b. Indeed, CANNOT (sustainably) live that way;

c. So, if you are from a family that manages to keep all of your children on track (through some miracle), then the leakage will just happen in the next generation--or the one after that. (These greater-than-85% secular Jews have to come from somewhere!)

And it will happen in such a way that it will be as it has been: 10 to 12% of Jewish people are observant, and the other 85% or so couldn't care less.

3. A lot of times people who are victims of abuse are the worst perpetrators of the same abuse on to other people:

a. In the same way that many sexual abusers were themselves sexually abused....... Many people who are baalei teshuva will go off the deep end trying to exclude other people or even their own children as a way to prove their Jewish mettle;

b. For some unknown reason, Russian Jewish people are the scum of the Earth in Orthodox Jewish eyes--both in Israel, and the United States.

How ironic that a family of Russians went off the deep end to the point of a mother making sure that none of her sons ever was productively employed because that would require too much interaction with the outside world. Or that they got so stupid with the stringencies that they wouldn't even eat any [fresh strawberries / raspberries / blackberries / broccoli / spinach / artichokes/etc] because an invisible bug *might* be in them.

c. These headmistresses and female school teachers that had their individuality stripped from them actually seem to have worked even harder to make it such that their girls were even more homogenized through the Haredi
Jewish meat grinder.

4. I wonder what do a lot of ultra Orthodox people believe about their world in their deep heart.

Never in your life will you hear a parent say that they don't want their child exposed to alternative versions of Physics--and that's because: you can believe anything you want to, but the laws are what they are.

If these parents believe in the correctness of their way of living, how could they believe that somebody could be dissuaded to live the wrong way?

Why does the (Ultra-Orthodox) rabbinate go through such psychotic lengths to keep people completely and totally ignorant in almost every way if they really believe in their product?

Actions speak much louder than words.

5. People seem to have a really hard time separating what is stringency versus what is law. Even in spite of all of that learning. It doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon.

6. It took the author 12 years to choose her own path. And even while she was figuring it out, she put her son in a super right wing School so that he could be bullied over eating M&Ms (they're not Cholov Yisroel!)

7. I did wonder who Freaky Julia thought she was fooling: she had had four babies and she thought that some of her boyfriends couldn't guess?

They didn't notice an episiotomy scar or some stretch marks? (p.349)

8. I have heard the (Corey Holcombe) joke before that "If you are a woman over 30 years old and still in the dating game and talkin' about how men ain't no good..... It's you, baby. The enemy is in the mirror."

If you did not understand the joke, then you would after meeting Julia Haart.

Legs swung open more time than the shul front door, but STILL unable to find a suitable partner (this book was before her second marriage/ divorce).

Lucas The Hung Boytoy was something that EVERYBODY has seen by the age of 40: A manchild who was viciously spoiled by his doting parents and just never grew out of it

*******
New words

peplum
puce
beignet
blini
Essure
décolleté

∆∆∆Funny quotes:

--The woman who did my makeup would have done well as a makeup artist on a set of one of the Star Wars movies.

-I was also dying for my first real kiss. I didn't count what happened with Yechiel
because it had been more a saliva deluge than a kiss.

-High heeled shoes were totally forbidden; Anything above a 2-inch heel and you might as well be a prostitute

-Although, like baalei teshuva, geirim are supposed to be beloved by God and therefore on equal if not greater footing than frum-from-birth jews, the reality is very different: Marrying a ger is considered demeaning in my world.

-No, to me, is a slow yes.

∆∆∆"Did she really put that in print where her kids can find it?"/"At Least She Was Honest" quotes:

(p.262): "I walked into that prison house with someone's cum deep inside of me and felt so surreal."

(p.261): "I learned something else about myself that night: I am a squirter... It is impossible for me to fake an orgasm, because when I orgasm, there is clear liquid evidence."

Verdict: Recommended at the price of $5, or as a library book.