In 2020 Netflix aired the four-part mini-series Unorthodox, loosely based on Deborah Feldman’s memoir of the same title, depicting the flight of a young Satmar Hasidic Jewish woman from her arranged marriage in the insular and oppressive ultra-orthodox community in Brooklyn where she had grown up, to a life of freedom— albeit alienated from her family and that social world—in Berlin, previously the epicenter of the Holocaust.
As we watched the series, we were reminded of similar gripping memoirs of women escaping from extreme forms of other religions. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel (followed by Nomad and Heretic) described her escape from a Somali version of Islam—which included her suffering genital mutilation—to avoid an arranged marriage and find freedom and education in the Netherlands. Amber Scorah’s book Leaving the Witness chronicles her exit from her family’s three generations of devotion to the Jehovah’s Witness religion that left her in Shanghai with no education or support system, and what it was like starting her life over that eventually led her to pursue education and a new life in New York City. And Tara Westover’s memoir Educated described her exodus from a school avoiding survivalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. She endured physical dangers, physical abuse, and coercive psychological control in a determined effort to achieve an education, even though it would challenge her most deeply held and unquestioned beliefs; and she ultimately received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge.