Deborah Feldman?

As a 19-year-old, Deborah Feldman felt she had a decision to make. She could stay with a husband she didn’t love and remain in a religious community she didn’t want to be in, or she could leave and never see her friends or family again. She left, and a few years later, she wrote an autobiography called Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, which inspired the Netflix series Unorthodox (see pages 24–25).

Born into an ultra-orthodox Jewish community — the Hasidic Satmar — in Williamsburg, New York, Feldman’s primary language was Yiddish. She went to a private school where the emphasis was on religion and was taught that men and women must take on traditional roles. At 17, she entered into an arranged marriage, to a man she’d met only twice.

Two years later, Feldman had a baby boy and realized she didn’t want him to grow up under what she considered to be the Satmar’s oppressive rules. After moving away from the Williamsburg community with her husband and child, she began to study literature. Her marriage, though, broke down, and she left with her son, ending all contact with her husband and the rest of her family. Later, Feldman moved to Berlin, where she works as a writer.

She was criticized by the Satmars for making their community look bad, but Feldman told People magazine: “Of course no one story about someone who’s left the Satmar sect can reflect everyone who lives in the Satmar sect. … It’s up to the reader or the watcher to decide if an experience like [mine] would make a woman happy or unhappy.”