These ultra-Orthodox Jews admitted to religious taboos ranging from same-sex attraction to extramarital affairs. The treatment they received was alarmingly severe.
Joseph, a thin man with a delicate bearing and soft gray eyes, has a mellifluous accent that is hard to place – evidence of growing up in the United States but in a world apart. Until 2009, he was living in a religious enclave of upstate New York as a Belzer Hasidic Jew. He worked as a travel agent, spending his days arranging flights to far flung places, often for people with more freedom than he could ever dream of.
Like many Hasidim, Joseph (who, like several of the people interviewed for this article, requested that his real name not be used here) married at twenty. His wife was the first woman he had ever touched, and she got pregnant soon after their wedding. But their sex life left much to be desired for both partners, and then petered out altogether. Joseph says his wife would sometimes decide not to go to the mikvah, the ritual bath required of Hasidic women after they menstruate to “purify” them, making them once again sexually available to their husbands. According to Jewish law, if Joseph’s wife had not gone to the baths, he was forbidden from touching her, much less having sex with her. After their fourth child was born, Joseph says she stopped going altogether.
Joseph grew desperate for intimacy. After two years of celibacy, he finally went to a strip club, Stiletto, on Route 59. A stripper asked him if he wanted a dance and a confused Joseph told her he didn’t know how to dance – was she going to teach him? “She meant a lap dance,” he told me when we met in his Brooklyn apartment, shaking his head with an embarrassed smile. “I had no clue.”
About once a month, Joseph would go back to the strip club. Sometimes there would be other Hasidic men there. Fearful of being recognized, he learned to ask the bouncer before entering if there were others like him inside, and if the bouncer said yes, Joseph would go to Lace Gentleman’s Club, on Route 303.
One day Joseph sold a ticket over email to a Hasidic woman planning a family trip. A mild flirtation developed when she got her ticket and made a throwaway comment about the airport code listed at the bottom of the itinerary – something most customers never noticed. Joseph remembered their first interaction fondly: “I was like, ‘Wow, a chassidishe woman, you know airport codes? You go, girl!’ And she was like, ‘You bet I know!’” The woman, who I’ll call Dini, managed a store. She had an open-mindedness and a brassy confidence that Joseph found intriguing; her curiosity about the world mirrored his own. “I liked her power,” he remembered, and for her part, Dini was drawn to Joseph’s gentleness.
