Basya Gertner describes how her parents Shimon Shain and Gnesha Ganeles kept strongly religious Jewish tradition in the "wilderness" of New York in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. She also writes of her husband Zanvil Gertner, one of the "Malʼakhim"--students of the Malʼakh Rav Ḥayim Dov Ber Leṿine--later founder of the Golden Flow kosher milk company, and safe house for the missing Yosele Shukhmakher.

The only Jewish family in a luxury Fifth Avenue building of WASPs, the senior Rothschilds took over the responsibility of raising their grandson, Matt, after his mother left him for Italy and a fourth husband.

"In 2009, at the age of twenty-three, Deborah Feldman packed up her young son and their few possessions and walked away from her insular Hasidic roots. She was determined to forge a better life for herself, away from the rampant oppression, abuse, and isolation of her Satmar upbringing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Out of her experience came the incendiary, bestselling memoir Unorthodox, and now, just a few years later, Feldman has embarked on a triumphant...