An Orthodox
woman in Brooklyn.

Igrew up in a Hasidic family in Williamsburg, went through Bais Yaakov, married a Litvish man from Lakewood, and have spent the last fifteen years in the part of Brooklyn most outsiders never see. I cover my hair. I keep a kosher home. I teach fifth grade, and I work in the world.

I started this site because the questions never stopped. The colleagues and parents at my school, friends from college, neighbors moving onto the block, a journalist on deadline, my own kids' classmates' parents — they all wanted to know what was actually going on, and they all got the same evasive non-answers from the internet.

So this is the answer. Plain, specific, written from inside. No apologetics, no proselytizing, no tribal defensiveness. Just: here is what we do, and here is why we do it.