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When Schneur Zalman Newfield studied at Chabad yeshivas, everyone thought he was a pious young man who had little knowledge of the outside world. They couldn’t have imagined that Newfield had secretly assembled a stash of contraband books - modern Yiddish literature, science and history texts and even Russian novels - which he feared would lead to his expulsion.
The scenario might sound like something you’d read in the memoirs of a Jewish intellectual raised before the Russian revolution. But Schneur Zalman Newfield is still in his 30s. Born in Brooklyn in 1982 and brought up in the Lubavitch bastion of Crown Heights, today he is an assistant professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College who specializes in the sociology of religious communities. His monograph, “Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism,” is the first sizable scholarly study of ex-Hasidic Jews by someone who has left a Hasidic community.
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