Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood

Leah Vincent

Mey 2015 · Kuthengiswe ngu-Penguin

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In the vein of Prozac Nation and Girl, Interrupted, an electrifying memoir about a young woman's promiscuous and self-destructive spiral after being cast out of her ultra-Orthodox Jewish family

Leah Vincent was born into the Yeshivish community, a fundamentalist sect of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. As the daughter of an influential rabbi, Leah and her ten siblings were raised to worship two things: God and the men who ruled their world. But the tradition-bound future Leah envisioned for herself was cut short when, at sixteen, she was caught exchanging letters with a male friend, a violation of religious law that forbids contact between members of the opposite sex. Leah's parents were unforgiving. Afraid, in part, that her behavior would affect the marriage prospects of their other children, they put her on a plane and cut off ties. Cast out in New York City, without a father or husband tethering her to the Orthodox community, Leah was unprepared to navigate the freedoms of secular life. She spent the next few years using her sexuality as a way of attracting the male approval she had been conditioned to seek out as a child, while becoming increasingly unfaithful to the religious dogma of her past. Fast-paced, mesmerizing, and brutally honest, Cut Me Loose tells the story of one woman's harrowing struggle to define herself as an individual. Through Leah's eyes, we confront not only the oppressive world of religious fundamentalism, but also the broader issues that face even the most secular young women as they grapple with sexuality and identity.

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Leah Vincent, who now goes by Jericho Vincent, is the author of Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood and the co-author of Legends of the Talmud, a collection of illustrated children’s stories. They have lectured on sexual assault, trauma, and Judaism at colleges, organizations, and synagogues across the country. Their essays have appeared in the New York Times, Salon, the Cut, the Daily Beast, Mask Magazine, the Forward, and the Rumpus. The first member of their family to go to college, Jericho was a Pforzheimer Fellow at Harvard, where they earned a master’s degree in public policy. Named to the Jewish Week’s 36 Under 36, they have organized numerous initiatives advocating for reform in the ultra-Orthodox community, including co-producing the nationally-profiled It Gets Besser Project. They live in Brooklyn with their partner and collaborator, Ben Ash Blum.