Join us for a talk and reading with Leah Lax, author of the Uncovered, the first memoir by a lesbian who left Jewish orthodoxy. In Uncovered, Leah Lax tells her story—beginning as a young teen who left her liberal, secular home for life as a Hasidic Jew and ending as a forty-something woman who has to abandon the only world she's known for thirty years in order to achieve personal freedom. In understated, crystalline prose, Lax details her experiences with arranged marriage, fundamentalist faith, and motherhood during her years with the Hasidim, and describes in aching detail how her creative, sexual, and spiritual longings simmer beneath the surface Uncovered is the moving story of Lax's journey toward a home where she truly belongs.

From Leah Lax:
"Uncovered is about a woman who gets a voice and takes back her life in middle age, who has to grapple with an extreme example of patriarchy and with her own faith in order to do so. These are universals, and so Uncovered has generated strong interest among a diverse audience, particularly among women of a certain age.

Uncovered, does what almost no book has done before, because it is in the voice of a silenced covered woman. The few memoirs about leaving a fundamentalist community are all coming-of-age stories by people who left while still young. Only Uncovered speaks with authority to years of adult female experience in a religious world where women’s self-sacrifice is glorified."