Customer Reviews

Stranger in the Midst: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery

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This is not a memoir by a convert who fell in love with Judaism and lived happily ever after. Rather, this book is about someone who didn't live happily ever after: Ms. Fink got a seemingly well-thought out Jewish Renewal conversion, a quickie and questionable Orthodox conversion, then married a Jewish man (who she cofounded Tikkun magazine with) and was pretty observant, then divorced him and dropped out of observance, and (at the time the book was written) was starting to gradually return to observance.

What caused her to bounce around so much? Based on what Fink writes, I suspect a combination of (1) her near-abandonment by her father during her teenage years (which could not have possibly been good for her marriages) and (2) her commitment to feminism and other forms of liberal egalitarianism (which could not have been good for her religious commitments, since she sniffs out sexism even in more liberal forms of Judaism, and disliked what she saw as chauvinism by some Jews she met).

Also interesting: her comparison of her Christian family and Jewish culture, which perhaps explain why she found Judaism so appealing. Just as many Jewish families moved to the US in the early 20th century, became small businessman, and gradually get wealthier, her family moved to California as covered-wagon pioneers in the early 20th century, became small businessmen, and got wealthier. She also sees parallels in family food cultures and in ambivalent attitudes toward meat-eating.

At any rate, this book is not a work of scholarship, but it is a fairly easy-to-read, fairly interesting depiction of one 20th-century life.