This past spring, I went looking for a family of Hasidic Jews, neighbors I had avoided in my youth, to make amends and learn about Judaism. As someone who grew up with no religion, I saw this effort as my own tiny project to promote harmony. Maybe I couldn’t solve conflict in the Middle East, but I could increase my own understanding and tolerance.
I lived a few doors down from the Hasidic family when I first moved from Dallas to Los Angeles to stay with my dad and stepmom. The three of us occupied a tiny house of 500 square feet, like an outhouse that had sprouted additional rooms as an afterthought. I was 10 and slept on a sofa. That house was dwarfed on all sides by apartment buildings. We tumbled out the front door like a clown family from a too-small car. I would have felt more self-conscious, but this was a neighborhood of misfits: single moms, eccentric elders, late-night yellers. Perhaps none more strange to me than the family of Hasidic Jews who occupied a shabby apartment complex on the corner, the front yard crammed with old playground equipment and quarantined by a low but sturdy fence.
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Meet the Hasids: Getting to know the people who scared me
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