Disobedience by Naomi Alderman
I’m going to take the unusual step of reviewing a book. I read Disobedience because I missed the film, and then the book appeared on my BookBub list and I thought why not? I didn’t find it a particularly easy read in some ways. The central setting is within the British Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon. There are elements of that I can relate to, clearly I’m British after all, but British Jewry is something I know very little about, and deeply Orthodox Jewry is, equally, something I know next to nothing about. Most of what I know about British Jewry is, kind of ironically, beautifully skewered within the pages of Disobedience and, although I’ve had Jewish friends over the years, none were practising so I didn’t learn anything about the religion from them. The only real exposure to Orthodox Jewry I really have is hearing about the ultra-orthodox community in Israel on the news and while I’m sure their statements are correctly presented, they are news snippets they aren’t an in dept...