Medievalist Fred Behrends, an incomparable Latinist and head of a local Talmud study group, has been a loyal friend, a Jewish Studies resource, and an intellectual model for a quarter of a century. I was fortunate to meet him at the tiny local Orthodox Kehillah holding its services on the ground floor of a Conservative synagogue. The OK has accompanied this project from start to finish and has remained a prime site for articulating my postorthodox ambivalence toward modern Orthodoxy, above all my irritation at its effort to retain gender privilege as an identity marker. לא זה הדרך (Wrong Way!), but it remains my community – the minyan I complain about (and attend).

Malachi Hacohen, Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire (Cambridge, 2019), p. 16.