Introduction

This is Rossi’s wild, queer coming-of-age story. Rossi was taught only to aspire to marry a nice Jewish boy and to be a good kosher Jewish girl. At sixteen she flowers into a rebellious punk-rock rule-breaker who runs away to seek adventure. Her freedom is cut short when her parents kidnap her and dump her with a Chasidic rabbi—a “cult buster” known for “reforming” wayward Jewish girls—in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Rossi spends the next couple of years in a repressive, misogynistic culture straight out of the nineteenth century, forced to trade in her pink hair and Sex Pistols T-shirt for maxi skirts and long-sleeved blouses and endure not only bone-crunching boredom but also outright abuse and violence.

The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews is filled with wonderfully rich characters, hilarious dialogue, and keen portraits of the secretive hothouse Orthodox world and the struggling New York City of the 1980s: dirty, on the edge, but fully vital and embracing.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER TWO

ESCAPE FROM MESHUGA MOUNTAIN

For as long as I could remember, I’d carried a secret. It had followed me like a shadow, except this shadow lived on the inside. I simply didn’t belong with the people who called them-
selves my family.?As an adult, I viewed an old black-and-white film my father
had made using a 1960s eight-millimeter movie camera. For years, it had sat in mothballs in the family attic, until my younger brother Mendel converted it to VHS. Nice of him, since he wasn’t in it. He wasn’t born until eleven months after it was taken. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

Discussion Topic Suggestions from the Author:

Her identity as a rebellious punk rock rule-breaker, an adventure-seeker and a gay Hungarian Jewish feminist with a Yiddish-Jersey-Southern accent

Finding yourself amid restrictive cultural expectations

Her experience being forced to live under the care of a "cult busting" Chasidic
rabbi who aimed to “reform” wayward Jewish girls

Breaking out of a repressive, misogynistic culture in which she endured abuse

Facing the constant threat of assault, prejudice, homophobia, homelessness and
violence

Her decision to confront her past and make peace with it
Trying to survive her own personal crisis amid larger cultural crises (AIDS in NYC,
racial unrest, 9/11)

Advice to young people facing similar challenges and pressures to conform

Balancing her Jewish faith with her gay soul

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