Selection, Over the Rainbow Project, GLBT Round Table of the American Library Association
“On the face of it, Through the Door of Life is the story of how Jay Ladin, the author and an English professor at Yeshiva University in New York City, transitioned into living as Joy Ladin. But it’s Ladin’s relationship with Judaism that anchors this book and makes it stand out. . . . Orthodox Jewish leaders should thank Ladin for refusing to hide out, for reminding us how human beings should relate to one another.” —The Huffington Post
Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman—Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self.
With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions that arise. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain of her experience living as the “wrong” gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. We eavesdrop on her lifelong conversations with the God whom she sees both as the source of her agony and as her hope for transcending it. We look over her shoulder as she learns to walk and talk as a woman after forty-plus years of walking and talking as a man. We stare with her into the mirror as she asks herself how the new self she is creating will ever become real.
Ladin’s poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn’t, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life.
Joy Ladin, the David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, is the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. She is the author of six books of poetry, including, The Definition of Joy and Coming to Life.
See also Joy Ladin’s TEDx Talk, “Ain’t I a Woman?”:
Praise
“This is an emotionally intense, deeply personal memoir of self-discovery.” —Parents Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays
“Not only a memoir of transgender experience, it’s also a story of family heartbreak and family love; of growth as a teacher and writer; and, not least, of a self deeply connected to God and Judaism throughout a life lived across genders.” —Rabbi Jill Hammer, author of The Jewish Book of Days and Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion
“In painstakingly and painfully constructing her new self, Ladin is fully aware of the societal conventions and privileges of which she makes use. . . . But there seems to be a poignancy, of which Ladin is exquisitely aware, that precisely because what Ladin wants is so normal, her efforts to obtain it are so fraught with pain.” —Lambda Literary
“Joy Ladin’s book succeeds so well because it is anything but a trans tract; it is a fierce story of regular old human life: hideous choices, endless repercussions, occasional glory, frequent humiliation, abiding difficulty. It could have happened to us. She makes us believe it.” —Kay Ryan, former poet laureate of the United States, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry
“Joy Ladin’s lyrical and thoughtful new memoir. . . adds another before-and-after metaphor to the mix, yet its searing narrative undercuts any such simplifications.” —Jay Michaelson for Lambda Literary
“An important book for anyone interested in gender, spirituality or the universal experience of feeling out of place.” —Next Magazine
