Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiog)

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 womanJoy 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. Ladins poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasnt 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. 2012 Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for Biography Autobiography or Memoir Wrenchingand liberating. . . .it opens up new ways of looking at gender and the place of LGBT Jews in community.Greater Phoenix Jewish News Given her high-profile academic position Ladins transition was a major news story in Israel and even internationally. But behind the public story was a private struggle and learning experience and Ladin pulls no punches in telling that story. She offers a peek into how daunting it was to learn with little support from others how to dress as a middle-aged woman to mu on make-up to walk and talk like a female. She provides a front-row seat for observing how one person confronted a seemingly impossible situation and how she triumphed however shakingly over the many adversities both societal and psychological that stood in the way.The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide