How Not to Become a Jew

From Augustine’s Confessions to C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, the conversion memoir is a time-honored genre. Several Jewish versions have appeared in the last few years, including David Klinghoffer’s The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy and Stephen Dubner’s Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son’s Return to His Jewish Family.1

But perhaps unique among recent entries in this category is Girl Meets God, by Lauren Winner, a 2002 book that describes not one conversion story but two.

Born in the American South, Winner, now in her late twenties, is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Gentile mother. Raised by her parents as a Reform Jew, she was, for most of her youth, obsessed with finding something more authentic. “I became convinced,” she writes, “that the heart of Judaism, the most essentially Jewish thing, was a set of texts, and a particular, rabbinic way of reading them—a canon and a hermeneutic, if you like. And I became convinced that the people who were reading those texts, and reading them the right way, were Orthodox Jews.”