The Charedi community is one of the most devout among the Jews and almost every one of their acts is bound by law, tradition and rules. On the Sabbath, before eating bread, there is a hand-washing ritual governed by specific instructions. Cold water is poured from a cup twice over the right hand, then twice over the left. These rules are beyond question, but Fletcher decided that rather than wash her hands, she would only pretend to, then see if God struck her down. “God was not only revered,” she says, “he was the shape of everything we did.”

Heart pounding, Fletcher “went ahead and did it anyway”. And so the die was cast for a rebellious life within a community that refuses women any personal autonomy. Now 37, an avowed lesbian and feminist, she has been disowned by her family, sexually abused by her foster father and abused by both her husbands — all devout Charedim. And yet she refuses to flee her community. Instead, Fletcher has found a way not only to remain within her Jewish faith, but also to be openly critical of practices such as forced marriage and the overlooking of the secular. Now, in a further act of rebellion, she has published Chutzpah!: A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality and Daring to Stay, a book that takes a close look at those issues she has faced.

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Before Charedi girls are even out of their teens, they enter arranged marriages, where they have, on average, seven children. Driving, working outside the home, and disobeying their husbands is frowned upon, and once they are married, they are obliged to wear a wig known as a sheitel. Their clothes must cover collarbone, elbows and ankles, and sex segregation is so strictly enforced that many families don’t even allow brothers and sisters to play together.

The daughter of a rabbi, Fletcher has spent much of her life in this intensely insular world. She recalls a childhood that she spent at a Lanarkshire school wearing opaque tights. And then, aged 14, she and her younger sister — their four older siblings were already married — moved from Scotland to Israel with their parents to make aliyah (the settling of Israel by the Jewish diaspora). Life there was even stricter than in Scotland: at schools she was described by one teacher as “anthrax” — a bad influence to everyone else. Fletcher was so miserable that she overdosed on Ibuprofen, and ended up on a mental health ward for six weeks. Hospital was preferable to home. After that, she was admitted to foster care.

If anything, however, things would get even worse. After only a year in Israel she was sent back home to live in Manchester with family friends. She was 15 when she started lodging with a Jewish scholar, Todros Grynhaus. In her book, Fletcher describes him as an “authoritarian who locked his kids in their rooms for days at a time”. Then, one night, he began sexually abusing her: “He shoved two fingers inside me. I felt no pain because I wasn’t in my body any more.” These assaults continued nightly for six months, until they were discovered by his wife and he threw her out. She moved in with another family, unable to tell her parents to whom she was virtually a stranger now. And when Fletcher eventually reported him to the local rabbi, he just told her husband to go to therapy. Her testimony was worthless without a male witness.

So she returned to Israel to learn “how to be a wife” at a seminary. By the time she was 18, a shidduch (match) had been found and she was pressured into an arranged marriage with Danny.

Right from the start, the union was marked by regressive gender attitudes, something Charedi girls are taught from childhood. Having to devote their lives to housework, children and the Sabbath, Fletcher recalls her mother saying that even doing the laundry was holy. “Fuck off,” she laughingly responds. “The laundry gets done because the laundry needs to get done. The idea that men do holy things in the synagogue and women do holy things with laundry is just patriarchy.”

Sex was framed in similar ways. “If there is an expectation that you have sex on a certain night at a particular time and if you’re not in the mood,” Fletcher explains, “it’s like you’re saying no to God, not even just your husband.” But Fletcher’s husband was also violent, and when she found him in bed with another woman, she abandoned the marriage. Barely a year in, she left. Her parents needed to get shot of the 19-year-old divorcée, and six months later, she married again, this time to Zvi, 29. As she tells me, “I knew he wasn’t going to hit me.” And though he wanted sex constantly — he started saying the prayers that were to be recited before sex in the car home after the marriage so as not to waste any time — the marriage lasted for over a decade. She left the day before her 31st birthday with her three children.

At this point, Fletcher had known for a long time that she was a lesbian. She had suspected as much at school in Israel and came out to a rabbi at 17. His response: “All the girls are doing it but it goes away when you get married.” Ironically enough, all that sex segregation provided ample opportunities for experimentation.

Her coming-out story is also bound up with her discovery of feminism. In her early 20s, she stumbled upon a feminist book, Harriet Harman’s autobiography. “I read it on the train, and by the end of the journey I’d signed up as a member of the Labor Party. I went into work after I read it and started rabble rousing and talking to the other women in the office about, like there’s a thing called maternity pay. And this is how it works.”

In 2019 Fletcher enrolled for a degree at the University of Salford. “I had been taught that they were forbidden spaces for us,” she says, but nevertheless went ahead without seeking permission to do so.

When she wrote a paper on forced marriage, it was covered on Radio 4, as well as on TV in America and India. At that point, though, she was careful not to talk about her lesbianism for fear her critics would claim it informed her critique of forced marriage.

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When she eventually came out to her family, in 2021, she was roundly rejected. As Fletcher continues, leaving the Charedim is like being a refugee in your own country, with many members ultimately put off by how hard it is. Remarkably, though, leaving her husband wasn’t followed by departure from the Charedi community more generally. She calls staying a “revolutionary” act, arguing that “My existence is resistance. I feel that it is an act of service to the future of this community for it to include visible feminist lesbians.” No one, she adds, “should have to choose between staying and staying safe.”

Describing life in the Chasidic community, she tells me, “Every single moment of the day is mapped out. So as soon as you get out of bed there are rules that you follow before you even walk and, for many people, what that does is give a freedom or absolution.” But this has a terrible downside for girls and women as Fletcher explains: “Personal autonomy is dictated, particularly sex when sex is so ritualized and dictated by external authority. Not only does it diminish it, but it pretty much removes capacity for consent.”

Fletcher’s decision to stand and fight, to show how women are harmed within her culture, has already led to material change. Her campaign against forced marriage led her to co-found Nahamu, the first UK think-tank to tackle religious extremism in the Jewish community. “It’s not about burning down the house,” she says, “it’s about infusing a community with informed consent, with knowledge of what we’re entitled to as women.”

You might say the same about Fletcher personally. She once worried about being spotted in public with a partner and was terrified of putting anything on the record; she lived a public life in which she was campaigning as a feminist but hiding her sexuality.

But wanting a more integrated life, she came out and now lives with a partner openly. Fletcher has also been gratified to discover that though some people “will take offense on seeing me in the kosher shops, especially if I’m wearing one of my rude t-shirts”, others “have capacity for it”.

Perhaps that helps explain why, despite everything, Fletcher has always loved her culture and could never leave it behind. Most Friday nights, she hosts dinners for up to 25 lesbians, gay men and trans people, all from the Charedi community, all around a single table in the heart of Manchester’s Orthodox community. “For me,” she says, “to live a Charedi life — it’s the food that I like to eat and it’s the songs that I sing and it’s where I feel comfortable. It’s my heritage.”

It has helped, too, that Fletcher has fought to reclaim her own past. The code of mesirah prohibits Jews from handing over other Jews to secular authorities, and usually prevents anyone from reporting crimes against women and children. But, in 2015, Fletcher helped convict Todros Grynhaus for sexual assault against her and another girl, waiving her right to anonymity. The case led the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, to state that sexual abuse must always be reported to the police, with Fletcher herself continuing to condemn those Charedis who actively cover up abuse within the community.

As for the future, Fletcher is clear about what must happen. Like most Charedi women, she received effectively no education until she went to college. With that in mind, and at risk of “sounding neoliberal”, Fletcher argues that “education, education, education is what makes a difference.” And rather than turn her back on her community, she is striving to make it a better place. “No one,” she adds, “gets to throw me out”. Given everything she’s achieved so far, we should probably take her at her word.

The Haredi first arrived in Britain in the late 19th century. Most immigrant communities that have been around for that long blend into the wider national life – there was a lengthy wave of Irish immigration to Britain at around the same time, for instance, and Archway, also in north London, had a large Irish community. Now the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of those immigrants are distinguished, usually, only by their surnames.

But the Haredi have worked hard to maintain their distinction. Most don’t have televisions or the internet, many read only Haredi-produced local newspapers. Marriage is within the community, usually arranged. It’s like entropy: if you unplug a fridge, it slowly reverts to the same temperature as the room around it. It needs to work to maintain its difference. The Haredi, deliberately, put that work in.

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Are Heredi Jews ahead of their time?

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I sometimes think about the Haredi when I read people saying that because immigration is economically positive (which, almost entirely, it is), the only reason to oppose it is bigotry. I’ve seen the argument a few times; the latest is by Matthew D’Ancona, who is a clever and fair-minded writer, in the Guardian. D’Ancona rightly points out that surveys have shown that anxiety about immigration drove the Brexit vote, and says that this shows that a large percentage of Britons “just don’t much like people of foreign extraction, and certainly don’t want many more of them around the place”.

Changing their way of life – allowing the internet, opening their community up to outsiders – would undoubtedly be good for the Haredi, economically. But it would open them up to the social entropy they’ve worked so hard to counteract. Are they bigoted for doing so?

Honestly: I don’t know. It depends, in large degree, on what your definition of “bigoted” is. It is worth noting that a few years ago Haredi three-year-olds were being given school-produced sheets describing non-Jews as “evil” and claiming the “goyim” wanted to kill all Jews, which certainly raises a few red flags with me.

But I think it’s a bit much to say that bigotry is the only possible reason that they could want to keep themselves separate from wider British society. As this fascinating 2011 profile by the Telegraph’s Mick Brown shows, the Haredi are a close-knit and mutually supportive community; I can understand a fear that any changes to their lifestyle might be damaging.

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Comparing white Britons to an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is inevitably going to raise some eyebrows. The ethnic majority in a country has power and influence in a way that a tiny, niche religious subculture does not. But I think the Stamford Hill experience works as a sort of microcosmic analogy.

A couple of years ago, I did some interviews for a piece that never got published, about how accent and dialect affect our life chances. One of the people I interviewed was a fascinating, brilliant man who had grown up in a very working-class village in the North-West. In his 30s, after working for years as a postman, he ended up becoming a teacher and then getting a PhD in sociolinguistics. Eventually he decided he preferred the working-class life and became a lorry driver. I had been researching the piece expecting to write about how important it is that posh ‘RP’ speakers like me drop our prejudice against non-standard dialects, and I did, to some extent.

But I also found out, in a classic case of Posh Metropolitan Journalist Writing About The Northern Working Class As Though They’re A Remote Amazonian Tribe, that accent prejudice goes both ways. He had kept his Lancastrian accent throughout his career, which had made it harder to find work in middle-class professions such as teaching. But, he said, without it, he would have been perceived as less authentic by his peers. Your accent marks you as having solidarity with your area. Being authentically local is important for acceptance in many working-class communities. Like the Haredi, these communities actively do the work to prevent social entropy, the slow process of homogenisation.

Further reading

The economic rationalists don't get the immigration debate

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This, to me, suggests a possible reason for being wary of immigration that is neither economic nor straightforwardly bigoted. Immigrants, by definition, are not ‘authentically local’. If a place has a distinct local character, and then people from outside move in in large numbers, the distinct local character will probably change. That doesn’t matter to me, at all, but I live in London, where change is the only constant; most people move here for a few years at the start of their career and then move on. That’s not true of the sort of villages where my lorry-driving PhD friend grew up.

There’s another reason that’s been floated to me as well. I spoke recently to a Conservative MP who argued, passionately, that an influx of hard-working, talented Eastern European migrants had made it harder for struggling local people in his constituency to get work. “Why would a local construction firm hire John, my constituent who’s just come out of prison for a second time, when they can get a Romanian guy with a PhD for the same money?” If the Romanian PhD wasn’t there, he said, they’d have to hire John and help rehabilitate him. I think that MP was wrong – I think he is committing the Lump of Labour fallacy, and that hiring the Romanian PhD would end up with more work available for John. But his reasoning, surely, was not bigoted; as an MP, he has duties to his constituents, not to people currently living in Romania.

Obviously there are reasons that people reject immigration which are unambiguously bigoted – there really are racists who don’t like brown people. But there are also people who are worried about their local community staying the same. That means, by the simple working of logic, that they would be wary about new people moving into it, whether those people are from Kent or Sri Lanka. Looking at it this way, too, might partly explain the phenomenon that places with the least immigration are often the places most worried about it. The Haredi probably have the least social mixing of any community in Britain, and yet they’re the most worried about it. It’s not a paradox from this angle.

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Labour’s conspiracy of silence on immigration

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Some of the Haredi, by the way, are having to leave Stamford Hill. It’s too expensive there, so young families can’t afford the rent or the mortgage: to maintain the super-tight-knit, ultra-managed community that they want, 100 families have decided to up sticks and move to Canvey Island in Essex.

The analogy is too convenient not to use. It’s really hard to keep an economically viable community if you cut all your ties to the outside world. The bits around you, which keep those ties, will outperform you. It’s understandable to want to maintain your old ways of life, to guard your still little pool from the churning waters outside, but it ends up costing you. Obviously, for the Haredi, that price is worth paying.

Perhaps there’s a similar thought process going on when some British people reject immigration. You can think – I do think – that they’re wrong, that Brexit is a terrible idea, and that immigration is a good thing. But it does show that bigotry is not the only reason you could possibly want to choose low immigration over economic growth.