I think Potok portrayed his characters in a very sympathetic light. Even R’ Saunders (who would be the closest thing to a villain in The Chosen) is so well fleshed out and explained that it’s hard to not understand his position.

I think that the characters in the Asher Lev books were less prone to sympathy, but you could make the argument that their actions were at least reasonably believable (that is to say, they were portrayed accurately, more or less). Sometimes, even in real life, it’s hard to be happy with the actions of your fellow Jews, even if you understand them.

-DMZ

Read http://www.beliefnet.com/story/27/tory_2796_1.html

to have more background on where Mirvis comes from:

“Letting My Hair Down

Orthodox women must cover their hair after marriage. But after years of struggle, my feminism beat out my Orthodoxy on this one . . . In the end, my decision to uncover my hair wasn’t a halakic decision, but a personal one. I stopped because I was no longer willing to do something that offended me so much. By willfully doing something that I acknowledged to be against halakah, I had changed. My bind to halakah had loosened. I had to concede that though hair covering doesn’t mean everything, it does mean something. Halakah was no longer the sole criterion by which I would be making decisions; other values such as feminism now had competing weight. Questions that used to seem black and white–Is it in accordance with halakah or not?– have become more complicated. If I’m already not covering my hair, I can ask myself, why it is that I am not called up to the Torah in the synagogue, which is also against Orthodox practice? And if I am not observing laws that offend me, what about the prohibition against a man hearing a woman sing for fear it will arouse him? So far, I haven’t changed in these or any other ways, but I do not know what the future holds. By opening the door to this kind of reckoning, I knew I was setting down a risky path, and now I can’t be sure where I will end up.”

–> My comment is, I don’t cover my hair either and so I have a lot of sympathy with Mivis’s points. But I wouldn’t call myself Orthodox. (I’m Conservative with a lot of Orthodox friends.) I don’t think it’s entirely fair of Mirvis to now say, Oh, I’ve been observant my whole life when she’s on the left-fringes of Orthodoxy and clearly has some problems with being Orthodox. I don’t agree with everything in Wendy’s article eithr, but these authors obviously do have ‘issues’ with Orthodoxy and that is coming through in their negative writing. I am sick of reading so much negativity too. Yes, we need more Chaim Potoks! I agree with whoever made that comment.

Keep up the great work. Any comments on the NY Times portrayal of Rachel Factor’s show (Tuesday Feb 15, Arts)?

Of course, in her rage, she utterly fails to find the point of Shalit’s essay. Not that you can’t have off flawed-frum charechters, but that you shouldn’t use the frum as your whipping boy.

And when you wright phrases such as

“[T]hey who pretend to be so holy are just like everyone else…it was all pretense”

You don’t also get to say , “Let’s imagine one person who is.”

It’s wrong to invent a sinner so that your protagonist can then draw conclusions about a whole community.

As a BT I’m highly offended by Mirvis’s sweeping generalizations regarding those whome with I’ve traveled a similar derech. She accuses Shalit in one moment of judgeing her credentials based on her shettle, and then slanders her by demotstrating how better her understanding is because of her early (childhood/childish) experiences with Judiasm. I would counter, that a childs understanding of the world can not compare with those of an adult; no matter how much cholent still resides in her colen.

Mirvis comes off as an adolecent strutting about in self importance, and labeling only thouse of her ilk as true artists. The rest being cheasy kiruv hacks… (all love to those kiruv workers btw)