Feldman grew up as a member of the Hasidic Satmar group in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City.
[2] She has written that her father was mentally impaired, and that her paternal family had arranged a marriage for him to her mother, whom Feldman described as an intelligent woman who was an outsider to the community because she was of German Jewish origin.
[11] Feldman started blogging, and in 2012, she published her autobiography, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,[12] which became a bestseller[13] and was translated into 30 languages, into Hebrew in 2013.
The Swiss-German newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung called the book "a report on the long journey to the self, a literary survival guide, and a formidable philosophical-analytic confrontation with one's own history".
[17] Netflix also produced a documentary, Making Unorthodox, that chronicles the creative process and filming, and discussed the differences between the book and the TV series.
[19][20][21] Feldman criticized the postponed award ceremony for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli and her novel Minor Detail at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023 and signed the open letter from 1200 intellectuals against it.
[22] Jesse Kornbluth examined this criticism in a pair of articles in the Huffington Post which concluded, "There are claims in this book that Hasids have disputed.
No doubt girls all over Brooklyn are buying this book, hiding it under their mattresses, reading it after lights out—and contemplating, perhaps for the first time, their own escape.
"[23][24] Other journalists also investigated some of the incidents described in Feldman's memoir and found a number of exaggerations or discrepancies, including her account of her schooling, her relationships with various family members, and her description of an alleged murder and its supposed coverup by Haredi authorities.
[25][26][27] In response to these criticisms, Feldman noted that the book carried a disclaimer stating that certain events had been compressed, consolidated or reordered.