52 pages • 1-hour read
The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen
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Chapters 8-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination and violence.
After his Sunday morning Judaic studies classes, Hoodie lies to his friends in order to visit Anna-Marie at her house. Thrilled to be in Anna-Marie’s home, Hoodie’s surprised to find that it’s similar to his, only quieter and brighter. Anna-Marie’s mother, Mayor Diaz-O’Leary, mispronounces Hoodie’s name and is offended when he won’t shake her hand. She offers to make them lunch and is embarrassed when Anna-Marie explains the rules of kosher eating. Hoodie decides not to get involved. Anna-Marie takes Hoodie up to her bedroom, where she reveals that she often feels lonely. She explains that her mother has focused solely on work since the death of her husband, who grew up in Tregaron. Her mother wants to preserve it as it was when he was a child. Anna-Marie feels betrayed by her mother’s intense focus on her job, which leaves Anna-Marie alone in her grief. She asks Hoodie to hug her, and he does, telling himself that he’s doing it to provide comfort and not to be romantic. Nevertheless, he considers this their second date.
Later that afternoon, Hoodie receives a text from Zippy telling him to leave Anna-Marie and meet her at the town’s only kosher market immediately. Hoodie arrives to find the entire Orthodox community gathered together. He learns that his two best friends, Moshe and Chaim, were the victims of an antisemitic attack after school. The attackers accused the boys of having devil horns and rip up Chaim’s kippah. As the leaders of the community discuss plans to institute a buddy system in public, the police arrive and try to shut down the meeting, claiming the building is over capacity and violating fire codes. The police officers grab at several married women, horrifying Hoodie and angering the adult men. Hoodie’s father and a rabbi intervene, and the crowd disperses.
As the crowd walks home, several members of the community ignore or explicitly criticize Hoodie for his friendship with Anna-Marie. Zippy explains that the community expects outsiders to harm them and they feel betrayed by Hoodie’s willingness to forge relationships with gentiles, whom they view as a danger to them. When Hoodie arrives home, his father forbids him from seeing Anna-Marie, referring to her as a shiksa, a derogatory term for a non-Jewish woman. He explains that Hoodie’s relationship with her is a betrayal of their community and God. He takes Hoodie’s phone and restricts him from leaving home for any reason except school.
Chapter 9 Summary
That night, Hoodie lies awake thinking about his father’s words and the attack on his friends. For the first time, he feels like an outsider in his own home. He sneaks into the kitchen to use Zippy’s laptop to try to find a way to contact Anna-Marie. Desperate, he pulls up her TikTok page. Ignoring a new-to-him dancing video, he watches her most recent video, in which she criticizes the recent attacks and alludes vaguely to her friendship with Hoodie. She encourages her friends to reach out to people who are different than them, rather than pushing them away. Hoodie is thrilled by her words and feels even more connected to Anna-Marie.
Attached to Anna-Marie’s video are links to articles about the attacks from major newspapers. In one of them, Mayor Diaz-O’Leary criticizes the Jewish community for violating fire codes and capacity guidelines without mentioning the antisemitic attacks on Moshe and Chaim. Despite his feelings for Anna-Marie, Hoodie is enraged at the Mayor’s disregard for his community. He is also horrified by the comments left on the article, which deny that the Holocaust happened and accuse the Jewish community of orchestrating the September 11th attacks. Disturbed by the comments but in love with Anna-Marie’s video, he finally falls asleep in bed.
Chapter 10 Summary
The next day, Zippy’s fiancé Yoel accompanies Hoodie to school without speaking. When Hoodie arrives at the yeshiva, most of his classmates avoid making eye contact with him. Others spit at him and call him names. During the morning prayers, Hoodie tries to speak to his best friend Moshe. However, Moshe moves away from him and refuses to speak to him.
Rabbi Moritz and Rabbi Freidman summon Hoodie after morning prayers. They bring Hoodie to a small, dusty room on the fourth floor of the yeshiva. Rabbi Freidman explains that Hoodie must be separated from his classmates because his presence is a distraction and because the rabbis fear his sinful thinking will spread to other students. When Hoodie questions what he did wrong, Rabbi Freidman explains that Hoodie has committed both a chet (a misstep) and a pecha (an intentional sin) and that he must atone by studying the Torah and asking God and his community for forgiveness.
A few hours later, Moshe appears with more books. He confirms that Hoodie is in cherem (an official community-wide shunning). Moshe explains that Hoodie’s sin was associating with a gentile girl—explicitly forbidden in his community—while his friends were the victims of an attack. As Moshe and Hoodie argue, Hoodie accidentally knocks a copy of the Torah to the floor, horrifying them both. Moshe leaves, telling Hoodie that he will pray for his forgiveness.
When Hoodie arrives home, he finds that his family is shunning him too. Even his youngest sister, Rivkie, runs away from him. Despite the shunning, Hoodie learns that Mayor Diaz-O’Leary publicly suggested that Moshe and Chaim faked their attack for political gain. The proposed construction of new housing for Orthodox families remains blocked by the city. Hoodie falls asleep thinking about Anna-Marie.
Chapter 11 Summary
Three days after the cherem begins, Hoodie meets with Rabbi Taub, the chief rabbi for the Orthodox Jewish community in New York and Pennsylvania. Rabbi Taub is older than anyone Hoodie has met, and Hoodie struggles to understand his mixture of Yiddish, Hebrew, and heavily accented English. At the end of his speech, the rabbi tells Hoodie that he knows the community will be proud of him one day soon. Although Hoodie does not understand most of what the rabbi says, he leaves the meeting feeling proud. When he returns to his small classroom, Rabbi Moritz seems to think the meeting had a positive effect and agrees to let Hoodie stop copying and begin directing his own study of the Torah, an important step toward ending the cherem.
That night, Hoodie struggles to sleep and once again sneaks downstairs to watch Anna-Marie’s TikTok videos. He is upset to find a video of Anna-Marie dancing with her friend Case, who was among the boys making fun of him and his friends when they met. Zippy wakes up and reveals that, because Hoodie did not erase the browser history, she knows about his habit of using her computer to watch Anna-Marie’s videos. Hoodie tells Zippy that he knows she has broken rules before, like when she danced with Yoel at a wedding before their engagement. Zippy replies that there are rules that can be broken and rules that can’t. She warns him that a relationship with Anna-Marie would mean total exclusion from the community. She urges him to find a way to live within the restrictions of their faith, knowing that most of the rules are up for debate. Energized by their conversation, Hoodie thinks up a way to continue his relationship with Anna-Marie while also remaining a part of the Orthodox community.
Chapters 8-11 Analysis
In this section, Blum increases his use of Hebrew and Yiddish terms, and the fact that he does translate or define them suggests that his intended audience is Jewish readers. Blum uses nearly a dozen Hebrew and Yiddish terms in these chapters, including kashrut (Jewish dietary laws, 105), kippah (a small cap worn by Jewish men, 115), shtetl (small, primarily-Jewish European towns, 121), shiksa (a non-Jewish woman, 121), beis medrash (a Torah study hall, 134), apikores (heretic, 134), chet and pesha (two types of sins, 139), teshuvah (atonement, 139), and cherem (official shunning, 141). For Jewish readers, these terms signal the larger Jewish community to which Hoodie belongs, increasing empathy for the protagonist. For non-Jewish readers, these terms may offer a disorienting experience that mirrors Hoodie’s feelings of being an outsider.
Hoodie’s attempts to define his feelings for Anna-Marie highlight the specificity of his coming-of-age arc within his Orthodox context. He repeatedly calls Anna-Marie his “girlfriend” although they have never discussed having a romantic relationship, and she has not expressed interest in him. Hoodie’s belief that Anna-Marie is his girlfriend leads to him “crying uncontrollably” at the sight of her dancing with a male friend in a TikTok video. Hoodie’s reaction positions his relationship with Anna-Marie as a formative romantic experience—one that highlights his community’s resistance to interfaith relationships. Later, when Hoodie is ostracized by his friends and neighbors, he suggests that “thinking about [Anna-Marie] was the only thing keeping me going […] I couldn’t sleep at night unless I cleared my mind until she was the only thing in it” (146). The repeated use of the phrase “only thing” in this passage highlights the importance of first love in a coming-of-age context, an importance exacerbated in Hoodie’s case by the forbidden nature of the relationship. Blum’s suggestion that Hoodie’s possessiveness and devotion to Anna-Marie is one-sided further emphasizes the cultural divide between Hoodie and Anna-Marie. In Anna-Marie’s context, casual romantic relationships are not uncommon, whereas in Hoodie’s, they’re both unheard of and unlawful. Hoodie’s actions in this section foreshadow Anna-Marie’s response to his advances in the coming chapters.
The conversations about Hoodie’s cherem, resulting from his relationship with Anna-Marie, reflect a belief in The Role of Community in Maintaining Faith. The act of cherem assumes that the threat of isolation from the community is a deterrent against bad behavior. The depiction of Hoodie’s time in Cherem suggests that he does suffer. Although most of his classmates ignore him, one intentionally runs into him “with his elbow out […] knocking the wind out of [him]” (134). Hoodie feels “a combination of bone bruise and betrayal” that remains with him for days (134). These passages suggest that isolation from the community at large is an important deterrent against violating the rules of an insular Orthodox Jewish community, emphasizing the role that community bonding plays in the maintenance of faith.
Hoodie’s brief, confusing conversation with Rabbi Taub also highlights the importance of community in maintaining faith. Although his friends and neighbors are actively shunning him, Hoodie’s teachers Rabbi Moritz and Rabbi Friedman are working hard to bring him back in line with the requirements of his faith. They summon Rabbi Taub, “the most important voice” in the Orthodox Jewish community “from Monsey to Brooklyn to Tregaron” to help Hoodie with his crisis of faith (147). Hoodie takes this visit as a sign of the magnitude of his sins, reasoning that “I’d done something so unthinkable that Rabbis Moritz and Freidman didn’t know what to do, and they needed a higher authority to come down and make a direct ruling” (148). However, his sister’s fiancé Yoel argues that “to meet alone with such a man” is “an extraordinary honor” for anyone, let alone a teenage boy. Yoel’s positive perspective suggests that, rather than seeking permission to expel Hoodie from their community as Hoodie fears, Rabbi Moritz and Rabbi Freidman take their responsibility to guide Hoodie on the right path seriously. Summoning Rabbi Taub to Tregaron signals their faith in the Orthodox Jewish community’s ability to support individual members in maintaining their faith.
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