Rachel Light, MD

A native of Westchester County, New York, Rachel Light attended Jewish schools through high school. At the age of sixteen, she attended Swarthmore College, majoring in biology and education and graduating with high honors. During her later high-school and college years, Rachel found herself becoming more and more religious, ultimately becoming a more strict Orthodox Jew. At the age of eighteen, she met her future husband, whom she married at nineteen. Only weeks before her marriage, her future husband broke her nose in what was to become a pattern of abuse.

Rachel's first book, UNDER MY HAT, tells the story of her turn to Orthodox Judaism and the abuse she suffered in her marriage. It highlights the abuse problem in the Orthodox Jewish Community, where women often stay in abusive marriages twice as long as non-Jewish women.

Ultimately escaping her marriage, Rachel went on to attend Yale School of Medicine and has published her thesis, FOURTEEN YEARS OF SILENCE: AN EXPLORATION OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE IN THE JEWISH COMMUNITY. In 2005, she appeared in the documentary film, WHEN THE VOW BREAKS: BUILDING A RESPONSE TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN THE JEWISH COMMUNITY.

Currently Rachel is directing the establishment of a birth center at Yale New Haven Hospital, the first of its kind in Connecticut and only one of three academic birth centers in the US.

• UNDER MY HAT