They're dirty, they're smelly, they're ignorant, and they can't speak English.

Though I didn't personally know any Orthodox Jews until my mid-teens or even so much as have a conversation with one of them until high school, my negative opinion was formed at an early age.

My father, a doctor, brought home disparaging impressions of the chassidim he treated as a resident at a Manhattan hospital. I watched movies like "Fiddler on the Roof" (old-fashioned Jews) and "A Stranger Among Us" (fanatical Jews). And during our monthly family trips to New York, I would see observant men and women from afar, in their wigs, long beards, hats, and outdated clothes, and think about how different we were. (Our predominantly Catholic town in the suburbs of Northern New Jersey certainly didn't have any locals of that persuasion.)

I knew I was Jewish - but I was normal Jewish: American, balanced, part of society. My parents instilled in us a sense of great Jewish pride, and put the fear of God into us to not intermarry, but these Orthodox people clearly took the religion too far, I thought.

After my bat mitzvah, I superficially got to know a few of the Orthodox Jewish teachers at my local twice-a-week Hebrew high school. While they seemed nice enough, I still considered them very different from me, part of a world I knew very little about (and I was happy to leave things just as they were).

I didn't confront religious Jews or Judaism in a personal way until my junior year of high school, when one of those Hebrew high teachers proved to be very useful in helping me deal with something that had been plaguing me since childhood.

I discovered at around the age of 8 that I didn't know why I was alive, but to my surprise, no one else I encountered seemed to know either. After nearly eight years of off-and-on insomnia and panic attacks caused by this existential angst, I enrolled in a Hebrew high class called "Taoism and Pirkei Avos."

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My teacher was very warm and approachable and I distinctly remember how much better I would feel walking out of his class each week. It was the first time I grasped just how much wisdom Judaism had to offer, as I had been raised to believe the greatest Jewish contributions to the world consisted of food, funny Yiddish expressions, and academic excellence.

During the spring semester of that year my teacher invited me to spend Shabbos - my first real Shabbos ever - with his family. I was instantly drawn in by what I saw, but simultaneously frightened to venture down such a path.

The Shabbos, the learning, the lifestyle all seemed so beautiful, but how could I become one of them? They were backward and extreme. What would my family and friends think of me if I changed so drastically?

At first I tried to be more observant without officially "changing teams." I became active in a Conservative Jewish youth group and searched for other teens who also wanted to be committed to Jewish law.

Despite my efforts, however, I quickly realized there weren't many people in those circles who cared to observe as seriously as I did. I soon started calling myself Conservadox, then MODERN orthodox, and then finally, one day at the end of high school, I stopped worrying about labels and accepted myself as an Orthodox Jew.

* * *

Purely out of ignorance, I had spent my life missing out on the beauty of traditional Judaism. I knew many other Jews were doing the same. Rejecting Judaism based on knowledge is one thing, but the majority of Jews were rejecting their heritage blindly - and for that I wouldn't stand. So from the moment I started observing Judaism myself, I did everything I could to educate other Jews about the depth of their heritage.

I started close to home. I got my family interested in learning - my parents and two sisters are all observant today. When I arrived at Columbia University, I became very active in Jewish outreach there. At any given time I had half a dozen girls I would study with and bring along to Jewish events. I became the student leader, and later national student coordinator, of a campus kiruv group called Stars of David (little known today, it was a precursor to the very popular and successful Maimonides campus program.)

In addition to my campus efforts, on the weekends I was an NCSY adviser and Hebrew high teacher at the very Hebrew high school where I first got my introduction to a Judaism that was exciting and relevant.

Upon graduating from college I began working at Partners in Torah, a Jewish outreach organization that facilitates telephone Torah study-partnerships. During my five-year stay there I interviewed more than 3,000 young, college-age Birthright alumni over the phone, as part of the "intake" process for new students.

I immediately noticed a certain trend in the interviews, but it wasn't until several years later that I was able to draw a useful conclusion from what I saw: nearly every person I spoke with about observant Jews displayed a palpable dislike or distrust of - and a clear feeling of disassociation from - the Orthodox.

I'd start off the interview with a nice conversation, get into an interesting topic, but if at any point along the way I'd reveal that I was Orthodox (which I often did for fun), the interviewee almost always commented that he or she was shocked, because I seemed so nice and "normal." I also noticed throughout these many conversations that there was a lot of misinformation about Orthodox Jews.

The "research" I was unknowingly conducting didn't come to a head until about three years ago when I was interviewed by a Catholic journalist for a Spanish newspaper. She had come to New York to cover a story, and while here she started noticing the Orthodox Jews in the Brooklyn neighborhood in which she was living. Having had very little exposure to religious Jews in her native Spain, she decided to find out more and write an article on the subject.

A colleague of mine saw her post online requesting an interview with a local Orthodox woman and suggested I e-mail her. I did, and she came over the next day. When she stepped inside our apartment, which is decorated in a very urban, contemporary manner, I could immediately see from the expression on her face that the stereotypes were breaking down. After a nearly three-hour interview, her perspective had completely changed.

It was at this point that all the pieces started coming together. I began to realize that not only were the negative beliefs toward religious Jews with which I was raised virtually universal among non-observant Jews and non-Jews, but that such negativity was preventing Jewish wisdom from getting out to the world. I recalled how even one of my most liberal, open-minded friends from college revealed to me months after we became friends that if she had known I was Orthodox when she met me, she never would have spoken to me in the first place.

* * *

If spreading the beauty and wisdom of Judaism was my ultimate goal, the system to do so seemed internally flawed. In my decade of outreach involvement, I'd spent several years recruiting for NCSY, Partners in Torah, and Moodus/Sinai Retreats. Getting people through the door was always a tremendous challenge - and actual arm-twisting was necessary in some cases. The programming itself was almost always terrific and inspiring - at times life changing. But none of that mattered if not enough people were there to get inspired.

Obviously there is more than one solution to the challenges of recruitment, but it occurred to me that would-be participants were rejecting programs simply due to their negative perception of Orthodox Jews. This meant that despite all the wonderful Jewish outreach going on around the world, the image of Orthodox Jews was a roadblock all too many Jews could not get past.