In my early twenties in London, I married a man who was not halakhically Jewish, though he had had a mostly secular-Jewish upbringing similar to my own. My parents refused to attend a civil wedding. I sulked in my callow, who-needs-this-bourgeois-rubbish way, then marveled at the zeal and genuine joy with which my beloved applied himself to the equivalent of an American Conservative conversion that would receive him into a tribe of which he was already an active member.

Given the more rigorous hurdles they must clear to achieve an Orthodox conversion, how much more amazing is the staying power of some of the gentile candidates whose rites of passage we follow in Leap of Faith, a sharply observed, yet admirably open-minded documentary produced and directed by Antony Benjamin and Stephen Friedman.

It is often said that Jews don't proselytize—we do, but mostly to reel in lapsed members of the tribe. Gentile converts to Orthodox Judaism must go through an obstacle course—including adult circumcision and either remarriage to a spouse to whom one has been married for many years or abstention from dating during the conversion process—that must sometimes feel more like a series of invitations to fail. As one rabbi in the film explains with evident satisfaction, "Most people cannot withstand the test."

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