Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age
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Book Talk
Admission: Free |
In her recent publication, Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, scholar Ayala Fader tells the fascinating, often heart-wrenching stories of married ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women in twenty-first-century New York who lead “double lives” in order to protect those they love. Drawing on five years of fieldwork with those living double lives and the rabbis, life coaches, and religious therapists who minister to, advise, and sometimes excommunicate them, Fader investigates religious doubt and social change in the digital age. In following those living double lives, who range from the religiously observant but open-minded on one end to atheists on the other, Fader delves into universal quandaries of faith and skepticism, the ways digital media can change us, and family frictions that arise when a person radically transforms who they are and what they believe.
Join YIVO for a discussion of this recent publication featuring Fader in conversation with Josh Lambert, professor and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College.
About the Speakers
Ayala Fader is Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University. She is the author of the award-winning books, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (2009) and Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (2020). Fader’s research, supported by fellowships including the NSF and the NEH, appears in academic journals and more public venues. Fader is the co-founder of the Seminar on Jewish Orthodoxies at Fordham’s Jewish Studies Program, on the steering committee of the Haredi Research Group, and is a fellow at the American Academy for Jewish Research. As the director of Fordham’s Center for Public Anthropology, Fader is currently collaborating on the Demystifying Language Project, which works to make linguistic anthropology a social justice resource for public high schools.
Josh Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English, and director of the Jewish Studies Program, at Wellesley College. He's the author of The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature (2022) and Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (2014), and coeditor of How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (2020).