[Air-L] Ayala Fader discusses Orthodox Jews and their digital practices

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Ayala Fader discusses her book, *Hidden Heretics*: *Jewish Doubt in the
Digital Age*, answering Yzza Sedrati's questions.

https://campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana


Press blurb: What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but
revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of life
you had ever known? *Hidden Heretics *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. While they no longer believe that God gave the Torah to
Jews at Mount Sinai, these hidden heretics continue to live in their
families and religious communities, even as they surreptitiously break
Jewish commandments and explore forbidden secular worlds in person and
online. 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, Ayala Fader investigates
religious doubt and social change in the digital age.


The internet, which some ultra-Orthodox rabbis call more threatening than
the Holocaust, offers new possibilities for the age-old problem of
religious uncertainty. Fader shows how digital media has become a lightning
rod for contemporary struggles over authority and truth. She reveals the
stresses and strains that hidden heretics experience, including the
difficulties their choices pose for their wives, husbands, children, and,
sometimes, lovers. 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.

In stories of conflicts between faith and self-fulfillment, *Hidden
Heretics *explores the moral compromises and divided loyalties of
individuals facing life-altering crossroads.