Hidden Heretics - (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology) by Ayala Fader (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A revealing look at Jewish men and women who secretly explore the outside world, in person and online, while remaining in their ultra-Orthodox religious communities

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.

Review Quotes

"Hidden Heretics does indeed reflect the best of anthropology: an incisive, sensitive book that draws novel ethnographic fieldwork together with scholarship on language and semiotic ideologies, secrecy, doubt, media, authority, and ethics."-- "Journal of Linguistic Anthropology"

"Hidden Heretics provides a view of contemporary ultra-Orthodox life from a series of unexpected angles and tucked-away corners."---Naomi Seidman, Public Books

"[Hidden Heretics] explores, with great insight and sensitivity, the complex existence of double lifers and the conditions under which they live. [Fader's] engaging style makes this fascinating work appeal both to scholars of contemporary Orthodox Judaism and those who study the relationship between technology and society, as well as to the general reader."-- "American Jewish History"

"[An] absorbing account of how Haredi Jews in contemporary New York use social and other digital media to negotiate religious doubt. . . . It is the personal stories in particular that make Hidden Heretics so compelling."---Giulia Miller, Times Literary Supplement

"Ayala Fader . . . unpacks one of the most daunting public secrets confronting Haredi communities: the suspicion, or realistic understanding, that there are members of the community who are experiencing life-changing doubt."-- "American Anthropologist"

"Engaging. . . . Fader effectively shows how modern apostasy meets hard-line orthodoxy."-- "Library Journal"

"Fader has written a groundbreaking work that delves into the parts of the Orthodox world that many do not even know exist."---Ben Rothke, Times of Israel

"Finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Award in Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore, Association for Jewish Studies"

"Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies"

"Finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, Jewish Book Council"

"Masterfully written"---Oren Golar, Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture

"Providing us with a detailed examination of how disbelief occurs on a spectrum, Fader pushes us to understand how staying or leaving a religion does too."---Katie Christine Gaddini, Marginalia

"Substantial and riveting."---David Zvi Kalman, The Forward

About the Author

Ayala Fader is professor of anthropology at Fordham University. She is the author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton).