Hidden, with Ayala Fader

About the Guest

Ayala Fader is professor of anthropology at Fordham University. She is author of Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, which was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Nonfiction in 2022. She also wrote Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn.

Best Books

Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, by Ayala Fader.

Number Our Days: A Triumph of Continuity and Culture Among Jewish Old People in an Urban Ghetto, by Barbara Myerhoff.

The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence, by Laurence Ralph.

The Changeling, by Victor LaValle.

THEME MUSIC: “Great Light,” by Deep Sea Diver.

Transcript

[Theme song: “Great Light,” by Deep Sea Diver]

AYALA FADER: Somebody asked me at a talk I was giving, “What does it mean when somebody has doubt? Does that mean they doubt God?" and I was like, “Oh, no no no, it's not always about God.”

BLAIR HODGES: Ultra-orthodox Jews do their best to live in the world, but not of the world. Hasidic enclaves in New York, for example, are filled with believers who shape their entire lives around obedience to God's revealed laws, but who you might see shopping downtown, or who might have helped code an app you use on your phone. As with any religious community, there are also members of the faith who come to doubt ultra-Orthodoxy’s beliefs or question its practices. And the consequences can be life-shattering.

In this episode of Fireside with Blair Hodges, anthropologist Ayala Fader joins us to discuss her book, Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age.

Yisroel’s story – 01:06

BLAIR HODGES: Ayala Fader, welcome to Fireside. It's a pleasure to have you here.

AYALA FADER: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book Hidden Heretics. When I saw it, I had to pick up a copy of this book. And right at the beginning of it you introduce us to Yisroel, this is a Hasidic Jew, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, born and raised in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, New York. I wanted to begin with a little bit about his story, because it's representative of a lot of the people we're going to meet in this book, which is about people who encounter faith crisis within the Hasidic community.

So tell us a little bit about Yisroel's story. And by the way, I should tell listeners, I'm going to be mispronouncing a lot of things throughout this interview. [laughs] So please, tell us about Yisroel.

AYALA FADER: Sure. Well, there's a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew in this book—mostly Yiddish, so I can understand the mispronunciation. But Yisroel's story opens and closes the book, actually. I chose him because, as you say, his story encapsulates all the issues that thread throughout the book. So he told me the story about his own crisis of faith, which is what he called it—a crisis of emuna, or faith.

When he was a teenager, he studied Torah all day in a Yeshiva, as Hasidic boys do. But when he was about thirteen, he began to have questions that are called emuna kashes, or questions about faith. He told me that things in the religious text he was studying just didn't make sense. And he wanted to ask his rabbi, his teacher, why, and what, and they really troubled him. His rabbi immediately shut down the questioning by saying, "Those kinds of questions, those are the questions that come from masturbation."

So he immediately stopped asking them because that is a forbidden activity [laughter]—for theological reasons in addition to social reasons—and he kept his questions to himself, and he tried to just continue on.

And as many young men and women do at eighteen, he entered the matchmaking market. He met his wife—he didn't actually meet her. He met her at the wedding. But they talked a little bit before, and it was a wonderful match. With matchmaking, parents try hard to have the couple be compatible, and he grew to love her very much. They began to have children right away; they had five children. But when he stopped studying Torah—married men usually do for a year or so after they get married and began to go out to work, he began to work in IT, in tech, because you don't need a higher degree. He didn't even have a high school degree.

And it was around the time that the Jewish blogs were really flourishing, meaning that all of these people who were ultra-Orthodox Jews would go online and debate these theological and social questions. They would explore new ideas. And he had access. He went online and suddenly all of his questions returned to him. And he couldn't stop. He went online, he started to debate with other people, and little by little his own sense of the acceptance—and in this case "faith" means accepting that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, that's the basis for ultra-Orthodox faiths, that the literal words of God are in the Torah, and that God gave them to Moses. Over time he came to stop believing that.

And that affected his practice—but secretly. He did a little bit of testing. I write about this moment, one Sabbath evening when Jews aren't allowed to use electricity if they're observant, and his baby started crying in her crib, and he knew that if he turned on the mobile, the musical mobile above her bed, she would calm down. And he tested, and he turned it on. And from then on, he began to break Jewish law secretly and in little bits.

Eventually, he began to meet up with people. Because what happened online, eventually, as people trusted each other, they began to meet in person. His wife, Rukhy, of course, eventually discovered, even though he didn't plan on telling her, and she asked him all kinds of questions. She was devastated because she was a very strong person in her own religious belief. She begged him to talk to their rabbi. He did. The rabbi recommended a number of therapists, and required actually, that he go to a number of what are called "religious therapists." Those religious therapists didn't help him. Some were well trained, some weren't.

One thing I write about is that the loss of faith is sometimes considered mental illness in the community. It's pathologized. And eventually he and his wife came to an agreement that he would never share his personal beliefs with the children, but that he would continue to live publicly as an ultra-Orthodox Jew in front of his community, but privately he would have some independence to go and explore. And she knew he was breaking religious laws.

And that's actually the point where I met him, where he was just beginning to explore New York City and thinking about what his life could actually be.

The Jewish blogosphere – 06:08

BLAIR HODGES: You talked about the rise of these blogs. What were these Internet communities like early on? In the book you talk about them coming around—2002 through 2009 was sort of the heyday of these blogs. What were these communities like?

AYALA FADER: They began as Yeshivish communities, meaning they were not Hasidic, but still ultra-Orthodox. It's a different variety of ultra-Orthodox Jews but these Jews had more access to computers. Yeshivish Jews even go to college, it's not forbidden the way it is for many Hasidic Jews.

So in the beginning, there were bloggers who became extremely well known, both among ultra-Orthodox Jews and to the wider public. I think for the wider public there was a kind of dissonance, of thinking about ultra-Orthodox Jews online the way there are for lots of religious communities who are online—there are many religious communities that are online, of course, but there was something about that sense of ultra-Orthodox Jews as representing the past, I think. But here there were these bloggers who became superstars, who began to question the authority of rabbis and the version of ultra-Orthodoxy, what they called “the system,” that they were living.

And so people would post other forms of reading, like biblical archaeology debating the age of the world, for example. I think the Torah says that the world is 6,000 years old and they would bring in other scientific facts, or they would argue with certain rabbinical readings, or they would show—one blogger posted pictures of how ultra-Orthodox women dressed modestly in the 1950s and how much more relaxed it was compared to the modesty requirements for today.

So basically, in some ways, they were historicizing the ultra-Orthodoxy of today and saying, “It's not that they're just continuing from Mount Sinai to the present, it's that we, as ultra-Orthodox Jews, have had lots of changes in our own lives.”

And what people told me was that the posts were great, but what was really important were the comments after the threads where people debated, and I think the big thing about the J-blogosphere was that people could be anonymous. So it was mostly men—the way blogs actually were in the wider public as well. But even women could come on anonymously and debate with men. Men of all different kinds of Jewish orthodoxies could debate together. And I think it was a place where people like Yisroel, who had doubts, could come and, number one, actually experiment with different ideas. But more important even, was to come to those blogs and see that there were people that they admired, who were not mentally ill, who shared their doubts.

It was a real space of affirmation, I think. And a kind of parallel or alternative explanation for why people might have these kinds of questions. And initially the rabbis who were, of course, older, weren't paying much attention. But even people who weren't online started to hear about them. One person said to me, like, there were many people who weren't online—although, in fact, the internet wasn't as policed until a little bit later—but people were talking about the blogs, he said, in the men's mikvah, around the Shabbos table, people would say, “Did you see the latest posting? What do you think about this?”

So it spilled over into face to face life. And that's when rabbis began—not rabbis, but leadership in general of these communities—began to get worried. And one person told me that some of the advisors to different leaders would actually print out the blogs and show them to some of the leadership and say, “Look! Look what's happening on here.”

The Enlighteners – 9:43

BLAIR HODGES: And anybody could be that person because there was so much anonymity. It could be the person that you were worshipping next to.

AYALA FADER: Yes. And I think that's where the idea of a hidden heretic, or bahalenta apikorsim (or apikorsa, in the singular) where that began to create a lot of anxiety in the more general public sphere of the ultra-Orthodox world. It allowed—as one person said to me, you know, “The man sitting next to you in shul praying so diligently could be somebody who had blogged. You didn't know.”

And I do want to say that being somebody who had doubts, living as what is often called now "living a double life," that's nothing new in these communities, or historically in ultra-Orthodox communities, either. What was new is that usually people had to leave their communities to find any kind of fellowship or friendship or affirmation that they weren't crazy. Many men were seeking intellectual communities that understood Jewish history, things like that. They had to leave—one older man told me he used to go, for example, to the public library in the mid-Manhattan branch and go to the Jewish Studies Reading Room and meet others, usually Jewish academics there, and talk to them.

But what was so profound about the Jewish blogosphere was that people could remain in the privacy of their homes or their work and still explore those kinds of things. I mean, Yisroel did that late at night when his family was asleep.

The J-bloggers, as they called themselves, also compared themselves to a different historical period, which I was really surprised by. I hadn't expected it. They call themselves Maskilim, and that means a Jewish enlightener. And they were referring to the Jewish enlightenment in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century when—there were no ultra-Orthodox Jews—when just traditional Jews began to explore different writing styles, the printing press was new then, and it was easier than before to spread new ideas. And there wasn't that kind of strict division, there was an effort to kind of expose yourself to not only Jewish texts, but to other kinds of ideas that were percolating up, especially from the European enlightenment.

And so what the "hidden heretics" began to claim through the J-blogosphere was that they didn't necessarily want to become secular Jews. They wanted to reclaim a more authentic version of Jewish orthodoxy that they claimed had become perverted—or not so much perverted, but had been changed by the rabbis. They sometimes called contemporary ultra-Orthodoxy "Taliban Judaism." They used those kinds of images a lot for a kind of religious extremism.

BLAIR HODGES: Extremism, fundamentalism. So they were drawing on Jewish history to legitimate what they were doing instead of—you know, their own community would say that they're not being good Jews, or they're apostates, or they're heretics. They would say, "Actually, we are inheritors of this great tradition that is legitimate within Judaism."

AYALA FADER: That's what they were claiming. That was clearly a point of struggle, and you have people— journalists, ultra-Orthodox journalists, and leaders actually addressing that and saying, "These people claim to be Jewish enlighteners. But they're nothing but bums," you know. So that was a real point of contention.

BLAIR HODGES: "Bums," by the way, is like a slang term for a lazy person who's not a good Jew, basically, right?

AYALA FADER: Not a good Orthodox Jew, yes. Because one of the explanations for people who stop practicing and who stop believing is that they're just too lazy. The word is called tayves, their lusts overcome them, and they don't have—it's not even lazy. They don't have the spiritual discipline to observe all the commandments. They give way to wanting to be inappropriately sexual, or eat inappropriate things, and not keep kashrut. So those kinds of things.

BLAIR HODGES: So they give in to temptation.

AYALA FADER: Temptation, exactly, yeah. I think what was really important to the people living double lives that I have spent time with was they were really saying, "We are not bums. In fact, it has nothing to do with our lusts or temptations. We actually have intellectual problems with the narrative that we've been fed and the way of life that we are supposed to live, and we are actually making a real critique."

Again, this word "maskil," or "maskilim" was really mostly for men. I never heard a woman—and there were plenty of women who were living double lives, and had life-changing doubts, I never heard a woman refer to herself as a Maskil. It's a masculinely-gendered term. So in a community that is so separated, gender-wise, women were even left out of the J-blogosphere, and also opportunities for claiming an equivalent intellectual challenge.

Sex and gender dynamics – 14:50

BLAIR HODGES: But there were some women J-bloggers, right? What's her name? Shtrump—

AYALA FADER: Shpitzle Shtrimpkind, which is a tongue twister! And she was unusual in that she entered the fray, the male bloggers respected her. I mean, she made critiques of the J-blogosphere and said, you know, men don't take us seriously. But she also blogged about her own story. It's public, you can go online and find it yourself. And she blogged from 2007 to 2008 about her own process of beginning to have doubts, which she does also trace to her job through her access to online communities, which is interesting.

BLAIR HODGES: So it wasn't masturbation and laziness for Shpitzle Shtrimpkind. [laughter]

AYALA FADER: No, no, it was clearly an intellectual quest.

BLAIR HODGES: But would she identify as enlightened? Would she use that gendered term for herself?

AYALA FADER: She used it in English, which I thought was interesting, in one of her posts. She said "Enlightened, I'm an enlightened." But not usually, no, because that was a very male lineage. Even though there were a few enlighteners back in the day, even in Jewish Studies scholarship, it's only recently that we're hearing more about the women involved in the Jewish enlightenment. It was very much biased, I would say, toward men who were more public and had more chances to be more public.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And if I remember correctly, too, it was also because of the gender segregation that exists now within the community, right? Where male Jews would go to school and learn Hebrew and learn Torah and do all this stuff together, and women wouldn't, right? There’s a separation of duties, women prepare to be housewives and things like that.

AYALA FADER: Yes. And one of the things that I learned that I hadn't expected to—I knew there would be gendered findings in this based on my first book, Mitzvah Girls, where I basically studied women and girls only. Suddenly, in this project, I was talking to men exclusively. And it really puzzled me. It took me a while to actually meet women to talk to who were living double lives.

But when I did, I realized the experience of life-changing doubt—which is this term that I use for the kind of doubt that disrupts religious practice, versus the kind of doubt that actually defines faith that I think is part of faith—once women experienced life-changing doubt the structures of gender difference in these kinds of communities shapes their experience as well.

So when boys are in Yeshiva, where they're studying Torah, their scriptures—

BLAIR HODGES: This is their school—

AYALA FADER: Yeah, their school—their lives are really structured. They're in Yeshiva from like six a.m. to nine at night. They don't have much independence. Whereas girls in high school actually have quite a bit of independence. They can go into New York City and go shopping. They have intense friendship groups. They put on plays.

But once girls get married, suddenly their young husbands have a great deal of flexibility and independence and it's women who have to be home. First, they might be working while their husband spends a year or two studying in kollel, which is Yeshiva for married men. But eventually, once they have a couple of kids, they have to stay home and take care of the home, and there they answer to their husbands. Like if they're not home, who's going to take care of the kids?

Whereas the husband has all this built-in independence and time for socializing—in shul, after Friday night dinner, or they might go out and meet friends on Thursday night. They might go out, and nobody's asking them anymore. Whereas a woman's life, as she is married and begins to raise a family, is much more—I wouldn't say surveilled exactly, but it's much more—there's somebody to answer to much more than when she was a young girl.

So those kinds of differences were really important in terms of how men and women live double lives quite differently. But there were also really serious consequences that many women told me about, which was that because so many of them worked at home after they had children, they didn't have their own incomes. And if a husband discovered that his wife had lost her belief and was living a double life, he was sometimes encouraged by his rabbi to divorce her, in which case the community would put all its resources behind the still-religious spouse and there was a likelihood that she could lose custody of her children. That was the kind of specter haunting so many women living double lives.

I think women were less encouraged to divorce their husbands. I don't have statistics on that. But anecdotally people have told me that their rabbinic leaders were less inclined to encourage them to get divorced and more inclined to say, you know, “Make the home a pleasant place, support your husband, he'll come back, just be patient, do what you have to do.” Because the ultimate goal is to raise the next generation of Orthodox children. And so the only time where a rabbi, I think, would encourage a wife to divorce her husband is when children are suddenly "at risk." And that means at risk for somehow leaving. When a child started acting out and, maybe, aligning themselves with one of the parents, that was really one of the few times a wife would be encouraged to get divorced from her husband.

Four kinds of life-changing doubt — 20:32

BLAIR HODGES: We'll talk more about family dynamics here in a minute.

I wanted to go back to something you said about different kinds of doubt. In the book, you outline a kind of doubt that sort of refines and strengthens faith, which you see as a natural part of religious life, and the other would be life-changing doubt. Let's unpack that a little bit more, if you want to draw the distinctions between those.

AYALA FADER: So yes, I think that was really important. I realized that the kinds of life-changing doubt were not all the same when somebody asked me at a talk I was giving, "What does it mean when somebody has doubt? Does that mean they doubt God?" And then I was like, “Oh, no no no, it's not always about God.” And then I realized, and began to ask about it, which is how ethnography actually works, like, what does it mean for you if you have questions or doubts? Or what are these different words that I hear sort of bandied about, like heretic, or doubter, or atheist?

So, in the introduction to the book, I lay out these four different kinds of life-changing doubt. And at one end of this pole is somebody who's merely open-minded. And the word that people use for that was ofgeklerte. In Yiddish—all of these words are Yiddish—ofgeklerte means “enlightened.” It's a literal translation of enlightened. And that just means a person has become more open-minded. They might stay in their community, they might observe all of Jewish law, but maybe at the same time they're reading the New York Times, or maybe they're reading some kind of science, and maybe they're not quite as strict with their daughter's modesty. They say, like, "Sure, you can wear a denim skirt," or whatever, or “go to college.” So that's at one end of the pole.

Another word that people use, apikorsim, actually means “skeptics.” And those are people who are explicitly critical of ultra-Orthodoxy today, particularly the leadership. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they don't want to continue to be ultra-Orthodox Jews and they don't believe in God. They're critical of this iteration of ultra-Orthodoxy—postwar ultra-Orthodoxy that we have in the States today. Sometimes apikorsim would reject core beliefs. And one of those core beliefs is that when the Messiah comes, all of the dead—it's the resurrection of the dead, it's tkhiyes ha-meysim, so some of those skeptics did not believe in that literally anymore. And they were not necessarily, again, atheists.

Heretics, or kofrim, were similarly critical of ultra-Orthodox leaders. But they actually had started to doubt the literal truth of divine revelation at Mount Sinai. They thought maybe it was more metaphorical or maybe humans had interpreted certain things. And that actually is a huge dividing line among Orthodox Jews. I hadn't realized that, having grown up as a Reformed, very liberal Jew, I was taught in Hebrew school that that was a metaphor, you know what I mean? [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Huh. Did they talk about higher criticism and stuff, too? Like how you can see different sources in texts?

AYALA FADER: Yes, we totally talked about that. But also, we learned that this was a historical document, not a divine document, I would say. Not that Mount Sinai was necessarily a metaphor, but that this was a historical account of something that probably happened and it's our inheritance. It was a very different interpretation.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews are taught a literal interpretation of that, which means that the Torah is God's word, which means that you have to follow it. So heretics—or apikorsim, again, in Yiddish—didn't believe that any longer. They had serious doubts about that.

Then the last category that they used in English were atheists. And most of the people I met, in fact, were not atheists. There were some, but most I would say were either skeptics or heretics, which is why I called the book Hidden Heretics, because that turns out to be a term that they themselves use in Yiddish to refer to each other.

Community policing of religious observance – 24:38

BLAIR HODGES: I see a lot of distinctions in actual beliefs. But there's also practices involved, and I think this would get to how spouses might find out about each other, right? What kind of things would start cluing a spouse in that something might be different?

AYALA FADER: That's a great question. So it always amazed me that you could keep a secret for so long in the intimacy of your home. I mean, Jewish law shapes every single aspect of your existence if you're an ultra-Orthodox Jew, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. So going back to Yisroel, what his wife first noticed was that, as she said, he stopped washing negl vasser. Nagl are nails. But when you wake up first thing in the morning, if you're an ultra-Orthodox Jew, you pour a little water over your hands and you thank God for having made it through the night and you utter a prayer. She noticed that when he woke up in their bedroom, that he no longer did that all the time. And to her, that was a tipoff that something was amiss.

I talk about other people in the book, for example, who constantly lie to their spouse and say, "Oh, I already prayed," because men have to pray three times a day. Women are not obligated to those timebound commandments. But there are men who say to their wives, like, "I'm going to pray at work," or, "Oh, I prayed before you woke up." And one father told me about how he moved his tallit, which is his prayer shawl, around the table so that his kids thought that he had taken it and put it back on the table when in fact he hadn't prayed.

So there were all kinds of efforts that hidden heretics made to not let their spouse know, or their kids. But it was usually those very small kinds of moments where a wife or a husband begins to question. For a man it was often when a woman grew her hair out under her wig. Some of the most stringent ultra-Orthodox Jews—and it's Hasidic Jews, in particular—women will shave their hair and put on a wig and a hat usually. And it's a kind of heightening of the mitzvah, the commandment that married women have to cover their hair. There's nothing in Jewish texts that says how they have to cover their hair. So much of the kinds of practices today are, of course, interpretations—as in any religion. But—

BLAIR HODGES: But by the way, does it say why they should cover their hair at all?

AYALA FADER: Yes. They cover their hair so that they're not attractive to other men, and to show the world that they are married and available only to their husbands. So it's a kind of protection of male sexuality in some ways. But the evolution of the wig is really interesting, because that happened in Eastern Europe as well, when a lot of traditional Jewish women who had exposure to "secular education"— either Polish or Russian educations—were actually starting to leave and were unhappy with the kinds of restrictions on their lives and were just covering their hair with a kerchief. And so different rabbis decreed that they could wear wigs instead of just covering their hair with a kerchief.

So how women cover their hair, not only is it incredibly detailed, kind of almost dictionary, for what your community believes and interprets, but it's also a historically changing set of markers for how women's positions have been interpreted over history.

BLAIR HODGES: And so men would start to notice that their wives are not doing that, or doing it differently or something, and that sort of might tip them off?

AYALA FADER: Yes. And as a matter of fact there were things that hidden heretics didn't observe, or did observe, but in a slightly different way. But there was also the small changes they made to the public more generally when they began to have these doubts, which really surprised me. I was like, why don't you just keep everything private and that will protect you more?

But a number of people told me that once they began to have these kinds of doubts, they actually wanted to dress and be differently in the world to kind of be a little more true to themselves. So for women that was often not only not shaving, but maybe shortening their skirt, even just a little bit, which again, was a tipoff to their husband, but also to the wider community.

I mean, one woman told me that she shortened her skirt a little bit and took the hat off of her wig. And one of her neighbors came over and said, "Is everything all right? Can I help you? Are you going through a difficult time?" So people pay attention to these markers. So it wasn't surprising—

BLAIR HODGES: There’s community policing going on.

AYALA FADER: Yes, exactly. And actually, there's a whole tradition of women leaving anonymous notes for each other. They’re like, "Dear neighbor, I noticed that your blouse isn't buttoned all the way up to the top. God is watching." Just left in your mailbox. So there is a lot of surveillance. And there's a ruler lady who comes and measures girl skirts in high school.

So there's a lot of emphasis on adhering to communal norms as both a form of adhering to religious law, but also to bending yourself to what communal authorities say is the right way to observe these laws. So it's both communal authorities and a kind of theological authority.

Competing value systems – 29:58

BLAIR HODGES: That's Ayala Fader and we're talking about her book, Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age. Let's dig a little bit more into the “morality of married double lives," is how you frame it in the book.

I have a quote here I'd like to read that gets at the heart of it, I think. It says, "For those living double lives, that tension between revelation and secret keeping meant choosing between self-fulfillment and comfortable familiarity, individual truth and protection of their family. They secretly violated laws while appearing orthodox. And when those living double lives rejected ultra-Orthodox morality and its obligations, they often developed an alternative moral system, one inflected by North American liberal ideas about the individual's right to autonomy, their personal authority to make ethical judgments, along with other liberal values, like tolerance and pluralism."

So this is the tension, right?

AYALA FADER: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: These people want to be authentic to themselves, but they're also part of a community that oftentimes they still love and that they care about. So they're trying to find a way to be true to themselves, but also remain part of this community and this system that they no longer really fit in. And they could be accused of abandoning their values. Your argument in the book and in your experience with actual hidden heretics is they're not abandoning values. They're developing different value systems, not abandoning values. So I'd like to hear more about kind of the heart of this.

AYALA FADER: Yeah, I think that's really important. One of the things that really moved me when I was doing this research were the familial struggles that hidden heretics engaged in. And so many people said to me, "I'd leave, I'd take my family and go to a different community, but it would break my parents' hearts."

There was a sense that if they acted out the way they wanted to act—if they stopped praying and didn't go to synagogue, and just stayed in their families, their children would be marked by their behavior and would never be able to continue to live happy, healthy lives in the community. Because so much centers on matchmaking, that if your parents, for example, leave—what is called going off the derekh, or off the path, and they leave their communities altogether, that's considered a kind of black mark on the marriage market. That means there's something wrong with your family, like something somewhere didn't go well. And so it makes it much harder for kids to find matches.

So parents were really aware both of their own parents, who had sacrificed a lot for them, usually—and the Holocaust is really quite present in a lot of these narratives. Like the impetus for rebuilding after the Holocaust was very strong. There's often a grandparent—fewer and fewer now, but when I was doing some of the research, there was often a grandparent who was a Holocaust survivor, their parents, you know, sacrificed many things for them. So I think hidden heretics felt intense obligation to their families, their extended families, and definitely the Jewish people.

At the same time, they didn't want to hurt, of course, their own children, and make their spouse incredibly unhappy, or had their spouse lie for them, which is part of what was required if their spouse discovered them.

One of the women I spent time with said, "It makes me feel terrible. I have to support my husband's lies all the time. I don't want to, but I have to for the sake of the children and the sake of the community. And because my rabbis are telling me that this is the ethical way to continue on, knowing what I know."

Religious and cultural relativism – 33:27

BLAIR HODGES: By the way, let me just say, there seems to be some relativism there, right? The idea that it's acceptable to lie in that case, when otherwise lying would be, you know, breaking the law.

AYALA FADER: Yes. Well, one of the things that also surprised me was the kind of flexibility in the ultra-Orthodox system. I really didn't expect that. I think coming, again, from an outsider's perspective, you think of these kinds of, let's say, conservative religious communities as so rigid and unchanging. But one of the reasons that ultra-Orthodoxy has been so successful post-World War Two is because of their flexibility. But the nature of that flexibility is that any kind of change is never able to come from the bottom, it always has to come from the top. That's the kind of way that change happens. And change has happened tremendously since coming here in the fifties.

But what many rabbinic leaders and religious therapists told people who were living as hidden heretics, what they said to them was, “If you can continue to live publicly as ultra-Orthodox Jews, and not speak out against the system, you can stay in your families and we won't bug you.”

There's a point where there's a discovery process, when a wife calls a rabbi, or a husband calls a rabbi, and that becomes a communal affair. But once the ground rules are set and once good behavior on the part of the doubter is established, and that kind of questioning is not public, it becomes more private and hidden, then secrets and lying are the ethical way to protect your family and your community.

Which, yes, it is a form of cultural relativism, in that the good of the community becomes more important than the unethical behavior—I don't know if that's cultural relativism exactly, but than the unethical behavior of lying. And I think in that way Judaism is probably different from certain kinds of Christianity where the practice is really believed to cultivate—it's a reciprocal process—but the practice of keeping the commandments is what cultivates your ability to have your faith in God and to trust God. So for many leaders the goal was just to have people continue practicing and then their faith would return.

BLAIR HODGES: That's just by doing the stuff, right? Going to worship services, doing the prayers, doing the washings, having the meals, doing the Holy Days.

AYALA FADER: Exactly. Right. The right feelings would assert themselves. I think that broke down for hidden heretics. They did continue to do that, and the feelings—

BLAIR HODGES: Because they kept doing all that and their doubts didn't go away. Right.

AYALA FADER: Right. And so that was a real challenge to the system in a lot of ways.

Marriage and relationship issues – 36:13

BLAIR HODGES: You also talk about different ways that different couples handled it. So just to break it down quickly, some spouses would kind of betray the other one, they would turn their spouse in and want to be done with it. Other spouses would flip the other spouse, or sort of pull the other spouse along, and then others reached this kind of settlement.

As you were meeting with actual people, did any of the couples really stand out to you in how they handled one of these different approaches?

AYALA FADER: Yes. The interesting thing was, because my work was so longitudinal, like over a period of—I mean, the research itself was about five years, but it took me a while to write this, too—so it was almost seven or eight years, really. And people changed over the course of time.

I mean, some people were in the same position, and they were sort of at a standstill with their spouse. Their spouse knew, their spouse was angry—and this was often women, and the husband, because he had an okay job not in the religious world necessarily—had his own life. And he kept it under wraps, his activities that were not okay, and had affairs, probably, but with non-Jewish women, and it just was at a standstill.

What really interested me were couples who changed so dramatically over that time period. And, you know, there are some people who say living as a hidden heretic is just a period before everyone leaves. I don't think that's accurate. There are some people who live their entire lives as hidden heretics. That's the only kind of situation they can have so that they're protecting their families. And really, again, living as a hidden heretic is a way to show your love, in some ways, of your family and your children in particular.

There was a lot of tension between people who left their communities—and you've seen those people in shows like Unorthodox and a lot of the memoirs that have come out recently about people who have left their communities. But there was really nothing about people who stayed. And those two groups of people each thought the other was more cowardly. And each thought the other was less ethical.

I just did an interview with somebody who has a YouTube channel who left her community. And she said the biggest takeaway for her was the kind of ethical decisions and emotional sacrifices that people who stayed made for their families. She said she really hadn't understood that until she read my book. And she had much more compassion now for people who stayed.

So I hope that's one outcome of the book, is that both sides are making tremendous sacrifices—whether you leave or whether you stay, you're struggling with very similar kinds of decisions. How they manifest is going to depend on your own situation, and a lot of people who leave do so before they get married, which makes it easier because you don't have children, of course.

BLAIR HODGES: Sorry to rewind a little bit, but you mentioned this very fascinating dynamic to me, of people who leave, people who go, both looking back at each other and sort of saying, “You made the wrong choice,” or, maybe judging each other. Did you find people that were sympathetic toward each other? Saying, "Hey, I get why you left." Or people who said, "I get why you stayed, I understand."

AYALA FADER: Yes, I did. And I found that mostly in the advisors to people who were just starting to struggle. So again, going back Yisroel, when he began to have these questions, he began posting on Facebook—of course under a pseudonym—but he also got a lot of negative attention from people in his community. And somebody I know, who actually advised me as well, who I worked with quite closely, he had left. He had been actually kicked out of his community because he was very publicly critical. So he was living as somebody who was an OTD, it's called, "Off The Derekh"—

BLAIR HODGES: “Off the path,” yeah.

AYALA FADER: “Off the path.”

And so a friend of Yisroel said, "Why don't you talk to this guy? He's done this whole thing. He can advise you." And there is a whole community of people that are not only online, but that know each other and have each other's phone numbers, and have created a kind of network where they advise each other, especially people who are a little bit ahead of the process in terms of people who are having this crisis right at the moment.

Another guy, for example, I was interviewing him, and while we were driving back to his house he took a phone call from somebody else whose wife had just discovered that he was no longer keeping the commandments, and was threatening to divorce him. And the driver, who was also a hidden heretic, gave a step-by-step of what he should do: Find a therapist. Find a lawyer. Here's a good lawyer. Don't say anything. Don't sign anything. Don't talk to anybody. These are the people that you need to talk to.

So there were hidden heretics who advised each other, but there were also people who had already left who advised each other. Especially people, I think, who had left and were married. I think when you leave before marriage—so let's say you're 18—I think that experience is quite different. There are a lot of different issues that go into it. It's just a very different set of challenges.

But people who have left when they already have kids know that the children are probably the key piece here, like you don't want to lose custody of your kids.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. This is what happened to Shulem Deen in his book, All Who Go Do Not Return.

AYALA FADER: Exactly.  

BLAIR HODGES: Basically, the kids started—It seemed like the well was poisoned against him. He was painted as a very horrible person and so less and less they wanted to go see him. Basically, as they would get older, they would align with their community standards and say, "Oh, Dad's wrong. Dad's bad and scary." And so he eventually lost contact with them.

What also stands out to me is people that are advising each other, it's not all about getting people out, right? It's about what's healthy for an individual, like what the options are, and what's going to work for them. And I think that's an important point, because hidden heretics aren't always the ones that are—They don't have this goal of taking down ultra-Orthodox communities or ruining people's lives.

AYALA FADER: No. Not at all.

BLAIR HODGES: They're really just trying to help people find peace and help people negotiate these tensions.

AYALA FADER: Exactly. And find some happiness.

I do want to say in the Shulem Deen example, I think that's important, and that takes us back to cultural relativism. I think it's hard for people who are not part of this community to understand why joint custody wouldn't just work. But it wouldn't because ultra-Orthodox Jews basically don't believe in cultural relativism. It's not a community that believes in tolerance and pluralism—not that they don't respect other people. Of course they do. But it's not that, you know, “as long as you're a good person, everything is fine.” It's that if you are not living as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, you're wrong.

BLAIR HODGES: And not part of this covenant people. “You've left God's people.”

AYALA FADER: Exactly. But so even if the intent is not there—and often it is there to turn the children away from the non-observant parent, especially with women—which has led, by the way, to a number of suicides. There's been journalistic stories about that. It's a term called “parental alienation,” when children begin to be alienated from their own parents—But even if children are not encouraged to reject their parents, it's a very fine line to walk because children are hearing across the board, not only from their families, but from their own private Jewish schools, that the only way to be a good Jew and a moral person is to live this kind of life. And so it's almost incompatible to have, like, “this parent does this and this parent does that.” It's not like if one parent is a vegetarian and one parent eats meat. There's a moral kind of judgment there for the no-longer-observant parent and that becomes really problematic for the children.

So it's an awful situation, although I do know of a few people who have managed to walk this line. Again, they left when they were already married with children. And maybe that's part of it. They had a very strong relationship with their kids—although Shulem did too. But he left, I think, a little younger.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, his kids weren't thirteen yet.

AYALA FADER: Right. The people I'm thinking of—Well, they also had young children. I think the legal system itself is changing a little bit. And there is, I hope, a kind of support among community members who are living in-between these two worlds, who support each other. So I don't know. It's a real dilemma.

BLAIR HODGES: It's also a dilemma for people that remain in the communities as well. A lot of the people you met were struggling about how to ethically raise children, even though they wanted to stay within their communities. They didn't want to leave. And so they were kind of living double lives. They were being observant publicly and not trying to upset the community. But then they would also do things at home that differed from community norms and standards, and their kids would notice this, and then they were wondering, is it okay to raise kids in this community?

What kind of struggles did you see from parents as they were thinking about raising kids within communities when they weren't really on board with the community all the way?

AYALA FADER: Yeah, well, if you have children, and I think you do—

BLAIR HODGES: I do!

AYALA FADER: —then you know that kids are really smart—

BLAIR HODGES: Yes they are!

AYALA FADER: —and they're anthropologists in their own families. They are very observant. So when they're very small you can sort of pull one over on them, but you can't for very long, if you ever can. And of course, people who are living double lives were very aware of this and the goal they articulated to me was they wanted to introduce more open-minded ideas—that word again "ofgeklerte," like open-minded ideas. Not, again, as you said, to bring down the whole system, but to maybe loosen it a little bit and expand the parameters of how to be an ultra-Orthodox Jew.

And they also knew that if they brought in really different ideas or encouraged certain behaviors that their children wouldn't be able to function in the Jewish schools. Like, you know, Jewish schools have an arm into your home. You have to sign a contract as a parent, like, “I'm not going to have internet in my home,” or television.

So there's a real consistency of message, I would say. And the hidden heretics tried to, very gently and carefully, introduce new ideas, but ones that didn't challenge the authority of the community usually. And for some—like for a mom I knew, she asked her children to call the cleaning lady by her name, and not to refer to her as the goyte, that's the feminine for goy. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: The non-Jew. The outsider.

AYALA FADER: The non-Jew. Exactly. She has a name and she's a person. So she was encouraging them to see non-Jews as people also. Or she would wear leggings instead of tights, you know, and say, like, “a Mommy can wear pajamas. It's not a big deal.” So for small children there were those kinds of differences.

Some fathers were a little more provocative and challenged some of the received knowledge that their children got at school. One father consistently said to his children, like, “That arts and crafts project that you're doing where you count the pomegranate seeds and there's always 613, like the 613 commandments, open up this pomegranate and you count it and tell me how many there are.”

So the parent in some ways often got—again, there's a gender difference, like, okay, the mother was a little more open-minded, that was okay, she was still doing everything she was supposed to and keeping a kosher home. But the father could be considered a little quirky, right? Or also a little open-minded. So there was a balancing line. The tricky part got when kids were older and when they saw—especially in my experience between mothers and daughters who are so close, because as kids get older boys spend more time with their fathers, and then eventually really spent all their time in Yeshiva, like in high school with other boys.

BLAIR HODGES: With other boys, right? They're separated completely.

AYALA FADER: Totally separate. They come home at night for dinner, and that's it. Whereas girls continue to live at home and spend more and more time exclusively with their mothers, of course their fathers too, but it's a very intimate relationship for everybody. And some of the girls began to see that their mother's sort of seriousness or earnestness in religious practice was not all it could be. And teenagers can also become very—they can either become big questioners or they can become very earnest in their religiosity.

BLAIR HODGES: Judgmental.

AYALA FADER: Exactly. Judgmental. And so some kids—and I really only talked to one or two, no one would, of course, let me talk to their child. One woman did.

Toby and Leyeh – 49:15

BLAIR HODGES: Toby did. [laughter]

AYALA FADER: Yes, Toby did, which I was never quite sure why she did.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, because her daughter was saying, "Toby's got problems!" Maybe she thought you could help her daughter—Leyeh, I think, was her name—

AYALA FADER: Yes, Leyeh.

BLAIR HODGES: —maybe she thought you could help her daughter loosen up or understand a little bit more, or something.

AYALA FADER: Maybe. I mean, that sort of speaks to my own role as an anthropologist in there. And I think many people said to me, "Oh, talking to you, I feel like I'm talking to my therapist." And I had to say again and again, "I'm not a therapist. I'm just interested in this." So it was a difficult role to be as the anthropologist—like, curious, but also a witness to a lot of pain and those kinds of conflicts in families where I couldn't really get involved.

For example, with Leyeh, I couldn't talk very much about Toby. I told her, “I'm not going to talk about your mother to you.” But she talked about her to me a lot. And I write about how at one point she began to cry and we stopped the interview. She got really upset. And she said, “You know about my mother, don't you?” And we turned off the tape recorder and it was really upsetting. And I wondered, like, did we cross a line here? I backed off completely.

But then as I write about, she called me and said, "I want to do another interview." And I was surprised, and I wasn't sure what my ethical obligation was, either. I was very curious to why she wanted to talk again! And so I did ask her before I agreed to do the interview, because I wanted to make sure she was very clear that I was writing a book and that this would be public and that I didn't mislead her in any way.

BLAIR HODGES: This is a pseudonym too, right?

AYALA FADER: Oh, of course. Yes, I used pseudonyms. Yes, every anthropologist does that. But I had to really do a lot of obfuscating around people's identities, and I don't use the real communities that they're from. I mix up different characters and give one character the child of this character.

It was really an incredible obligation, I felt, to not blow anyone's cover.

BLAIR HODGES: What did she do when you met with her again, then? Knowing that she could be anonymous.

AYALA FADER: She said on the phone, "I want to talk to you again because I want to give a message to everyone who's living a double life about all the damage that they're doing to their children."

And I thought, that's fair enough. Why shouldn't she have a platform too? So we had a second interview, and she was in a different place. It was already a year later. She was going through some life changes, and she was very clear that it was her responsibility to tell people like her mother, but the wider community of those people living double lives that she was aware of, that she thought they were being bad parents. So I included that. I felt like it was really important.

And that message was repeated to me. So it wasn't just one person. There was a consistency across different stories that I heard from different parents, where their teenagers were angry at them for not providing a model for being a quote-"good" ultra-Orthodox Jew.

I will say that there were cases—a few, but some—where children began to have doubts themselves, and knowing that a parent was perhaps not all that they should be in terms of their own faith, began to confide in a parent. And that's when community alarms went off. And that's when many were advised to get divorced.

Because again, the real focus here is on continuity and raising frum, or ultra-Orthodox Jewish children. So when a child would drop out from Yeshiva, or would secretly begin to meet boys, or wear jeans—and in one case, stashed her jeans in her dad's car, things broke open for this one person and he got divorced, at the advice of rabbis.

BLAIR HODGES: Are you still in touch with Toby at all?

AYALA FADER: Yes, I am. I'm in touch with most of the people.

BLAIR HODGES: And Leyeh? It's been a few years, right? Like, is their relationship still pretty similar?

AYALA FADER: No. Their relationship is stronger, I think. She is off doing her own thing. And I didn't send her a book. I sent her mother a book, but after consulting with her mother we decided it was best to just cut all ties. She's living a very religious life and seems satisfied, according to her mother. She and her mother are close, but not that kind of intensity, I think, that they had when they were growing up.

Renegotiating sex – 53:58

BLAIR HODGES: You also spent some time talking to people regarding their renegotiating morals, including around sex. And some women even reported harassment as a result of being a double lifer, that some men would assume that they were open to casual sex, for example. Did you see a lot of harassment within the hidden heretic community? And what did that look like?

AYALA FADER: I actually think that's similar for both hidden heretics and people who leave their communities. And I see it as a direct outcome of the separation growing up of men and women, and the really limited kinds of conversations in families around sexuality and sex.

BLAIR HODGES: Like consent and boundaries and stuff?

AYALA FADER: Yes, that's not an issue because you're living in these gender segregated worlds, you know, there's men's and women's worlds. Even when you're married some families have the men's side of the family on one side, all the men on one side, and all the women on the other. And even though many families live in small apartments in New York where the stockings are hanging in the shower and boys are exposed to that, there's still a real separation between men and women's worlds in terms of social life.

So when you erase those boundaries, like when they're suddenly gone, I think often men and women don't know how to behave. And I think especially men don't know how to behave and don't know—I mean, part of the whole elaboration around modesty, theologically, it's like “modesty before God” and also “protecting men from their own baser instincts.” But that has become kind of elaborated as, like, “without these modesty behaviors in place, men will just be animals.” And so sometimes when the structures are gone, I think men and women don't know how to behave.

BLAIR HODGES: It can even become like a self-fulfilling prophecy if men have been raised to believe that without these strictures they're just like wild animals, [laughs] then they may be like, "Well, here we go. This is what it’s like."

AYALA FADER: Yes. Well, and also, I know that in an organization like Footsteps, for example, that supports people who have left their ultra-Orthodox communities, there's been a kind of acknowledgment of that, and a kind of educational—like different groups that teach you how to date, and for women in particular how to say no, and how to put up their own boundaries. And that's the part for women. And for men, how to maybe be friends with women, right? And everything is not sexualized.

So I heard some cases of harassment—especially online, where it's anonymous, and where even without heresy there's always been a kind of market for ultra-Orthodox men who are unhappy in their marriages, sort of getting the informal "okay" to have affairs with non-Jews outside of their marriages. The goal is to keep your mind pure. And as long as it's not with a Jewish woman, you know, it's not great, but if you have to, do that.

Of course, nothing for women in this account.

BLAIR HODGES: Mhmm. Right. Although there was a woman in your book who did do that, although I don't think her husband knew, right?

AYALA FADER: Yes, who had a long-term affair—

Renegotiating values – 57:14

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, and was like, "I would never cheat on him," as in, the person she was cheating on her husband. You asked, "Well, would you have an affair around—" and she said, “Oh, of course not,” you know, because, again, she had a new value. She had a different value system—it wasn't that she didn't have any value system.

AYALA FADER: Exactly. And that's really important. That was a really important takeaway for me from the research, was that, here were people not only embracing a new value system, but actually creating the value system as they lived a new life. So it wasn't like they just sort of adopted secular liberalism, right? Like, of course they didn't. It was a kind of trial-and-error process.

The more they read, for example, usually, hidden heretics became more politically progressive. They became less racist, more politically progressive. I think gender equity happened last, if at all, in my opinion. That was a harder one to change.

BLAIR HODGES: Interesting.

AYALA FADER: But there were slow changes, there was a kind of increasing acceptance of all kinds of differences and all those kinds of things. But it was gradual and slow and individualized in lots of ways.

So that woman who did have the long-term affair, she felt like she was living the most moral life. I think her husband had a certain sense of it. I mean, it would be strange if he hadn’t figured that out, but not enough to change the life that they—I mean, there are all kinds of affairs that people have where the spouse unconsciously knows and decides to do nothing. I don't think that's unusual.

I think a lot of hidden heretics were angry that they had to get married so young, and they were disillusioned with the matchmaking system and angry at the community practices around marriage. So I think this woman in particular was like, “I found my beshert,” that's my intended. My special person. My, my—

BLAIR HODGES: Soulmate?

AYALA FADER: Soulmate. Thank you. “It didn't happen to be my husband, okay? That was a mistake. But I did find my soulmate. And so of course, I'm going to be totally faithful to him. But I have my husband and my children, and they matter to me also."

Because I asked her once, like, “Would you consider leaving?” And she was like, "I'm torn between my soulmate and my children. I don't know, I don't think so."

So, yes. I think that's really important, that there's a different set of morals. For parents and children, there was a lot of talking to me about the importance of their children having a choice. Like, they felt they didn't have a choice in the direction their lives took, and they wanted their children to have a choice.

The interesting thing to me as an outsider was, they didn't provide so many different messages that their children had a huge choice. You know what I mean? It was really more about like—

BLAIR HODGES: A little bit more of a choice than they had.

AYALA FADER: Yeah, like you have a little more say in how your match is made. Or maybe you get to go to college and you're not just a housewife. Or maybe you don't live in the most ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, you live a little bit on the outskirts of that neighborhood. And maybe you're not just a Torah scholar, maybe you're a social worker.

So it was a very slow and gradual kind of change that they embraced, but it was a change nonetheless. And I think these communities are really, in this moment—I call it a crisis of authority—but it's in this moment where there are all kinds of changes going on.

Behavior and interior belief – 60:39

BLAIR HODGES: We see a lot of people who find a way to stay, or find a way to leave. Did you find people who had the genie out of the bottle and were able to get it back in? People who were introduced to some of the heretical ideas or came to have significant doubts, and maybe even come to believe that stuff was wrong, and then get back, maybe through some of these therapists or through spiritual advisors, that were able to get back to that earlier version of faith?

AYALA FADER: Very few. There were people—and that's why the longitudinal nature of research is so important, because there were people who did go to therapy and, as one person wrote to me, "I went back in."

BLAIR HODGES: But did they believe, though? Did someone come to a point of saying, like, "I don't think God gave Moses the Torah?" And then later, were like, actually, "No, I think he did give Moses the Torah."

AYALA FADER: I think it was more a question of how you practice, you know what I mean? Or giving it a shot. I think it was more around the behavior, rather than the interior belief.

Remember that interior belief is, of course, important in Judaism, but not as much as practice. I think. That's my understanding.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I mean, you said a lot of rabbis would find someone that had these heretical beliefs, but their whole thing was like, “Okay, but if you can perform as a Jew, if you can be orthopraxy, if you can follow the commandments, then just keep that other stuff to yourself. We don't want you going and proselyting and sort of trying to—because that will lead other people astray. But we'll let that slide because you're living this way.”

AYALA FADER: Exactly. But one thing that I did learn was that there was a new investment—I'd say, from the last five or ten years—an interest and investment by community leadership in interiority, like more of a language. And I think that's the influence of the whole therapeutic framework, which has become slightly more acceptable in these communities, and also through self-help stuff that women read that has been translated into kosher reading, also along the lines of how to be happy. And, you know, a lot of the self-help literature anyway has a sort of Christian slant. So this is sort of taken and made Jewish.

So there was more of a concern with interiority and interior faith. I don't know that twenty years ago people talked about it as much as they do.

Religion and technological changes – 62:59

BLAIR HODGES: That's probably the internet too, right?

AYALA FADER: Yes!

BLAIR HODGES: Like you're getting these conversations going. People can talk more about interiority because they're in—it’s such a weird paradox. That being in public spaces, but with anonymity, can increase conversations about interiority.

AYALA FADER: Yep. But also reading. So it's not only online. People of a certain age—so people who were like in their 30s, I think it might be different for people in their 20s—but people in their 30s were like, “The internet didn't make me lose my belief, reading did.”

So it was reading books, actually, sneaking into the public library, you know? So it's a whole bunch of different media. I think what was really transformative was the smartphone because suddenly you didn't get your actual desktop.

BLAIR HODGES: It’s in your pocket.

AYALA FADER: Yeah. You had the privacy to do whatever you wanted it. And that's why smartphones became a problem for communal leadership, like “Don’t have a smartphone.”

BLAIR HODGES: What was their solution? If people did have smartphones, what kind of strictures were put in place? What was the advice from leaders?

AYALA FADER: There's a whole industry now on filtering using kosher filters on smartphones if you have to have one. And there are businesses, and it's part of the economic landscape now, where you get a phone, a smartphone, and you put in a kosher filter.

Of course, lots of people have a second un-kosher, unfiltered phone, smartphone.

BLAIR HODGES: A burner phone. I learned that on Breaking Bad. "Breaking Heretic."

AYALA FADER: [laughs] That would have been a good title. But also a lot of women now only have flip phones from the nineties that don't have internet.

BLAIR HODGES: You can’t browse on it.

AYALA FADER: Right. And that's a very public way to say that you're not on the internet.

BLAIR HODGES: So there's also a performance to it. Right? There's a signal.

AYALA FADER: Yes. You're very publicly saying like, “No, I have a flip phone." It's both public and private at the same time. It's really interesting.

BLAIR HODGES: And I want people to check out the book to see more about the different kinds of interventions that are made from rabbis, rebbes, therapists—some who are actually professionally trained, some who aren't—life-coach types. So you get that all in the book.

I want to mention too, before we move on, that you do mention a lot of LGBTQ issues. There are people within the communities who are negotiating, navigating those things. We don't have a lot of time today to talk about that. But for people who want to check out the book, that's also an important discussion here.

AYALA FADER: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking with Ayala Fader she's professor of anthropology at Fordham University and author of the great book Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, which I also want to mention was a finalist for the Sami Rohr prize in Jewish nonfiction. So congratulations for that.

AYALA FADER: Thank you!

Responses from the communities – 65:30

BLAIR HODGES: Alright, we've talked a little bit about your method, about the ethics, and some of the questions you had, and difficulties you faced doing this kind of research. I wonder what kind of responses your work has received from within the ultra-Orthodox community. And I know this is a group that doesn't often read outside books, so it's probably not a best-seller within the communities. [laughter] But I'm interested in what kind of responses you've gotten. Are there any criticisms that you've gotten that shed some new light on the work for you? What kind of responses did you get?

AYALA FADER: Yeah, that's a great question. Let me say that these communities do read books about them. They read all books about them. And they're very—

BLAIR HODGES: Really!

AYALA FADER: Yes! They're invested.

BLAIR HODGES: It's not like forbidden, evil, kind of stuff?

AYALA FADER: It is forbidden. It is forbidden. But people in these communities are really invested. They're savvy political actors. They're not living in some imagined shtetl. They're deeply invested in their own public representation.

So even when, for example, there was that My Unorthodox Life reality series about that woman who left, there was a huge media campaign by Orthodox women who said, "My Orthodox life is wonderful," and said all these amazing things they were doing.

So there's a lot of engagement with their own representation. And even when things are forbidden—for example watching Unorthodox, I know many people who downloaded to Telegram and just watched it secretly. There's that split, again, between what you do in private and what you do publicly.

Having said that, I have not gotten any response from the wider ultra-Orthodox community. I was anxious publishing this, because I do make a critique of some of the religious therapists who aren't trained and life coaches. I sent my book to the people I worked with and I didn't hear anything back about that. So there's that. I haven't gotten pushback, for example.

In my first book I did get some pushback, like, people had read that book and said, "Who is this person anyway? Is she pretending not to be part of our community? How did she get this information? Who talked to her?" So far, I haven't heard anything like that.

Who I did hear from were people living double lives and people who had left. From people living double lives, I've gotten some pretty intense Facebook and Instagram messages and WhatsApp messages, saying, "Thank you for writing this. I didn't know all of these people were having my experience, too." So a kind of validation, I think. And from people who've left a similar kind of, “Oh, I didn't know”—Sort of what I said earlier, like that woman with her YouTube channel, "Oh, I didn't know it was so hard to stay." It’s a kind of recognition that perhaps these groups have more in common than difference.

What was really important to me, actually, was the people that I worked with feeling okay that they trusted me with their stories. And I'll tell you a story that I haven't written about, which is that right before the book went to press—it was all copy edited and I was about to get the proofs—some of the people I had been working with got really anxious and said, like, "I want to look at my part again, I'm worried that you're going to out me," and that's the language that people used.

Witness protection – 69:02

BLAIR HODGES: Right, that they could be identified.

AYALA FADER: Yes. So I had to go to my publisher and say, "We gotta stop the press."

BLAIR HODGES: That's a big deal, too. I want to emphasize to people, you were at a point in the process where, I mean, they're going to send you the proofs where you're just supposed to find maybe stray typographical errors or something.

AYALA FADER: Exactly. Yes. So it was great of my press, you know, Princeton was like, "Fine." And so I spent the next two weeks meeting with every single character in the book and showing them their portion and going over it.

And I am so glad I did, because they caught identifiers that I would not have seen. They caught things, and they made suggestions like, “Don't say this, say this." And they were suggestions that didn't change my writing but that covered them more. They knew their audience much better than I did. I thought I had done everything I could. But I feel like identities are more protected than they would have been if I had just gone to press. So I feel very grateful to them.

I didn't feel grateful at the time! [laughter] I was very anxious. It was scary. And I was worried that, you know, one woman wanted to pull her story. And it was a very important story. And another person—I actually had one person read the whole manuscript for me, who was a member of the community, you know, to double check, and he helped me also, and said, you know, "Don't say this, this is too—"

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, like you could figure out who this is or something.

AYALA FADER: Exactly. So I had multiple levels of checking.

BLAIR HODGES: Just by the way, what kind of things would they notice? What kind of things would identify somebody that maybe you wouldn't even have realized?

AYALA FADER: Geographical markers, like when I describe certain places that my interlocutor said, "Oh, everyone would know where that place is, so don't say this."

BLAIR HODGES: Right, ok.

AYALA FADER: Which was frustrating to me as the writer because I couldn't describe, as fully as I wanted to, the people I was talking about. And you know, that's a very important part.

BLAIR HODGES: That's the tradeoff.

AYALA FADER: Exactly. It was a tradeoff. And I don't like to make composites. I feel like it's often not the best kind of ethnography or even writing. But I had to in order to protect anonymity. And that was my ethical obligation. So it was a compromise, and I would do it again.

But I will say that I know when the book came out, the group of people who participated in my book, who are also all together on certain social media, they decided not to talk about it because they did recognize each other. [laughter] So they decided it was a forbidden topic and they didn't talk about it at all.

But privately—in fact, I just got an email a couple of months ago from one of the women who wanted to pull her story. And she said, "It's been a year. So far, so good. No one has recognized me, I finally sat down and read your book. I read it in one sitting. I'm glad I participated. I know it's an important story, and”—this was the ultimate compliment—she said, "It wasn't even boring for an academic book." [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: “For an academic book, of course!” [laughter] How did you calm the fears of someone who—I mean, she wanted to pull it all the way. What was your response to that? How did you maintain it? And I get the feeling that if she really put her foot down, it feels like you would have pulled it out? Would you have?

AYALA FADER: Oh of course.

I mean, I have “informed consent” from my university, so they all signed releases. So legally I could have used it. But one of the standards of ethical research is that if somebody wants to pull, they always can. In fact, that's part of what's called an Institutional Review Board, that's informed consent, is that you are allowed to pull your consent at any time.

Absolutely, I would have removed it. But I, and another person, tried to convince her that if we changed the details enough, she wouldn't be recognizable and that it was a very important story. She had a story that was kind of paradigmatic of many people, in the same way that Yisroel was. But it was a very extreme case in some ways. And I felt like it was a really important experience to put out there. And she thought so too, which is why she talked to me in the beginning, I guess.

BLAIR HODGES: So she saw it also as a way to maybe serve, or maybe to be helpful to her community.

AYALA FADER: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: But that takes a lot of courage

AYALA FADER: I know. It really does. People were eager to talk to me, also very different from my first book where no one wanted to talk to me, [laughter] except to convince me to be more religious, but to be more observant Jewishly.

But I think hidden heretics were eager to talk to me—religious therapists, not so much, especially not life coaches—but hidden heretics were eager to talk to me because, not only did they want to show their communities that they were ethical actors, but also because I think you're right, they were kind of—not critiquing their community so much, but saying, “Here's a problem. And we're not leaving. We're staying. But we don't have a space here,” you know? “Our community needs to accommodate us.” So yeah.

Personal dimensions of research – 74:04

BLAIR HODGES: Mhmm. Did this book change you at all in the course of researching? It was a big part of your life for a number of years.

AYALA FADER: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: And how did you change as you were also witnessing people changing?

AYALA FADER: Yeah. I mean, being an anthropologist, the research changes you every time you do it. I always ask myself, “Why am I still working with ultra-Orthodox Jews?” Like, I'm a Jewish New Yorker, right? And I'm still working in New York. I'm working with ultra-Orthodox Jews. And I know that early on it was a kind of nostalgia and a way to recuperate a kind of history that was erased for my generation of secular Jews, really. This was a kind of nostalgia project.

I was quickly disabused of that in my early research, where I felt like, "Oh, I thought we were the same and now I see you don't even recognize me as really being a Jew because my Judaism is so different from yours." And I think some of that fascination—I mean, there's an intellectual interest in a community that is both very much part of the contemporary world and also a huge critic of it and a certain kind of religious conservativism that I'm also intellectually interested in.

But I think that I do this work in some ways because for me, it's a way of practicing Judaism. My research is kind of how I do “Jewish,” you know? It keeps me close, but distant. I learn all kinds of things about Judaism that I didn't know. But I go home to my own mostly secular kind of liberal progressive Jewish home. [laughter] Where it's not—I don't feel an obligation to practice. I do what I feel like doing with my family.

BLAIR HODGES: Like observe some of the holidays and do this kind of stuff?

AYALA FADER: Yeah, we observe the holidays.

BLAIR HODGES: Your head's not shaved, so—

AYALA FADER: No, it's not! [laughter] And I don't even wear a wig. But I do feel like this project in particular, it changed me as an anthropologist in terms of my writing, I would say. Because the experiences I lived with for so many years, they really moved me—my first project did too, but this project really moved me, and I wanted to go beyond the kind of old-fashioned anthropology of like, "Let's humanize these people."

I wondered, after experiencing this, and me questioning myself—as I always do in these projects, like, what do I believe in? What's my morality? Where am I as a feminist? What does it mean to raise children and to keep some knowledge to yourself and share? Like, I always thought we had no secrets in my family, but of course you don't say everything. And so it was a struggle for me to do this fieldwork and also keep people's secrets. I was not great at that, and it was something I had to learn.

But this project made me want to write for a different audience. It made me want to write both for academics interested in religion and Jewish studies, but also for a wider audience. Because I think this was a bigger story than one weird group of Jews.

BLAIR HODGES: Absolutely.

AYALA FADER: Yeah, this is a big story about what happens when somebody dramatically changes what they believe, in their community and their family, and the kinds of ethical choices we all make.

So this felt more similar to me, in a way, than my first project with Hasidic women and girls. It felt like it could be anybody; it could be me. And so, my challenge to myself was, "Can I write a book that speaks to a wider audience—not even only of Jews, but of anybody interested in ethical decision-making in our contemporary world?" And we haven't talked that much about the internet, but how digital media really changes us.

I mean, there were many points where rabbis were railing against the internet that I was like, “Right on! Yeah, you're right! [laughter] Digital media is terrible! I want my kids off their phones!”

BLAIR HODGES: Yes! “Social media is ruining the world! Get off Facebook, get off Instagram!”

AYALA FADER: Yeah! And then you're like, wait, but very different reasoning here!

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AYALA FADER: And like, yeah, they would say it's spoiling families. And I'd be like, “Yeah, yeah.” And that's where cultural relativism can be powerful, where you recognize the message, but your interpretation of its meaning is so different. I hope to bring to my readers that kind of recognition of, yes, shared concerns, very different kinds of responses.

And I'm doing some work now with ultra-Orthodoxy and public health in particular and some of the controversies—

BLAIR HODGES: I’ve been following some of the news about it, vaccinations and COVID. Yeah.

AYALA FADER: Yes. And that's an even bigger challenge, you know? And my challenge to myself is, how and why do I write about this? What are the goals? What is the broader purpose in sharing such a different story for an audience who doesn't have an investment?

I mean, I love to write for a Jewish audience, they do have an investment. And I discovered that from my first book, like, there's an amazing Jewish general public, the readership is just wide-ranging and amazing. I mean, my uncle's bungalow colony had me come and visit their book group up in the Adirondacks, which was a delight. But can I reach beyond the Jewish public and speak—

BLAIR HODGES: More broadly, yeah.

AYALA FADER: Yeah, to a thoughtful audience of people who are struggling with key issues of our times?

BLAIR HODGES: And I think, in the book, it's so focused on your subjects that you don't often get this space—you know, because it's also a pretty long book—you don't often get the space to draw the parallels yourself. But I do believe, as I read it, the parallels were there and were pretty easy for me to pick up on and to see different dynamics within my own faith community, or with a political affiliation, or a lot of different things.

AYALA FADER: Yes. Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: There's also that weird tension between scholarship and activism. So, scholars are often wrestling with that as well.

AYALA FADER: Yes, yes. Very much! Especially because in the beginning, I was "Team Hidden Heretics," you know? I felt so bad for them. I felt they were being harmed by some of the religious therapists. But then when I started to do real ethnographic interviews and spend time with some of those therapists and life coaches, I realized like, "Oh, they're doing their ethical best also. They think they're helping these people. They're earnest." And so yeah, that's the struggle. To represent that all fairly, and then take a position yourself as an outside analyst.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, there's so much more. I find myself saying this a lot, but we barely scratched the surface in this book. It's Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, highly recommend this book.

Ayala, thank you so much for being here. And we'll be right back in just a second to talk about best books.

AYALA FADER: Thank you so much.

[BREAK] 

Best Books – 81:49

BLAIR HODGES: We're back. It's Fireside with Blair Hodges. We're speaking today with Ayala Fader. She's professor of anthropology at Fordham University. We're talking about her latest book Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age.

All right, so Ayala, let's talk about best books. This is your opportunity to recommend something. It could be related to your project. It could be unrelated. It's up to you. What did you bring for us?

AYALA FADER: Well, I brought two ethnographies—which are the books that anthropologists write—and a novel.

So the first ethnography is very old. It's Number Our Days, by Barbara Myerhoff. It was written in 1978. I read it as a graduate student, and it really affected my sense of what was possible in an ethnography. She's writing about a Jewish retirement community in Venice Beach. And it's a very particular generation of Jews who came like in the 1920s, before the Holocaust, and raised a generation of children who became professional class. But it's really about the kind of community that they build in the Israel Levin Senior Center. There's also an amazing documentary that goes along with it that won an Academy Award, also called Number Our Days.

It's a beautiful book. It tells stories about real people and the kinds of relationships that they're forming as they're very old, and the kinds of dynamics between families and friends. It was written at a time where there was very little written about Jews by anthropologists—though many anthropologists were, in fact, Jews, and still are. And I just remember being blown away by that book, and thinking, "I wish I could write a book like that." So that was a book that I kept close to me when I was writing this.

BLAIR HODGES: Really quick—it's so dated, were there any methodological changes since then where you say, "Okay, that was of its time."

AYALA FADER: It was a really innovative book. No, because it was a super innovative book. It took a lot of liberties with writing. One of her main characters is actually dead, and she has endless conversations with him at the end of each chapter, even though he's a ghost. So there was a lot of literary experimentation that I found exceedingly contemporary and relevant, as a matter of fact.

BLAIR HODGES: Experimental, even, yeah.

AYALA FADER: Yes! It was a real boundary breaking book at its time. And she included herself, you know, I included myself. Every anthropologist at least positions themselves in the book.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you're there.

AYALA FADER: Yeah. She was one of the early feminist scholars and she trained a whole generation of feminist anthropologists, many of whom were my own mentors, and that I admired. She was one of the first to really position herself as a character, also, in the ethnography, so that you get a sense that the ethnography is her encounter with these people, rather than her just saying, “These people do this."

It's a very contemporary book. And it's a political book. She feels like she has to be an activist for these people and she's very explicit about that. So, I feel like that is a book that holds up today.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so that's Barbara—

AYALA FADER: Myerhoff.

BLAIR HODGES: And the title is—

AYALA FADER: Number Our Days.

BLAIR HODGES: Ok. And I should say, on Amazon here, “Bobblefrog,” the famous reviewer, has said, “This is recommended, even if you aren't an anthropology major.” So that's a strong recommendation from “Bobblefrog.”

AYALA FADER: See? It's a great read! I'm telling you, it's a great read. Like, you cry when you read that book. And when I show the film to my students, I usually teach that book in Intro. And when I show the film to my students, they're all crying. It's a beautiful film and a beautiful book.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I'm sold. Alright, book number two?

AYALA FADER: Book number two is another ethnography, but it's a contemporary ethnography. It's totally different than mine. It's by Laurence Ralph and it's called The Torture Letters. And it's a book about police violence in Chicago. It came out, I think, in 2020 or 2021. And it's told—again, it's experimental. It's told through a series of letters to different people, like one letter to the mayor, one letter to this boy and girl, brother and sister that he sees in the street being stopped by the police. It's a whole series of letters—one from a prisoner who's being held in Guantanamo. And it's both a form of activism and experimental writing, and something that's eminently readable. Like, again, a beautifully written book that makes you see your world in a different way. I felt like, especially after the Black Lives Matter movement, it was something I felt so grateful to have access to.

BLAIR HODGES: Is that what led you to it? Was like, kind of during that— I know, in 2020 was a big—

AYALA FADER: Yes. Well, 2020 when I started teaching again, so it was 2020. Yes, in the spring. I was like, I have to change my introduction to anthropology syllabus. It's too white! It's too linear. I need to shake things up. And a friend recommended that book to me.

BLAIR HODGES: It looks really, really good.

AYALA FADER: It's great. It really spoke to my students. It facilitated conversation in a way that was really constructive, you know, where everyone felt like they could talk, instead of only some people talking, which often happens. So I was really grateful for that book, that book also inspired me. It’s such a different book, but a different kind of anthropology.

I mean, we're at a moment in many disciplines, but definitely in anthropology, where there's a lot of questioning going on, there's a lot of talk about decolonizing anthropology and really questioning what we teach, how we write, who we write for—there's a growing acceptance of public scholarship. And I think both of these books contribute to that. And I think, for me, they kind of helped me think as both a researcher and a writer what's possible. And they inspire me.

BLAIR HODGES: I definitely want to check that book out by Laurence Ralph. And then you said the third recommendation was a novel.

AYALA FADER: Yes. It's a novel that's often shelved in the science fiction section. It's Victor LaVell's The Changeling. And it's a real New York story. It's about a couple who has a baby on the subway. A changeling, of course, is a baby stolen at birth and then exchanged with a supernatural figure. And it's about all of the magical and terrifying things that happen when the baby is changed.

And it's so beautifully written. I was actually reading it, I think, while I was writing this book, and I was really taken with the structure of his novel and with the real New York feel—like there were all these places I recognized and then there were places I knew a little less well and some that he imagined, and it made me think about my own city in a different way. And it's also about family. It's about parents and children. It's a very beautiful book. I've read all his books, and I can't recommend him highly enough.

BLAIR HODGES: This is so funny. I'm looking at some of the blurbs here and someone says, “There are hundreds of little dopamine hits—tiny baths for the prose snob's reward system." [laughter]

So this person really likes even just the way they're writing sentences. And I also see that someone's saying this is sort of a modern fairytale. It's got some horror elements. NPR says it's "enchanting, infuriating, horrifying, heartbreaking." That's an interesting combination. I have to say I haven't read a lot of books like that.

AYALA FADER: I know those are three very different books.

BLAIR HODGES: That's awesome, though. I appreciate all three recommendations, and again I recommend your book, which is Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age. People can check that out. We have a link on the website and in the show notes.

Ayala, thank you so much for joining me here at Fireside.

AYALA FADER: Oh, thank you so much, Blair. It was really wonderful to talk to you.

Outro – 1:29:45

BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.

Alright, another episode is in the books, the fire has dimmed, but the discussion continues. Join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. And I’m on Facebook as well. You can leave a comment at firesidepod.org. You can also email me questions, comments, or suggestions to blair@firesidepod.org. And please don’t forget to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts if you haven’t already.

Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistants, Kate Davis and Camille Messick, and also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges.

Our theme music is “Great Light” by Deep Sea Diver, check out that excellent band at thisisdeepseadiver.com.

Fireside with Blair Hodges is the place to fan the flames of your curiosity about life, faith, culture, and more. See you next time.

[End]

NOTE: Transcript has been lightly edited for readability.