18Forty Podcast1 Jul 2025

Ayala Fader: How Do Haredi Jews Deal With Religious Doubt? [OTD 3/3]

In this episode of the 18Forty Podcast, we talk to Ayala Fader—an anthropologist who studies American Haredi communities and their “hidden heretics”—about the personal, familial, and communal factors that pull us toward and push us away from different Jewish communities.
In this episode we discuss:

How should we respond to the discomfort we experience when the communities we live in don’t measure up to the communities we desire?
How has the internet changed Hasidic and yeshivish cultures over the past three decades?
How has the surge of antisemitism and anti-Zionism affected the views of Hasidic Jews?

Tune in to hear a conversation about the ways we seek out and build communities that nourish us.

Interview begins at 12:48.

Ayala Fader is a professor of anthropology at Fordham University. Her research investigates contemporary North American Jewish identities and languages and engages key issues at the intersection of religion, Jewish Studies, gender, and linguistic anthropology, including language and media. She is also the founding director of the Demystifying Language Project, a partnership between academia and public high schools, housed in the New York Center for Public Anthropology at Fordham. Fader is the author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age.

References:

“Failure Goes to Yeshivah” by David Bashevkin

Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn by Ayala Fader

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

Naftuli Moster with Frieda Vizel: "Why I left Hasidic education activism"

When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter

Jew Vs Jew by Samuel G. Freedman

18Forty Podcast: “Rav Moshe Weinberger: Can Mysticism Become a Community?”

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