Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology)
Zoomicon-zoom-in
Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology)

Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology)

By
Ayala Fader (Author)  

Hardback

In Stock

Quantity

Also available on eBook for £10.79. Click here to purchase from Rakuten Kobo

A revealing look at Jewish men and women who secretly explore the outside world, in person and online, while remaining in their ultra-Orthodox religious communities What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of life you had ever known? Hidden Heretics tells the fascinating, often heart-wrenching stories of married ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women in twenty-first-century New York who lead "double lives" in order to protect those they love. While they no longer believe that God gave the Torah to Jews at Mount Sinai, these hidden heretics continue to live in their families and religious communities, even as they surreptitiously break Jewish commandments and explore forbidden secular worlds in person and online. Drawing on five years of fieldwork with those living double lives and the rabbis, life coaches, and religious therapists who minister to, advise, and sometimes excommunicate them, Ayala Fader investigates religious doubt and social change in the digital age. The internet, which some ultra-Orthodox rabbis call more threatening than the Holocaust, offers new possibilities for the age-old problem of religious uncertainty. Fader shows how digital media has become a lightning rod for contemporary struggles over authority and truth. She reveals the stresses and strains that hidden heretics experience, including the difficulties their choices pose for their wives, husbands, children, and, sometimes, lovers. In following those living double lives, who range from the religiously observant but open-minded on one end to atheists on the other, Fader delves into universal quandaries of faith and skepticism, the ways digital media can change us, and family frictions that arise when a person radically transforms who they are and what they believe. In stories of conflicts between faith and self-fulfillment, Hidden Heretics explores the moral compromises and divided loyalties of individuals facing life-altering crossroads. 13 b/w illus.
Ayala Fader is professor of anthropology at Fordham University. She is the author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton).
  • Contributor: Ayala Fader
  • Imprint: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN13: 9780691169903
  • Number of Pages: 288
  • Packaged Dimensions: 155x235mm
  • Format: Hardback
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • Release Date: 2020-06-05
  • Series: Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology
  • Binding: Hardback
  • Biography: Ayala Fader is professor of anthropology at Fordham University. She is the author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton).

Delivery Options

Home Delivery

Store Delivery

Free Returns

We hope you are delighted with everything you buy from us. However, if you are not, we will refund or replace your order up to 30 days after purchase. Terms and exclusions apply; find out more from our Returns and Refunds Policy.