Ayala Fader
Professor of Anthropology and Jewish Studies
Fordham University

Ayala Fader received her PhD in anthropology from New York University and is currently Professor of Anthropology and Jewish Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of the book Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (2009) supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which won the National Jewish Book Award and the New York City Book Award. The National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities supported her most recent book, Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (2020), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Fader is the co-founder and co-convener of the New York Working Group on Jewish Orthodoxies at Fordham’s Jewish Studies Program, which will be publishing a special cluster on the social sciences and Jewish Orthodoxies in the AJS Review (2021). She is currently collaborating on an Annual Review of Anthropology article comparing Jewish and Christian Religious Orthodoxies.

Selected Publications

“Why Are Some Ultra-Orthodox Jews Flouting Social Distancing Rules?” Op-Ed, Daily News, 2020.

Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age. Series: Culture and Technology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.

“The Counterpublic of the J(ewish) Blogosphere: Gendered Language and the Mediation of Religious Doubt among Ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23(4): 727-747, 2017.

“Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Interiority and the Crisis of Faith.” Special section on sincerity and interiority. Hau: A Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(1): 185-206, 2017.

Mitzvah Girls: Bringing up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.