Women Wellness Influencers and Illiberal Religions
Zoom Webinar
This talk examines illiberal Jewish and Christian women influencers who focus on health and wellness. Using digital ethnography and interviews, Professor Fader explores how influencers inspire each other to elaborate religious women's authority beyond rabbinic leaders or husbands, creating change while imagining a public space for religion in the United States today.
Healing Women in Jewish History
New histories of medicine and the body offer a more direct vantage on women’s experiences than traditional approaches mediated through the sources and concerns of men. This series explores what we know about women as both practitioners and patients throughout Jewish history, and what we stand to learn from such scholarship about women’s lives more generally.
Featuring
Ayala Fader
Fordham University
Ayala Fader is professor of anthropology at Fordham University. She is the author of the award-winning books, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2020). Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Fader’s current book project examines the trend of American Orthodox Jews aligning themselves with a new form of religion on the Christian Right—a public, political, racialized, and biblical philosophy, redefining postwar Judeo-Christianity in the contemporary political landscape. As the founding director of Fordham’s Center for Public Anthropology, Fader is currently collaborating on the Demystifying Language Project, which makes linguistic anthropology a social justice resource for public high schools.
Fader received her Ph.D. from New York University.
Cosponsors
Katz Center public programming is supported by gifts from the Klatt Family and the Harry Stern Family Foundation.