Ayala
Fader

Fordham University
Ivan and Nina Ross Family Fellowship

Research Topic

Haredi Jews, Health, and Legal Cultures

Bio

Ayala Fader is professor of anthropology at Fordham University. Her areas of research include the anthropology of Jews, law, ethnographic methods, and language and social justice. At the Katz Center, her project will examine Haredi conflicts over religion, health, and law since the turn of the millennium.

Fader received her PhD in Anthropology from New York University. She is the cofounder of the long-running Seminar on Jewish Orthodoxies at Fordham’s Jewish Studies Program, and she was recently elected fellow at the American Academy for Jewish Research. She is also the founder of the Demystifying Language Project, which works to make linguistic anthropology a social justice resource for public high schools.

Selected publications

  • Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2020)
  • Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Fellowship

2022–2023

Studying law between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, an age of transition from a world of empires to the modern age of the nation-state and international law.