Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age

by Ayala Fader

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.

Genres: Jewish, Judaism, Nonfiction, Religion, Academic, Anthropology

288 pages, Paperback

Published April 5, 2022

Reviews

[Ben Rothke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rabbi Yaacov Love, formerly of Passaic, made a subtle but astute observation. He noted that our generation is not the first to struggle with and be challenged by the Yetzer Hara. However, it is the first generation that thinks they were the first ones to discover the Yetzer Hara.

I thought of that analogy when reading an interesting new book Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press), by Ayala Fader, professor of anthropology at Fordham University. Her book analyzes the digital age’s impact, primarily the
internet, and its impact on the more insular parts of the ultra-Orthodox world.

Fader is a gifted writer, and this is an insightful and fascinating book. Many of those interviewed lead double lives. A term she created, double lifers, is used to describe those with an external appearance as a Hasidic Jew. However, their internals is those of a non-believer. They give the public appearance of adhering to halacha, even as they explored forbidden worlds, online and in-person, beyond their own.

How prevalent double lifers are in the Hasidic world is impossible to determine, nor does Fader attempt to quantify it. However, given the size of the Hasidic population in the New York City area, even if 0.2% were double lifers, that would still be a sizeable number. While one can read this book and possibly jump to the conclusion that double lifers are a crisis, it seems as if they are simply a reality of any large faith-based group.

The focus of the book is what Fader calls “life-changing doubt.” This is a type of doubt that dramatically troubles a person’s faith in the truth of all they had grown up believing, even obliterating it for good. These doubt almost always provokes these individuals to make more significant public changes in their everyday lives with social and institutional repercussions.

She writes that those living double lives are part of a broader twenty-first-century generational crisis of authority among the ultra-Orthodox—a new aspect of an age-old problem. While the internet’s effects play a significant role in the book, every new technology has been seen as a dangerous outside force.

From papyrus, the printing press, newspapers, the radio, and more, new inventions have long been a scourge. As relatively recent as the early 1950’s, the venerable Rabbi Pinchas Teitz of Elizabeth, NJ, was criticized for using the radio to teach Torah to the general public.

A recurrent theme is that many of those facing doubt used the internet to find answers to the questions that were left unanswered within their schools and communities. Those struggling with faith and its underlying skepticism of everything holy is undoubtedly not a new phenomenon. Those who question rabbinic authority goes back to the first years in the Sinai desert with Moshe being challenge by Korach and his band of merry heretics.

Part of the issue is that for most of these double lifers, their only avenue to get answers to their questions is via the internet for many of these skeptics. This is the same internet that is seen as the bogeyman within their communities. A common theme throughout the book is various rabbis and community leaders blindly condemning the internet. Not that such an approach does not have merit. Nevertheless, as Rabbi Aaron Lopiansky perceptively writes in Ben Torah For Life, the internet is merely a facilitator, rather the initiator of a process.


Many of the double lifers voice frustration that they end their teen years without job prospects or understanding of society at large. Often this is manifest in their lack of secular education. One of the double lifers recounts how he would go weekly into Manhattan to donate blood just so he could watch television. Had he had a primary science education, he would have known that he was likely donating plasma or platelets, not blood.

While this book is placed in the anthropology section, it should also be listed as a tragedy. It is a tragedy because these double-lifers, with legitimate questions, are looking at the wrong books and the wrong parts of the internet for their answers.

Recent remarkable books such as To This Very Day: Fundamental Questions in the Bible Study by Rabbi Amnon Bazak and Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith by Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman are precisely the balms they need for their troubling questions. However, in the communities in which they reside, these titles are likely not
on anyone’s radar.

Fader quotes a prominent modern-orthodox therapist who said at the 2015 Agudas Yisroel convention, that “sometimes Orthodoxy just doesn’t work for a person.” The truth is that the Torah works, but people need to be taught in a manner that works for them.

Even the term OTD – off the Derech is imperfect. There is not a derech – instead, there are many paths. When people are forced down a route that does not suit them or meet their unique spiritual needs, that can be the start of a double life. The tragedy of the many stories Fader details is that there is no conflict. The underlying issue is that they may be in the wrong community.

Mark Twain supposedly said that “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” The message is that if you tell lies, you must remember all the lies you told and to whom. Similarly, Fader writes of how these double lifers deal with conflicts inherent to leading a double life. Many times this leads to depression, family conflict, and more.

What Fader describes here is a new aspect to an old problem. The questions the double lifers have and the struggles they face are legitimate. Moreover, the tragedy is that while within their communities, they are but a phone call away from a referral to the best physicians the world has for life-threatening physical conditions. When it comes to afflictions of the soul, they have no one to call. Even Project Makom, an organization that helps questioning Jews and often double lifers find their place in Orthodoxy, is never mentioned here.

Fader has written a groundbreaking work that delves into the parts of the Orthodox world that many do not even know exist. It is unclear how many double lifers there are or how prevalent an issue it is. However, one is hard-pressed to think that it is going away anytime soon.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was an excellent book that explored a world many aren't aware of: Orthodox Jews who lose their faith but still remain in the community.

It did a good job of showing the implications of living in a community when you don't share the faith . It also did a great job showing the internet communities these people create. My favorite part was how it affects their families and the way they raise children. Very complicated.

Two things I would have loved to see this book address:
1) How do these Orthodox Jews lose their faith? What's the process exactly? Are there any similar character traits between the people?
2) Why do they choose to leave their faith?

I guess however that these questions would fit a psychology book more than a sociology book.

One thing I think she got wrong was the reasons why the internet became banned. It has less to do with the heretical counter public (an idea of hers I actually love) and the blogs of the koifrim, and more to do with an access to general culture that these closed communities don't want members to have.

All in all, it was a great book and one which I'd recommend.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Hidden Heretics" is a very important work that will be cited often in the future as an early study on the impact of internet culture on Jewish Orthodoxy. For Fader's focus on positioning twenty-first century social changes within Orthodoxy as impacts of the internet, her work deserves much recognition.

The book is a quick-paced and fascinating serious work of twenty-first-century anthropology. Contrary to the sweeping claims of the subtitle, "Hidden Heretics" is primarily a study specifically of "double-lifers" who violate religious standards in secret while presenting outwardly as faithful, and the work primarily focuses on double-lifers in Hasidic communities as opposed to other Orthodox communities.

For starters, it is really a work of anthropology. I read and enjoyed Fader's "Mitzvah Girls" and I've generally enjoyed works of anthropology on ultra-Orthodox Jews written by outsiders, and this book's methodological approach is thoroughly in line with the field. For the book's subject matter, this methodology presents advantages and disadvantages. It gives the reader multi-faceted insights into the two dozen or so people who Fader studied with intensive fieldwork, including their extensive quotations and those of their family members. It also does not do enough to contextualize these two dozen people within the communities--perhaps Ultra-Orthodox Jews of New York number in the hundreds of thousands--among whom the research participants live. (The author also does not do enough to question whether there is a selection bias in her research subjects, and whether her profiled subjects are representative of all the other "double-lifers" who refused to participate in her fieldwork.) The reader is not left with a clear sense of the numerical strength of "double-lifers" or of doubt in the Hasidic community. Obviously, these numbers would be difficult to attain. Fader's approach to the subject matter is solid and rigorous anthropology, and while it leaves me wanting to read a similar book with a more historical approach, Fader is very good at what she does. (I even enjoy her forays into linguistic analysis of her digital fieldwork, although my husband finds that material very irrelevant.)

The strength of the book resides primarily in its earlier chapters, where Fader outlines the development of a "heretical counterpublic" (great phrase) online and how it contributed to the emergence of Jewish doubters. (I used to read some of the JBlogs discussed in this chapter, without losing my faith, and it is really fun to read about these blogs as important historical sources!) In later chapters, she details the efforts of rabbis and communal authority to respond to the internet as a threat to faith. These chapters are very interesting.

I wanted much more contextualization of the Jewish experience against those of Mormons, Evangelical Christians, Muslims, and other faith groups, all of whom have similar stories to tell following a very similar timeline.

I wanted more of a detailed explanation of the trajectory of the "double-lifers" into doubt online. Fader paints the participants in the heretical counterpublic as autodidactic intellectuals, self-styled maskilim in dogged pursuit of philosophical rigor and scholarship, in contrast to "bums" (who Fader isn't studying) who leave the faith in pursuit of physical pleasure and removal of stricture. I wanted to see more evidence that this is true, and not just a matter of Fader finding what she wants to see.

I wanted much more distinction between the relationship of Hasidim with the internet versus those of non-hasidic (Yeshivish) ultra-Orthodox communities, and Modern Orthodox communities, which Fader in some places paints with one wide brush. In the former, the internet's threat is more pernicious because Hasidim view many, many types of secular knowledge as a cultural (and therefore religious) threat. In the latter two communities, where smartphones and social media usage are ubiquitous and not viewed as an existential threat, the potential of the internet to sow religious doubts remain, but in a very different form. Fader makes some sweeping statements about all of the communities as one, which seems misplaced. She also mostly conducts field work among Hasidim, perhaps because their "double-lifers" are the most striking in their life contrasts. Non-Hasidic Jews both deserve to be studied as entirely separate research subjects, and also deserve a great deal more attention than Fader gives them for the unique impacts of internet on faith in their communities. Fair enough that they don't fit into this book.

Fader's focus on "double-lifers" seems to be a bit of a straw-man topic for a book. As Fader concedes, many "double-lifers" are people on their way to leaving their association with their faith altogether, and their phase of closeted heresy is merely a step on their journey. On the other hand, Fader does not research people whose doubts have not reached the point of "life-changing doubt." By focusing only on a narrow slice of Orthodox doubters, the book's implications are limited by design. I'm not entirely convinced that I buy the notion that "life-changing doubt" is a significant and different concept from non-life-changing doubt. By the end of the book, it's not clear why Fader didn't conduct her fieldwork analyzing the emergence of "modern Hasidic" communities in Airmont, NY or Toms River, NJ, to get a better sense of the impact of the digital age on ultra-Orthodoxy. The impact is obvious and it's enormous. But double-lifers is a tiny window into what that impact is.

Later chapters on the roles of therapists, the real-life meetups of double-lifers, and the impacts of double-lifing on family members, are less interesting to me than the early chapters. But all in all, this book is fascinating throughout.

In spite of all these paragraphs of critique, I still considered giving the book 5 stars. It's a very recommended read.

(Other thing: I was not pleased that one of the blurb-writers on the back of the book is a jBlogger mentioned and quoted a few times in chapter two. He should not have written a blurb.)

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read books on ex-Hasidim before, but this is the first book I've read on Hasidim who have lost their faith and yet try to stay in their communities. The most interesting points I got out of this book included these:
*Once the "double lifers" lost faith in their community and their rabbis, how were they able to establish any ethical boundaries at all? Fader notes that some of them had extramarital affairs, which suggests that once they had dropped the norms of their community, they were not (yet) integrated enough into secular society to have adopted secular ethical norms.
*The problems faced by Orthodox Jewish therapists, who wanted to serve their "double lifer" clients, but who also did not want to encourage their drift away from religious Judaism, especially if they had still-observant spouses and children. Fader suggests that many of the therapists tried to keep families together by encouraging everyone involved to compromise.

[Nichole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whew! I am now officially too old for anthropology. Despite a fundamental enjoyment of Hidden Heretics, something felt very different. This time, I couldn't breeze right through the book. I'm not accustomed to repeating passages. Hidden Heretics was almost grueling despite my fascination with the subject - and my love for science writing.

Growing older is so inconvenient. I can't believe I once considered a book like this "easy reading!"

3 stars (It wasn't you, Ms. Fader, it was me. You are an amazing anthropologist and a good writer!)

[Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

How does one balance authenticity, their values, ethics, and responsibilities when parts of them feel, or are placed by those around them, in conflict? Pleasantly readable and digestible for a topic so complicated, this book covers a broad range of perspectives to give one an encompassing understanding of the experience of, as Fader dubs it, “life-changing doubt” within Chassidish communities—for the doubter and for those around them—particularly when they seek to retain connections within and aspects of those communities.

The content is variably charming, relatable, challenging, disheartening, encouraging, and at times, infuriating. Like any ethnography, we’re invited into a microcosm of humanity, with all its beautiful and difficult and terrible parts. The absolute pathologization that many doubters faced is, in my opinion, inexcusable. At the same time, we see conflicts, for example, between mother and daughter, that may seem very religious on the surface, but seem to have a very common thread within many mother-daughter relationships. The pathologization of doubt is similar, in that it is not at all a unique phenomenon—behavior challenging to the norms of a largely hegemonic group is often treated as such, and this is far from the only community where one might hear that someone must be crazy to not believe and behave as they do. It is both completely unremarkable and, still, intricately unique, as any community is.

There are some quite compelling and interesting sections of linguistic anthropology on the development of different dialects and ways of speaking that reflect the cultural changes ongoing in these spaces. There is a lot of potential for further consideration in these sections regarding some of the particularities and individuality demonstrated by the people and groups studied. How language is used in the building of an identity, new and old, within and outside of a community, as a tool, and for what purposes, is a subject well worth a book of its own.

If you looked at this book and considered reading it, read it! It follows through in any way you would need it to.

[Sara Goldenberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not love. No new research or facts

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deep dive into the life's of people with doubt in the hasidic and ultra Orthodox society. Also, a detailed account of the evaluation of the Jewish blogosphere, and the early days of the internet.

[Edith · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and empathetic anthropological study of a hidden group within a group that's closed off to the outside. The author raises interesting questions on the benefit and harm of the internet, a concern that also preoccupies the ultra-Orthodox rabbis. It's a tool that helps marginalized groups find like-minded communities to help them through tough times. On the other hand, in modern times we also see the internet being used by extremist groups to radicalize and to form communities. It is a new technology and we still haven't figured out the best ways to use and regulate this tool.

On the other hand, I like how this book featured people who chose to stay in the community for various reasons, and did not just advocate leaving and rejecting it the way documentaries on this topic tend to sensationalize it. For a lot of people it is because they want to maintain ties to their family and children. For others, it is because they still enjoy the cultural aspects of the community minus the requirement to take the bible literally and stick to all the commandments. While many do go on an experimental stage, it turns out most people do NOT want to have all the thousand options and freedoms to do whatever and whomever whenever that the secular life holds. They just want a little personal freedom here and there (for example, using a smartphone, or text on Shabbat), but they don't necessarily want to throw out all the beautiful and comfortable things about tradition out.

As we find out, secular people aren't necessarily fulfilled either, and the secular world tries to sell stuff to us to give the illusion that happiness can be bought with a product. I enjoy the author highlighting this perspective and not carrying an anti-religion agenda like some of the other works on this subject I've read. If ultimately, our society is about individuals making personal choices on how to live their best lives, then we respect others who made their choices after thinking it through. Obviously it is not embracing moral relativism, as there are objectively poor decisions that do not lead to a good life (ie. shooting up heroin, robbing a bank, harming others through a Ponzi scheme etc), but somewhere in the middle, if we use our God-given brain and reasoning, and maybe the help of a good therapist and supportive community, we will find what's right for us.

[Bookreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book with wide-ranging implications

Professor Fader has written an accessible yet scholarly book about those ultra-orthodox Jews who straddle the line between
observance and belief on the one hand and personal truth and the ability to make "forbidden" choices on the other. The book has direct implications for understanding other individuals or groups who try to reconcile conflicting beliefs and behaviors.

[RYAN PHAM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dust jacket cover

What do you know about the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community? I've been procrastinating on my CFP capstone class and I have recently read Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age. The book is kind of bonkers.

So the book lays out how the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish is kind of a high control group that relies on insularity to keep the culture static. However, it seems that economics has pushed Hasidic Jews in a certain direction. They have a tendency of getting tech jobs in order to support their families and their English fluency is much better than the previous generations who primarily relied on Yiddish. Unfortunately for the Jewish elders, this means that they are susceptible to social media and the different social norms present on the platforms. In essence, they are able to leave the Jewish ghettos mentally, without actually physically leaving. Since these ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish communities have not been forced to modernize in so long, the clash between modern values and traditional Hasidic religion causes a lot of modern Hasidic Jews to doubt everything they've learned throughout their lives. It causes them to live a double life, one where they are faithful in public but then in private, they will meet up with other non-believers and express agnosticism. The elders react to this by clamping down and treating doubt as a mental disease. They collude with psychiatrists that are loyal to the religion to over-medicate these doubters so that their higher level thought processes are disrupted and the doubters are rendered zombies. It more or less works... until the doubters' bodies acclimate to the medication and double down on their religious deviations. This whole situation reminds me of the lawyers who work for the Jehovah's Witnesses to suppress sex abuse cases. You would think that because these people are super well-educated that they would know better, but I guess pragmatism takes a backseat to traditional religious ideology. Oftentimes these doubters are unsatisfied with their lives. By the time that they reach an age where they are able to question the elders and the tradition, they are often married with a lot of kids. This version of Judaism expects and pushes you to get married at an early age, so sometimes, at the age of 26, you are expected to support and provide for a family of 6 people. This often makes these doubters feel stuck in a situation where they try to make the best of the remainder of their lives. They try to suppress their doubts so that their kids can at least find belonging in a community that is hostile to their emerging spirituality. However, kids can sense inauthenticity/hypocrisy and inherit the same levels of doubt from their parents, basically placing the kids in the same liminal state of being doubters in a high control religious group that dictates everything about a person's life.

Frankly, this whole situation could be avoided if the Hasidic Jews created a different sub-branch of their religion that would be more willing to engage with the modern world. I am not sure if the spirituality they have now is something that will work decades into the future. However, it did make for fantastic reading though.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I live in an area with a high orthodox Jewish population, and that has whet my appetite to understand the orthodox Jewish experience. I found this book (which focuses on the Hasidic Jews in the NY/NJ area) really fascinating, with interesting corollaries to my own religion. The author offered great scholarship, while still remaining readable for the general public. 4+ stars

[Marsha Altman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent recent study of ultra-Orthodox Jews, mostly in New York, who live double-lives as they appear to be observant and live observant lives but are in fact no longer faithful and very conflicted about their roles in life and the position this puts their family in.

[Jennifer Paton Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF. Although the topic is interesting and important, this felt like a book for academics.

[Ellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

read this for anthro was super interesting

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Been on a kick of reading stuff about other former orthodox jews such as myself as my religious traumas been on my mind of late.

It's a solid book, Fader does amazing ethnographic work. None of this was particularly new to me but it's a great piece of anthropological research nonetheless.