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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello everyone, and welcome to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. If you're not yet familiar with yivo, I encourage you to learn more about us. We are a special place for the contemplation and celebration of Jewish history and culture. We have many events like this one happening live online. Next week we actually have a special workshop with a YIVO archivist where you can learn how to do research at YIVO by understanding the basics of what an archive even is. So if you've ever wondered about what an archive is or how you can do research with some of YIVO's millions of materials, feel free to join us next week for that. But today we're glad to have you join us for a talk on a recent publication titled Hidden Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, so to speak about this we have Ayala Feder, who is professor of Anthropology at Fordham University. She's the author of this book and also Mitzvah Girls Bringing up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Her research is supported by fellowships including the NSF and the neh. It appears in academic journals and also more public venues. She's the co founder of the Seminar on Jewish Orthodoxies at Fordham's Jewish Studies Program on the Serum Committee of the Haredi Research Group and is also a Fellow at the American Academy for Jewish Research as the Director of Fordham center on Public Anthropology. Vayner is currently collaborating on the Demystifying Language Project, which works to make linguistic anthropology a social justice resource for public high schools. So we appreciate her taking time out of her busy commitments to being here with us at YIVO today. And she's also joined by Josh Lambert, who is a Sophia Moses Robison Associate professor of Jewish Studies in English and also Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College. He's the author of Literary Jews Publishing and Postwar American Literature and Unclean Lips, Obscenity Jews and American Culture, and also co editor of How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish. So let's get started.
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C
Thank you so much, Jane, and I'm just really delighted to be here to talk about what I think and I want to tell everyone here who hasn't read it yet is an absolutely extraordinary book. And I'll say that like, while I want you to pay attention, I know you're all on a computer. You have a way to click over to a website of your choice and order a copy of the book. And I I'll say like, you will not regret doing it because as much as we'll get into here. It's just a deeply textured and incredible work of ethnography and analysis that, that opens up like an incredibly important story. So everything we say here is important. And please read the book too. Ayala, I'm so glad to like have a chance to talk to you about this book. And I want to start with Doubt, which is in the title. And I think that anybody listening to us, anybody anywhere, knows doubt, right? Like we all have, we all, we all live our lives surrounded by, informed by doubt. And I think one of the things you say that's so interesting to me is that you feel like doubt hasn't been that widely or that well studied and particularly the kind of doubt that you really center in this book, which you call life changing doubt. So I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about doubt and how you came to study it and really like what this life changing doubt is.
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A
Yes, absolutely. And let me just say thank you so much to Yivo for having me. And it's an equal thrill for me to be in conversation with you, Josh. I love your work. So I didn't know exactly this is the nature of ethnography. I didn't know that I was going to be studying doubt. I knew that I was really interested in talking to ultra Orthodox Jews who had what they called a crisis of faith. And the more they talked about that and the kinds of ways that they lived, that crisis of faith, or crisis of amina, they called it in Yiddish, the more I began to see that I needed a kind of framework for analyzing what they were experiencing. And I went to some of the really interesting recent work in anthropology of religion which has begun to look at things like uncertainty and failure in a religious context and doubt. And it was very helpful. But at the same time I felt like there were these two kinds of doubts that I had to make a distinction between. The first is the kind of doubt that you're talking about your own kind of personal doubt in everyday life. And I think in a religious community we can think about that kind of doubt as really forming the backbone for faith in lots of ways. Like, it's not as if you're born with faith. Faith is something that you struggle. It's its own uncertainty and it includes its own doubts. And that kinds of faith and doubt ebbs and flows over your life cycle. But what I was seeing was a kind of doubt and I called it life changing doubt to distinguish it from, maybe we could call it everyday doubt. It was a kind of doubt that actually changed the way People saw their worlds. It was a life changing moment where the ethics and morals and the cultural values that they had grown up living suddenly no longer made sense. And the thing that was, that was particular about life changing doubt was that it wouldn't just stay inside as a kind of personal, like, you're feeling doubts and it's a hard day. It had to be enacted. It actually pushed people to make changes within their lives. And the folks that I was talking to were married, they had children. And so the kinds of changes that they made had to be done secretly so as not to harm the people they loved. And what I also had to begin to describe was the ways that life changing doubt incorporated so many different forms. I assumed that people who were experiencing a crisis of faith would all be atheists. That turned out not to be true at all. There were all kinds of categories and Yiddish and English names for different forms of life changing doubt. So it's a very nuanced and, and flexible kind of concept that helped me understand the people I was meeting.
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C
I mean, I really appreciate that last thing you said about how, and I think the book does such justice to the individual stories, to the degree to which, like, it will take different directions for different people. And one of the things that I, one of the things that obviously like, it raises as a question and that is raised so much by many of the participants themselves, is a question of where it comes from. Like why? You know, because I think on some level we'd say to ourselves, there is so much everyday doubt in some cases in any culture, in any group of people, it will sometimes cross over that line to a doubt that will really just shake the foundations of someone's world. But I think you were seeing, you were responding to, even in the formation of this project, a pattern or if not like a growth, a sort of visibility or something of this kind of doubt. And one of the theories that people have is that it was really caused by the rise of the Internet. And I think it's such an interesting, that's such an interesting case because, you know, I study to some degree like the history of media forms and you can go back to any newly introduced media form and people will make very broad, intense claims about the effects of those media forms. Right. The classic one is like comic books were like turning kids into murderers in the 1940s and 50s. But like, we have these arguments about video games, we have these arguments about the introduction of radio or about the introduction of film. And I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about where you find yourself coming down on the question of like, how much is the Internet a source or a driver of that kind of life changing doubt? And how did you get to that place, to that feeling about it?
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A
Yeah, I mean, those are really interesting debates in media studies and, and I actually wasn't coming from there at all. Again, I was kind of driven by the ethnographic unfolding. What really got me interested in this whole project was the anti Internet rally that took place in Citi Field where Rabbis spoke to 40,000 men about not using the Internet or only using it in a filtered way. So the media question actually I bumped up against and I was really interested not so much in media and the media itself, but how people were using it. What I began to track, and I found really fascinating was the way that people in the communities themselves were debating the same kinds of issues that media scholars are debating and do debate, which is. Is the medium. The problem is the message, the problem is it. Initially, rabbis were very worried about the content of porn, but ultimately they began to talk about smartphone themselves as kind of inciting certain kinds or infecting people with doubt. So there were all kinds of debates going on in the communities themselves. But at the end of the day, I think what was most helpful for understanding what was going on with life changing doubt and digital media was to think about the concept of affordances. Affordances, it's a media term. These are the physical properties of a medium. So there are certain affordances that the printing press had, for example, and there's lots of comparisons between the printing press and, and the Internet, but the physical properties of a technology that make it useful for certain kinds of human projects. I will say that life changing doubt is nothing new. Right? People have always had life changing doubt. But what was really distinctive about having digital media, especially smartphones, as they became emergent in the communities, was that it used to be that if you had life changing doubt, in order to meet other people who shared your points of view, you generally had to leave your community, you had to physically move. But because of digital media, it was now possible, really, it facilitated living a double life in lots of ways. It was now possible to have these doubts, to continue living your life and then to secretly, even in your own home, once everybody was asleep, to go online and meet other people who were sharing your doubts. And one of the real, I think a really important feature of life changing doubt is that it is publicly shared with others. It's through interaction that that gets lived. It's not again, not an internal interior State it's actually made public and real through interaction. And that's exactly what I described the Jewish blogosphere or the J blogs back in the day when people still blogged where it was I think mind like just mind shattering for people to go online and, and see other ultra Orthodox Jews who were using Yiddish terms, who clearly knew religious texts and still had the kinds of questions that they were experiencing and to be able to talk to people. I think that really was life changing. And what I called it in the book is that I think the Jewish blogs and then later social media really created a heretical counterpublic meaning like a public that was full on heretical, challenging what they called the system, being really critical of ultra Orthodox life and leadership and being very public, but being anonymous at the same time. Because to express those kinds of views in public could get you kicked out of your community and force your spouse to divorce you and all kinds of horrible implications for that kind of behavior. So I think it kind of emboldened people to socially connect. And I will say also that the kind of online and in person spheres were very fluid. You know, once people began to trust each other online, they would actually meet in person. There were many groups who begin on WhatsApp and then meet in person, go to bars, explore New York City together. So I think the Internet really facilitated all of that. I was really interested to see how the kinds of possibilities that the Internet created for what is really an age old problem.
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C
To me, there's something incredibly poignant about it because it's not hard to imagine people 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 400 years ago, experiencing a lot of the feelings that some of the people you study experience. And what feels so historically specific about this period is that formation that allows them to connect with others, sometimes much to their benefit, and sometimes in ways that are very difficult.
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A
Yeah, wait, let me just add one thing, which is that I actually talked to an older person, so a generation above the people that I was meeting. And I asked him, you know, what was your experience when there was no Internet? What was interesting to me was that in going outside of his community, he met other kinds of Jews. He went to the Jewish reading room in Jewish Theological Seminary of the New York Public Library. I think what was very powerful were was that by going online you were able to meet people who were just like you, not who were, you know, more enlightened Jews or more secular Jews. And I think that created a kind of, it created a powerful voice of critique and dissent in the community.
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C
Yeah, no, and I do really appreciate the term, like the heretical counterpublic that gives the sense of the way that a sort of community or public formed. I appreciate that. One of the things you attend to really well in the book, too, though, is the way in which membership in that formation in that public really was different for different people. And one of the things you track very carefully is gender. And I think it wouldn't be a surprise to anyone who knows anything about Haredi Jews that gender would play, you know, a powerful role. But I was surprised by some of the ways in which gender informed how people could live a double life or the choices they would make about it. And I was wondering if you could say a little bit about that.
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A
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because my first book, Mitzvah Girls, I only talk to women. And in the beginning of this project, I only talked to men. And I. I was like, what's going on? What's going on? And so I will say that even on the. Even on social media, as in social media everywhere, men predominated, even among hidden heretics. But I learned about structural factors of the life cycle that actually were gendered and which shaped the ability to live a double life. And that is that at the point of marriage, which is pretty young for most haredi Jews, like 19, women have much less independence, and men suddenly have much more. I mean, physical mobility and the chance to. To explore on their own. So once a woman gets married, she's at home, and she. Even if she's working, she's usually in charge of the home and the children that hopefully come. Men, after having, you know, really serious, intense yeshiva lives, even if they continue to learn Torah, they suddenly have a lot of free time, and they have a kind of mobility that women don't experience. Nobody's asking them where they're going, who they're seeing, who they're socializing with. So there was a lot of differences in the ability, structural differences in the. In the possibility of living a double life. I was very interested to also see the kind of affective or emotional differences that the crisis of faith brought to people. Men described a devastating sadness when they talked about losing their faith or their amina. They. They were. They just, you know, some considered suicide. There was just a loss that. That many spoke about. Some women spoke about that, too. But I heard more about the anger from women, anger that they had given up a lot of their dreams for something that they no longer believed to be true. And I think that speaks to the kind of different Positions of men and women in some of these kind of communities. I will also say that the consequences of, um, and the dangers of living a double life were different for men and women. Um, you know, when a spouse discovers that her or his other spouse is living a double life, you know, men were sometimes encouraged to divorce. Women were just. Were encouraged less often to divorce a spouse. I heard many cases of. Of women saying, you know, well, my rabbi said to just keep. Keep on going, and he'll eventually gain his faith back. And again, I think that speaks to a kind of less of an independence for women. And even for the still religious spouses, there were consequences in terms of gender. One that actually forced me to reconsider my own kind of feminist ideas about authority, which was that there were women whose husbands were living a double life, and they had discovered it. And one of the things that they had to now take on was responsibility for the spiritual life of the home, which is usually led by a husband. And I thought, well, like, right, you know, women are taking responsibility for spirituality. And. And a number of women said, no, that's really devastating for me. That means that something's not okay in my house, and I don't want to have these new responsibilities for spirituality. So I think a lot of kind of expected structural gender differences, but also unexpected. That made me at least think about some of my own presuppositions.
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C
I know, I. And I. I think that it. It struck me that, you know, part of what comes out in the book is that you say in that split between a kind of like the. The loss of a lot like the. The sort of sadness that men experienced and some of the anger that women experience. Some of that has to do with what women seem to very often be most frustrated with is, like, institutional structures, social structures. And men were grappling because they had had the opportunity to engage with, like, theological or intellectual sort of questions. They were grappling more on that level. And that split, which I think comes from educational structures or from other social structures, it's sort of heartbreaking in, like, three different ways when you think of how it affects adults. I found it really just hard to know exactly which part of it to feel worst about. But it's hard. Yeah.
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A
No, absolutely. And even the explanations from rabbis and from therapists were gendered in ways that sort of mirror exactly what you're saying. Like, rabbis would say, well, this woman is having doubts because she's unhappy in her marriage. There was always an emotional explanation, Whereas men, it was acceptable to say, okay, maybe you're having emotional trouble, but you're just too, you're too smart for your own good, you're too intellectual. And so those kinds of almost stereotypes were reproduced even for life changing doubt by all kinds of players in these stories.
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C
And what you just mentioned reminds me of something else I wanted to ask about, which is one of the, to me most surprising aspects of the story you tell is the degree to which even in ultra orthodox communities that might be very explicitly and elaborately opposed to sort of aspects of modern secular science or culture in what you understood to be the case during the period you were studying, embraced, engaged with like the science of psychology, involved psychologists in the treatment of doubt in their communities. And there's something very surprising about that just even happening as a, as a formation in that community that probably a lot of people don't know about. But I also found it opened questions about the role psychology plays in a community. Right. In terms of how it bolsters authority structures or, you know, has a commitment to status quo. And I just, I wondered if you could talk about what you found about psychology and, and, and how it was playing out in, in these cases.
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A
Yeah, sure. That's a great question. I was surprised, actually. I hadn't thought that having life changing doubt would be pathologized in the way that it was. And it was. I mean, a lot of people who began going online were so relieved to find other people with the same kind of doubts because they were worried that they were crazy. And they used that like I must be crazy to have these kinds of doubts. In fact, when I originally started doing research in Hasidic communities, this book is about Hasidic and Yeshivish. I was. Therapy was really not acceptable. There was Freud, there was sexuality. Like it was, it was not discussed much. But in those 20 years or 15 years, there has been a much more opening of the communities in general to therapy. And I see that as kind of an embrace of a therapeutic wellness more generally that is part of, let's say mainstream society and which has now really influenced, I think, haredi communities or the ultra orthodox. So I was surprised at the role of therapy, but I saw even inklings in terms of like special education and vitamins and certain kinds of exercise, like even 15 years ago. But what has happened since then is there is a new kind of therapy that's called From Therapy. There's an organization for, from therapists or religious therapists. And these are Orthodox Jews, from modern Orthodox and even conservative to Haredi Jews who are, some are trained, some are not some are life coaches. There's a whole range of professionalization. But this has become a new kind of economic position for people. And it is an attempt to kind of almost kosher or make kosher therapy in a way that many parts of mainstream life are made kosher. And so you have people, there are some people who do this kind of religious therapy who are totally separate their religious selves. And there are others who do combinations or who talk about the kind of conflicts that they had. But what did surprise me is whenever somebody who was living a double life was quote unquote outed, which is a term that they used, they were always sent to a therapist, either a life coach, a therapist, or maybe sometimes for a woman, a bride, teacher, a college teacher, which eventually turned into a therapist. And I think again, there's a kind of sense that if you're having those kinds of doubts, you must be mentally ill or have some kind of emotional issues that is stopping you from the normative normal default of faith or being able to at least live with your doubts and continue practicing. The fact that people were disrupting their practice was really troubling. And one of the things that I write about is the kind of triangulation that happened between a spouse finding out about the double life of another spouse going to talk to their rabbi who then referred a therapist. And there were times that I think were really problematic where therapists and rabbi would collaborate and the patient wouldn't always know and talk to the spouse, especially if it was a woman, talk to the husband. So there were all kinds of ways that therapy was encourage those with life changing doubt to stay in their communities. Some were really problematic and, and dangerous, especially when medication and false diagnoses were, were, you know, were made. And I write about the case of one woman in particular who was diagnosed as having some kind of mental disorder and put on medication with. For something that she really didn't experience. There's a kind of silencing effort in really extreme cases. Not always, but in some cases. And that it really led me to a kind of deep dive into religious therapy. I went to the religious therapist conference, which was really interesting, and talked to a number of religious therapists. And it's an emerging field in all kinds of interesting ways.
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C
Yeah. And I have to say it makes me think about some of what we know about the history of psychology as a field. Right. Which is a complex one, as in most disciplines. Right. Where you can certainly point to places and times where, let's say a psychologist's commitment to the Reinforcement of community norms has been like, very, very painful for the people subject to it.
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Yes. For women's positions especially.
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So.
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C
Yeah.
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I mean, there's a long history there and I feel like this is one more wrinkle in that history. I know that there are therapists who are really in the communities who are really concerned with this and who are pushing for more professionalization. And as higher education becomes somewhat more acceptable for some communities, there are certain schools where it's acceptable for men, mostly men, to get like a master's in social work, for example, and training. But. Absolutely. It's an interesting legacy that gets continued in a surprising way in religious communities.
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C
Yeah. And I think probably there are questions going forward to ask within that community for psychologists to work on of where you would draw the right lines for that kind of practice.
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A
Yeah. And what your responsibilities are, both as a. From Jew and also as a professional. And I draw a lot of comparisons also to Christian psychology and the kind of therapies that are also put in place to try to keep people in the fold or to change their sexuality. I think there's a lot of overlap there.
- [26:12]
C
Yeah. No, absolutely. And that's one of, you know, there are many things that I hope come away from this book that people, you know, people take up, and that's one area in which I, you know, I'd really love to see. See more work or more people talking about it. Another question that I wanted to ask you, and I think this is a, this is a hard one that it's a hard thing to think about in terms of the people you study. Right. The people who are living a double life are particularly people who have not gone what's called colloquially going off the derrick. Right. Like people who've left haredi ultra orthodox communities. They're people who have a reason to stay inside and they, or I mean, or have decided to, you know, I have a reason is kind of vague and I, I think that one of the things that's pretty consistent or that seems consistent in many or most of the cases I'm trying to think of, if there are some exceptions, but are that these are people who've already had children and that it seems to me possible at least that one might be able to generalize that if someone is struck by this kind of life changing doubt before they've had children, it's much easier for them to just take a step out of the community. And it raises like, pretty profoundly distressing questions about, I mean, anyone among us who has children knows that they change your Life, they change your choices, your freedoms, your opportunities. But in a community in which people are married off very young, typically, and there's pressure to marry very young, what it made me think is the degree to which encouraging people socially pressuring people to have children at very young age, at what now by a non haredi perspective, seems like a very young age might be a way that the community is actually restraining people's choice and forcing people into these actually much more difficult situations. And that it's obviously a very, you know, when people's relationships with their kids are on the line and their choices about childbearing. Like, my belief is that people should have the freedom to choose when they want to have children, whenever they want, obviously. But I, but I, but I wonder what you think about, like, the role of sort of family dynamics and the community's pressure on family issues, like how that plays into these, these stories.
- [28:47]
A
Sure. Family dynamics were really, I mean, you've used the word heartbreaking. I found those really difficult and painful to talk about. You know, the kinds of fallout that children experience, that spouses experience, that people living double lives, which is, by the way, their term, not mine. So these are really poignant difficulties. Questions. My sense is that the push to marry off early is of course, the goal of these communities, is keeping the Jewish community going and rebuilding after the Holocaust. So that's the goal, the ideological goal. But I think there is a kind of sense of vulnerability of the individual to both outside forces and people's own individual challenges. And so different from the Amish who have that period where they are encouraged to go out and then to come back once they're ready, if they ever are ready. I think there's a sense that the individual is vulnerable and that structures such as marriage, intense schooling will all help people stay on the right path and not go OTD or off the Derek off the path. And I think for sure having children made people very reluctant to leave. You know, they knew that they would lose their children even. I mean, there are a few people now that I know who have been able to negotiate keeping their children, like sharing custody with a, with a still orthodox, ultra orthodox spouse, even though they themselves. But they have to maintain certain levels of kashrut and all of those kinds of things. It's difficult, but there was always the threat hanging over people that they would lose their children. I think if people were younger, it was absolutely easier to leave. I heard from some people that if you were gay, you almost felt forced to leave. Somebody said to me it would be unbearably lonely to stay and be gay in this community. I do. I also know that a lot of people who had those doubts were hoping that marriage would cure those doubts. So people might have had. I mean, nobody suddenly erupts with doubts. You know, almost everybody told me about having doubts, first as a kid and then sort of tamping those down when those are unacceptable to bring up, and then later on as a teenager, probably again having some of those doubts being assured by parents and other kinds of authority figures, teachers, rabbis, like, get married, everything is going to be fine. And, you know, that is part of the narrative of ultra Orthodox life is the beauty of building a home, of perpetuating the Jewish nation from Jews, you know, building a loving relationship, all of those things. And I know, especially women, really, many of them really believe, like, if I just get married, my doubts will go away, I'll be happy, and I won't need to worry about these intellectual issues. But those. That rarely happened. You know, usually those kinds of doubts came back again and again. But by that point, you know, 20, 21 people were already. So they had a few kids and they. It was almost impossible to leave. And that's why I think there's that sense that you really have to reach out in ways below the radar of communal authorities, even authorities within your own home, because the sense of loss was so palpable. I will say also that there were tensions that I hadn't expected between those who had left. And now there's a quite live and loud OTD community. Many people have written memoirs. There's the organization Footsteps. But there were tensions between those who left and those who stayed. And each one accused the other of being cowards or being too fearful or not being thoughtful enough and caring enough for their families. And I recently was on a podcast of a modern Orthodox woman, and she said one of the most helpful things for her reading my book was sort of getting at the point of view of those who had decided to stay because she left ultra Orthodoxy. And she said, you know, I didn't know that they struggled with those same kinds of ethical issues that I did. They just felt like they couldn't make the same kinds of decisions. And I hope that that's a takeaway from people within those communities reading my book.
- [33:21]
C
I hope so too, but it really does. I mean, it leaves you with at least me with a profoundly unsettled feeling, right, because we know in the world, and many social scientists and other people study people who leave communities, right, that it's very natural, even in Jewish History in Jewish context. Right. For very many of us in our families, we can point to people who left family members, crossed oceans, made huge swings in their cultural commitments, you know, in the last hundred years. It's kind of odd if you can't think of somebody in Jewish history who did that. And certainly if you talk to or connected to LGBTQ people today, like, for very many people, unfortunately, still, you know, in this country, in other countries, to live your full self sometimes requires, like, fully leaving behind in a pretty dramatic way, a place you came from. So I think from that perspective, where that seems quote unquote normal, I mean, those people are. To me, I haven't had to do quite that. And that's brave to me. And yet at the same time, it seems quite normal. What seems much, much, much more painful and difficult. And I think even what you highlight is even within the Haredi community, there are. It's a particular group of people who feel that they're. And I think it's important to say that in most cases you're saying that they do choose, it's still a choice people are making. They're not forced. The choice is not taken away from them, but the opportunity they have to choose is much, much, much more difficult, in a way.
- [35:02]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, we all have constraints on our choice. Nobody has free choice. Right. Like, I mean, there are all kinds of pressures that everybody in the world lives with. I think one thing that was really stark was when people experience life changing, doubt some of the alternatives, and the kind of exploring of the non ultra orthodox world that had been vilified from childhood, from early childhood on. Like, there is, you know, a lot of discourse for very young children about the immorality of the non from world and the dangers and, you know, the kind of the, the, you know, like people outside of our community don't care about families. Like, there's a lot of stereotyping and vilifying really more than anything else of the outside world. So the quote on outside world right across right next door to you. And I think that that is really difficult to kind of live both sides of because you are, you are changing how you see the outside world. And at the same time, you know, you're. You're experiencing and living this kind of part of you that is not acceptable in your world where you're actually comfortable. It's, It's a real challenging position. And I, I do feel like one of the things that really interested me the most is the kinds of moral decision makings that people living double lives lived and the kinds of considerations that they had and how they thought about their children and how far they pushed and how far they. And when they couldn't push anymore.
- [36:41]
C
I want to open it up to questions, so I'll just say again, if you're listening and you have a question, please share it in the Q and A function and I'll try to gather some of those together and ask. But before I do that, I'll ask one more question, just which is maybe my prerogative to do, which is this is part of what's so striking about your book is frankly, just the method, right? Like that it's based on ethnography. And you've said a little bit about that. But I really appreciate the degree to which you're transparent in the book about how this kind of ethnography is done and even how it changed over the period that you wrote the book. And so I wonder for. If just especially for the people listening who haven't read the book, if you can describe a little bit about how did you do this? How did you get the stories of people living in these very sort of difficult situations and tell them so fully and so with so much detail?
- [37:43]
A
Thank you. I mean, one of the real values of ethnography and the method of ethnography is participant observation. It includes interviews and participating and observing. So it's trying as much as you can to join people where they are in their lives. But one of the really valuable parts of ethnography for me are the kinds of relationships formed over the long term. I mean, in some ways, ethnography is like an experiment. It's a leap of imagination, but it's grounded in real people. And what was particular about this project was that many of the people living double lives really wanted to talk to me. That hadn't been the case in my earlier book. I had to kind of convince people to, and they wanted me to become more religious. And that was sort of the trade off. But in this case, the people I was talking to really wanted to tell their stories. And so that helped me feel like I was actually engaged in a kind of ethical project myself, because parts of ethnography can be invasive. You're using people's stories. There's a lot of debate these days in the field about what our ethics are as ethnographers. And so in some ways this was collaborative, and in some ways it wasn't. I. There were some real limits to collaboration that I found really interesting. I'll tell you a very quick story which is that right before I went to press with this book, it was already copy edited. People who had been involved in the project sent me WhatsApp messages like, I want to see my part again. I'm worried. I don't want myself outed. And that was one of the driving features of this particular project was I had to keep. Maintain people's anonymity. I mean, there were serious consequences for me of not doing that. And so first I was, you know, so anxious, like, I've already given my final book to the press and everything, so we had to stop the process and I had to go and show each person their versions. And I was actually really relieved and glad that I had, because there were markers there that I hadn't seen of people, of what hasidic group they belong to or where they might live or even who they might be. And that keeping of secrecy was really a challenge because in some ways, ethnography is about making secrets public, right? It's about uncovering ways of living people's lives that you see as the anthropologist, as somebody who's outside and inside at the same time and seeing patterns beyond just the individual.
- [40:20]
B
And.
- [40:21]
A
And so, of course, I'm positioned myself, but I felt like if I could write through my own positioning and maintain people's anonymity, that would facilitate the readers making their own decisions about what I was putting forward.
- [40:38]
C
I want to ask you just one quick follow up, which is that, you know, you talk about the. That there's a history that's well discussed of ethnography being invasive, but it seems to me, maybe I'm wrong about this, but that in the period you were writing this, with the emergence of these same Internet technologies, there's the potential for your work to become invasive in your own life, right? That you can be at a birthday party for your sister or I don't know who, I don't know anything about your family, but you could be hanging out, doing a thing, and then you get a WhatsApp from someone who's just had a revelation or needs to share or something important is happening. And I think that the strangeness with which social media allows this to enter your life, I think probably has pretty profound implications for the future of ethnography.
- [41:26]
A
Absolutely, that's a great point, Josh. Like, this was so different from my earlier project where I would take the subway to Borough park and be in Borough park and not even have contact because I didn't even have a cell phone back then, you know, but it's exactly the case that the, the lines between the field and the not field are totally porous for me now. And you know, yes, we're eating dinner and I get a notification and my kids are like, oh, you're WhatsApp again. You know, it's like, stop already. But, but you're, you have a kind of. It's both a joy and a horror. It's like, yes, you're, you're plugged in all the time, and yet you're plugged in all the time. I think, I mean, to me, at least for this project, it kind of forced me to reconsider what was data and what constituted the field. And it made those boundaries very flexible in a way that I definitely think is going to change ethnography and what we count as data. Absolutely.
- [42:30]
C
Okay, so one of the questions that's come up a couple times in the Q and A, which I think is probably on me as a moderator for this, is that some people would like to ask you to do something that you can easily do, which is give examples of what does it feel like? Like, what does it look like when someone's living a double life? Like, what do they do? Do they. And I know from the book, but
- [42:49]
A
you see, let me tell you. And this was where I got to do participant observation eventually, once people trusted me and where I actually had a really fun time. So one of the things that, that the ways that people live their double lives is they live publicly as who they are and then they get together in person, not only online, and they explore the city. So I went to bars with people. I went to outdoor concerts and restaurants. I was really interested that most of the choices that people made were Jewish. You know, like some people went to Fiddler on the Roof. I went to a Yiddish concert in the park. There wasn't a lot of food exploration. There were a lot of parties. I went to a lot of parties that were on Lil Shishi, which is Thursday. So it's before Shabbos. And that's actually a standard time when men get together. What differed about these kind of gatherings is it was men and women together. They sometimes sang Shabbos songs, they ate Shabbos food sometimes. But they were all sharing a kind of life changing doubt are all marginalized in some kind of ways. So it was a lot of socializing. They also explored things that were really not typically associated with living a haredi life. Like one of the first things people did was learn to ride a bike, which, which you know, some ultra orthodox boys do, but women certainly don't and adults certainly don't do that that much. Sometimes people went away to the mountains to go skiing, you know, so it was using their bodies in different kinds of ways that were not particularly haredi. I don't know how that's become haredi or not, but it was, I think hidden heretics were living what they imagined or at least experimenting with what they imagined secular Jews might be doing. Not that they wanted to be secular Jews, but they wanted to try out things they read together. They talked online about books they were reading. There were a lot of philosophical conversations and conversations about parenting, but in general it was forbidden socializing, I would say. And I do have to add that there were lots of love affairs and hooking up with people because part of it wasn't a reason. But some people who had life changing doubt and were living as hidden heretics were not fully, if their spouse didn't join them, were not fulfilled in their marriages necessarily. And so there was that romantic aspect too, you know.
- [45:20]
C
Absolutely. And thank you. And I will say to anyone who hasn't read the book that the details and the scenes that are set of. Of really just how, how people experience that are just wonderful parts of the book. Some. One person asked a question that I think is probably on a lot of people's minds, which is about how the recent attention to education in the Haredi community in New York plays into this story and might play into the story going forward. Right. Like what would a spotlight on Haredi schools, what kind of changes now? I guess I'm not going to ask you to predict the future, but the schools do play a sort of important role here and I'm interested for you to say more about that and to think about how that light being shone on the situation might affect these people in particular.
- [46:12]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I'll say a little bit about the schools, but I will also give a shout out to the Haredi research group I'm a member of that. It's online and there is a whole, there's like five very short pieces that a number of us have written in response to the Times article. So I think what didn't come out enough, I mean, I really admired that New York Times article. I thought it was accurate and I admired the research that went into it and that it echoed a lot of my own experiences from what I've seen in the communities. But I think what was less clear was the kind of central role that what are called the moistest the schools play. That's particularly in Hasidic communities, but also in Yeshivish communities. Which is that there's an incredible continuity across home and school, something that you don't find in mainstream public schools at all. And families choose certain schools to align themselves with certain kinds of religiosity and certain political leaders. And so there's a lot riding on what schools you attend and how you do in those schools. And eventually your attendance in those schools is going to shape actually matchmaking. So they're critical places. And in fact, a lot of the hidden heretics that I talked to were reluctant to come out publicly with their life changing doubt because they were worried they would hurt their children who would get kicked out of school because of them. Because parents, you know, have to sign contracts that they won't use the Internet. It used to be that they wouldn't go to the library. Like there are all kinds of agreements that parents make to live a certain kind of way. So the schools are also surveilling the parents in a way. You know, it's, it's an agreement because the schools are arms of the rabbinic leadership. They are, as a person once said, it's the RAV school. You know, and so the fact that you go to those schools has a huge impact on the rest of your life, including who you'll marry and where you'll send your own children. Wait, what were you asking me now?
- [48:24]
C
Well, and, and I guess part of the, part of the question is. Right, so, so I think that's so important to say that these aren't just like schools that people have in secular America where if you don't like it, you can homeschool something different, move to another town. These are like pillars of your community's life. And then I think that what I, what I'm curious for you to reflect on is, so then how do the revelations about the ways that those schools are, I think I'm, it's fair to say, failing their students. Right. Not preparing them, giving them opportunities to like make enough money to support their families. Um, how, how does that sense of the schools and the way in which it constrains people, like, how should we, does it change the way we should think about that fact?
- [49:07]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think my work with hidden heretics and the heretical blogosphere, the heretical counterpublic, I think that's a piece of this because even after the Times article came out, there was so much Haredi media, just like endless, Like I spent days on my phone, right? There was so much before, during and after. And I think what that speaks to is a kind of dissent going on right now in a lot of these communities. I know a lot of parents who are dissatisfied with their son's educations, and so they figure out ways to tutor privately in English. But I think even though many parents are very proud of Shiva educations for boys, and I think there's a general acknowledgement that they should. Not general. I wouldn't speak for everybody, but that there's a feeling among many that it would be useful for boys to also learn English and math. And, you know, it's interesting, legally, just in terms of. By taking public funds, what do you owe the state? Where are your responsibilities as a school? And I think the kind of all those different dissenting voices tell us that there are big changes afoot in a lot of these communities, and there are their placement in the US Today and in New York State.
- [50:27]
C
Yeah, I think that's. I mean, that's my feeling, too, as not an expert, but that as someone who thinks about culture, I'm always, like, interested in the way in which big social changes, like, redound into what we. What we get culturally. And for a long time, those of us like, I'll speak for myself, but I think other Yiddishists have wanted this too. There has been a sense that we might get many more really interesting Yiddish writers when some of the communities that have been really teaching Yiddish and keeping Yiddish alive in a beautiful way have open opportunities for people to explore sort of like writing in different ways. And obviously, you cover some really interesting stuff in the book, too.
- [51:08]
A
Yeah, I mean, that's another affordance of digital media that I really didn't expect. When I first started, people were writing in the English Alphabet because they didn't have smartphones yet. But once they had smartphones with easy access to the Yiddish Alphabet, like, there is an efflorescence, like a real effluent, like a real flowering now, I feel like, of haredi Yiddish writers and new kinds of magazines and. And new kinds of readers. And I don't know that that's hap. That it's definitely not being taught in yeshivas. You know what I mean? And so that's something distinctive, But I think that's a kind of homegrown movement that's an exciting effect of digital media that no one could have predicted. A kind of, you know, language revival in some ways.
- [51:54]
C
Absolutely. There's one question here that actually I'm not sure is covered in the book, and I'm interested to hear you speak about, and I wonder what the. I have a guess at what the answer is. But someone asked, do you see something happening to people when they're children are grown? In other words, at a point in time when, you know, if the child rearing years are these, like this incredible pressure, maybe at some point that would change and lighten up. And I was curious if that's the case.
- [52:22]
A
Yeah, yeah, I do think that's the case. The people that I work with most in depth have not reached that point yet. But I do describe the first marriage that people who were living what they called lives as reverse moranos. So, you know, like moranos, but forced to be religious. That was. Everybody watched that wedding very closely because they wanted to see like what would happen, like would they make a good match despite everyone. The public secret of everybody knowing that, that maybe they were not as form as they should be. And the match was a good one. I did see that a lot of middle aged women refused to give up their smartphones, despite what rabbis said, whereas younger mothers who were concerned with having to make matches for their children were quicker to do that. You know, they felt like it was a responsibility to their children both in the present to be there and also, you know, for later. So I think the older people got, the more, especially for women, the more kind of independence they were able to negotiate. I will say that I was so fascinated to see how flexible ultra orthodoxy actually is. I mean, if you can maintain a public front, you can do a lot of what you want as long as it's not publicly rebellious. And I hadn't expected that either. I think I went in with my own preconceptions. But I think age and you know, some of the hidden heretics, as they got older, sometimes brought along, they called it flipping a spouse. And the whole family might slowly change. So that idea of leaving the community could happen over years, you know, where small changes were made so that families got used to it. And don't forget, this isn't just nuclear families. There's a very beautiful aspect to haredi life, which is the deep extended family ties that are maintained in everyday life. You know, you live next door to your mother and you know, your cousins down the street and you socialize with them. And so I think the effort to gradually change was another way to be true to your changing sense of self and also try to avoid hurting those you love.
- [54:38]
C
We are coming close to the end. So I think I'm going to ask one last question. That is the thing that, you know, one of the things that's my own personal interest, which is in the relationship of the ethnographic work you do and the way you study a community and the representations we get elsewhere, the sort of. What I think the best way to describe them is commercial representations, because whether they're memoirs or Netflix series or anything, someone is doing it for profit. And obviously some of those narratives have been very, very popular and very successful in the last few years. And I guess I'm just interested to hear you say, if you have particular favorites or works that you think really do a good job, but also what ethnography does and offers, that's important, that's complementary to and additional to what people can get in those kinds of venues.
- [55:34]
A
Yeah, I really appreciate that. I will say that my favorites are Stissel. And I really love Shulem Dean's book, too. All who Go Do Not Return, Another heartbreaker. What I really loved about Stissel is its subtlety and the way that it. I mean, I think one of the. The rise of popularity in some of these shows, like Unorthodox, and some of the documentaries, the audience, the intended audience is often secular Jews, right? It's people who are, you know, curious and want to gain insight, but also are sort of seeing their own way of life emphasized and valued. And so what Stissel and Shulem Dean's works both refuse to do is to allow us to kind of be voyeurs and not be implicated ourselves, you know. And Stissel is especially subtle, I think, in showing how somebody who doesn't think fit in, doesn't necessarily want to become secular. You know, I mean, who really. Who wants to express himself through art like many people do, and yet values his from life. And so that kind of tension I really appreciate, and I think that's a very important show to watch in terms of ethnography. I hope that the ethnographic gaze, in contrast to a memoir, is not necessarily more objective because it's obviously coming from my own positioning, right, as a mostly secular Jew, as a New Yorker, as somebody who spent her life studying the ultra orthodox for all kinds of reasons. But it's a different gaze. It's one that spends the time to get to know people and is less interested in just one story, but in how those stories all fit together to tell a bigger narrative about really social process and change in this case. And I do think that it has resonance to other kinds of social change. I mean, we were talking about being on your phone, and like, you know, I worry about being on my phone too much. And rabbis who complained about social media, they're right in some ways. It is changing who we are. And so there's a kind of both kinship and difference that I hope ethnography makes us feel where you see yourself and then you see yourself as different. And I think that's really valuable for cultivating empathy.
- [58:02]
C
Well, I want to thank you for doing that work and really for giving us, like, a gift of a book. I want to say to everyone else, everyone who's been listening again, everything you've heard here and so many of the questions that people wanted to ask and we didn't have a chance to get to are answered really beautifully, thoughtfully, in wonderful detail in this book. So I hope you'll all read it. And really, I just wish you the best in terms of, like, continuing this kind of research. So thank you so much for being in conversation with me.
- [58:28]
A
Oh, thank you so much, Joce. It was really a pleasure. Those were wonderful questions.
- [58:32]
B
Wonderful. Thank you both. And thank you, everyone, for joining us. We'll see you next time live at Yivo on the Internet.