This ethnographic study by Ayala Fader, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University, won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Women’s Studies, as well as a New York City Book Award given by the New York Society Library.
Fader spent ten years studying how Hasidic girls in the Boro Park neighborhood of New York, mainly from the Bobov community, grow up, focusing on the everyday interactions of women and girls. In particular, she explored the girls’ use of language, which she sees as differing from that spoken by boys in the community. Girls combine Yiddish and English into what she terms “Hasidic English” (English transformed into a Jewish language), in contrast to the Hasidic Yiddish spoken by the boys. According to Fader, girls use Hasidic English so that they can “better” mediate the outside world, while the men are studying: in her terms, female engagement with the outside world “protects” the community’s men and boys. At the same time this engagement must be controlled so that the girls are not “contaminated” by the outside world. According to Fader, the Hasidic mothers liked to show her that “they were fluent in much of North American popular culture but rejected its values nonetheless.” Fader also explores how the women respond to girls who refuse to fit in or who ask what are considered inappropriate questions and challenge authority.
This book is a fascinating read. Its details help us understand the texture of female life in the Hasidic society she studied. The writer’s approach is scholarly and analytic, but respectful of the women whom she characterizes as “busy, active, strong, and most of all pious, certain that their way of life is the only one with any real meaning.” She beautifully describes her relation to her fieldwork as a nonobservant Jewish woman from New York, who also confesses “to harboring romantic notions about shared history and identity because her great-grandparents had been Orthodox.” Fader finds that for many of the women she was studying, her very choice of doctoral subject was God’s way of helping her return to her faith, and therefore served to legitimize their critique of the secular world.