Event
Women Wellness Influencers and Illiberal Religions
Healing Women in Jewish History
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. 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.
Featured Speaker
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.