Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic by Ayala Fader

Mitzvah Girls is the 1st ebook approximately citing Hasidic Jewish ladies in North the US, offering an in-depth inspect a closed group. Ayala Fader examines language, gender, and the physique from infancy to maturity, exhibiting how Hasidic ladies in Brooklyn develop into girls liable for rearing the following iteration of nonliberal Jewish believers. To discover how women research the practices of Hasidic Judaism, Fader appears to be like past the synagogue to daily speak within the context of houses, study rooms, and town streets.

Hasidic ladies complicate stereotypes of nonliberal spiritual girls via collapsing differences among the spiritual and the secular. during this leading edge ebook, Fader demonstrates that modern Hasidic femininity calls for girls and women to have interaction with the secular global round them, preserving Hasidic males and boys who learn the Torah. while Hasidic spiritual observance has turn into extra stringent, Hasidic women have suddenly turn into extra fluent in secular modernity. they're fluent Yiddish audio system yet swap to English as they get older; they're more and more modest but additionally trendy; they learn fiction and play video games like these of mainstream American young ones yet theirs have Orthodox Jewish messages; and so they attend deepest Hasidic faculties that freely adapt from North American public and parochial versions. Investigating how Hasidic girls and women conceptualize the non secular, the secular, and the trendy, Mitzvah Girls deals fascinating new insights into cultural creation and alter in nonliberal spiritual communities.