Top reviews from the United States

• 

  Danny

  5 out of 5 stars

  Book is book

  Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2026

  Format: Paperback

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  Book is book

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  Kindle Customer

  5 out of 5 stars

  Fascinating book with wide-ranging implications

  Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2022

  Format: Kindle

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  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.

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  Elizabeth M. Cousins

  5 out of 5 stars

  Excellent book

  Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2024

  Format: Hardcover

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  "Hidden Heretics" provides a fascinating insight into the lives of Hasidic men and women grappling with their faith.

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  Mike in NM

  5 out of 5 stars

  Fascinating!

  Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2020

  Format: Kindle

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  This was a fascinating study of a very timely subject. The amount of research was amazing, resulting in an in depth report of how the internet has influenced religious beliefs held for many years. I highly recommend this book.

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  4 people found this helpful

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• 

  Michael Lewyn

  5 out of 5 stars

  raises some interesting issues

  Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2021

  Format: Hardcover

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  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.

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  2 people found this helpful

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  charlotte koren

  3 out of 5 stars

  Interesting facts

  Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2025

  Format: Paperback

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  The book is interesting, but not well-written.

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  Amazonian

  3 out of 5 stars

  The question I wish would be asked.

  Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2020

  Format: Hardcover

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  The one question not asked is of the doubting Jew is why are they taking the risk of breaking the laws of the Torah if indeed they still are unsure of its truthfulness? Would someone eat food that had a 3% chance of being poisoned? I don't think so, so why would you risk eating non kosher as long as there's a chance the Torah is divine?. As long as a Jew has some level of doubt in their mind about the divine origin of the Torah it makes no rational sense to break her laws.

  The answer is that because we don't see any immediate negative consequence when we sin, we imagine that there's no chance it will happen. Joining online anonymous blogs of similar-minded doubters further reinforces the fantasy that there's no risk to doing a prohibition despite the chance of facing retribution. Many of these Jews would still be fully observant (though with doubts) if they hadn't chanced upon these online blogs where the culture of derision tugged them away.

  I asked this question to a proud & emphatic OTD woman & the response was profound silence! They all have some doubt in their minds that Jewish tradition may be true but still act as though it was clear that it's all a myth. This is mind boggling!

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  8 people found this helpful

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  Ben Rothke

  4 out of 5 stars

  Groundbreaking work: delves into the parts of the Orthodox world many don't know exists

  Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2020

  Format: Kindle

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  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.

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