Their goal was to emphasize the dangers associated with the unrestricted Web, especially pornography and gender mixing. Rabbinic leaders discussed the internet’s encroachment on ultra-Orthodox Jewish values in an age they dubbed “a crisis of emune (faith).”

Nearly five years later, Ayala Fader, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology, sees this challenge in the ultra-Orthodox community as a critical moment of cultural and religious change. She said the internet has amplified existing tensions among the ultra-Orthodox. There is a sense that more and more ultra-Orthodox Jews are leaving their communities or losing faith, but continuing to practice publicly— living what they call “double lives.”

As a result, Fader said, the internet has become a nexus for these concerns, with leadership trying to control its use and those living double lives using it as a lifeline to connect with other religious doubters.

“I don’t know if so many more people are leaving than a decade earlier or if they’re just louder, more public, and more well-organized, but I think there’s a sense in the communities that this is a moment when they need to start thinking about how they’re going to move into the 21st century,” said Fader, author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Fader has been awarded a $50,400 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her forthcoming book, Double Life: Faith, Doubt and the internet, which examines the community’s contemporary struggle to define authentic ultra-Orthodoxy.

“I was thrilled to be awarded the fellowship. It will give me sustained time to just focus on writing the book,” said Fader, who has been conducting research on this topic since 2013.

Fader first began the project by connecting with ultra-Orthodox Jews who had, during the mid-2000s, been active on the J-blogosphere, a Jewish blogging community. After interviewing members of various forums and Jewish blogging sites, she learned that the internet gave ultra-Orthodox Jews living double lives an opportunity to explore secular knowledge and activities, like going out together, and learning to bicycle and ski. It also provided a space where they could anonymously critique their communities and their rabbinic leadership.

“There are a lot of reasons that led people to lose faith in the kind of ultra-Orthodoxy they were living,” said Fader, who noted that the community had adapted to other types of technologies in the past—from newspapers and radio to television and books—without as much difficulty. “The internet is problematic because people need to use it for business. You can’t throw out the internet and you can’t keep it out. It’s also easily accessed, privately.”

Watch Ayala Fader discuss the ultra-Orthodox community’s response to “kosher” cellphones. 

To better influence their constituency to resist the lure of the internet, many rabbinic leaders are working closely with ultra-Orthodox schools.

“If you don’t agree to sign a contract when your children begin school [pledging]that you won’t have the internet at home, [and]that you won’t have a smartphone, then your kids can be denied access to school,” said Fader. “There are people who have left their communities—not because they didn’t have access to smartphones but because they didn’t feel they could continue to live these kinds of double lives.”

In recent years, there have been a few compromises allowing for some use. In 2013, the cell phone company Rami Levy Communications began selling “kosher smartphones” or rabbi-approved mobile phones that filter and block content considered immoral. Samsung, one of the world’s largest tech companies, debuted its first kosher smartphone specifically for ultra-Orthodox users last year.

Yet, despite efforts to permit some access to the Web, there is still a push to position smartphones as dangerous or contaminating objects, said Fader.

“There is a movement to not carry smartphones out in public, and an effort by educators in particular to create a sense of shame in having them,” said Fader.

She said the constant tug of war between the internet and religion isn’t limited to the ultra-Orthodox faith. It exists in many insular religious communities around the world.

“For religious communities that attempt to control their members’ access to the wider world, the internet is both an incredible tool and a dangerous piece of technology,” she said.

Magda Teter, PhD, the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies, mounted the exhibition, her second this year, with Fordham Libraries in the O’Hare Special Collections Library at the Rose Hill campus.

In the exhibition, however, she said the sacred is counterbalanced by the profane, as it captures both the meaning the holidays have had for Jews and Christians, and displays their painful convergence through several items that depict nearly 600 years’ worth of anti-Jewish imagery.

Teter said that she didn’t want to gloss over the reality of the violence and hatred that Christians subjected Jews to during Easter and Passover festivals. Some of the materials in the show served as propaganda to stoke hatred of the Jews.

Some of the images are disturbing.

There are several depictions of a child being bled by Jews. A frequent anti-Semitic accusation against Jews was that they murdered Christians for their blood and used it in Passover rituals, an accusation known as the blood libel. Some of the images were inspired by the cult of Simon of Trent, a boy whose disappearance around Easter in 1475 was blamed on the Jews of this northern Italian town. Many Catholics venerated Simon, until in the aftermath of the Church’s Vatican II the cult of the boy was abolished.

Among the items on display are:

• engravings from two editions of the famous 15^th century world chronicle that portray the bleeding of a child, with images of Jews as grotesque characters
• the Easter issue of an Italian magazine, La difesa della razza (The Defense of Race), from 1940 that once again return to the theme of blood libel;
• German currency from 1922 that celebrates burning Jews;
• an 1884 parody of the Haggadah by German artist Carl Maria Seyppel.

Teter noted that Fordham is an appropriate setting for the exhibition, as the Jesuits are not known for shying away from difficult issues.

What is disturbing is balanced by beauty, however, as precious facsimiles of the famous 14th-century Barcelona Haggadah, the Gradual of Gisela, and the magnificent 13th-century Biblia de San Luis are also on display. All are gifts of longtime library patron James Leach, MD. The books use contemporary color printing methods to achieve exacting color replications. The gold leaf, however, is applied by hand and can be found throughout both texts.

Although not an alumnus, Dr. Leach has developed a relationship with Fordham based on his love for the Church and for lifelong knowledge, he said. He remembers the first time he heard Mass in Latin at Holy Trinity Church in Passaic, New Jersey. From there his interest in medieval texts and manuscripts grew, he said.

“I think people say you see God in church architecture, and in the stained glass, but God is also in the illuminations alongside the printed word,” he said.

The aesthetic and intellectual intensity of the exhibit’s three main showcases are complemented with a display of ephemera as well. Some ephemera alongside the back wall of the special collections gallery includes Haggadot in many languages, including in Arabic and Amharic. There are also a few printed as commercial promotions for Streit’s Matzos and Maxwell House Coffee—which are ubiquitous to American Jewish households, said Teter, and which often became household keepsakes.

Father Ryan and Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, will team-teach a new course this spring that aims to create a literal as well as scholarly conversation between Judaism and Christianity.

The course, “Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” will examine the historical contexts of the two faiths to uncover areas of overlap and sources of difference.

“This course is good for Fordham students because it will help them reflect on the links that bind Jews and Christians in one of the major urban centers in the United States, where so many Jews and Christians live and work together,” Father Ryan said.

The course stands as part of Father Ryan’s larger mission to develop what he calls a “trialogue” among the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Father Ryan was appointed the McGinley Professor in 2009 after serving as Fordham’s vice president for University Mission and Ministry since 2005. For nearly half of his life as a priest, he held academic and administrative positions in Nigeria and Ghana.

Rabbi Polish is the spiritual leader of Congregation Shir Chadash of the Hudson Valley in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. An eminent scholar in interreligious affairs, Rabbi Polish has published widely in the field and served as director of education for Inter-Met, an interfaith seminary in Washington D.C.

— Joanna Klimaski