The 36th Annual David W. Belin Lecture will be delivered by Professor Ayala Fader on Thursday, March 26, 2026. Food will be served at the pre-lecture reception, and Fader will sign books after the lecture. All are invited to join the Frankel Center for our most popular community event of the year!

Ayala Fader is a professor of anthropology at Fordham University. She is the author of the award-winning books, "Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn" (Princeton University Press, 2009) and "Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age" (Princeton University Press, 2020). Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Fader’s current book project examines the trend of American Orthodox Jews aligning themselves with a new form of religion on the Christian Right—a public, political, racialized, and biblical philosophy, redefining postwar Judeo-Christianity in the contemporary political landscape. As the founding director of Fordham’s Center for Public Anthropology, Fader is currently collaborating on the Demystifying Language Project, which makes linguistic anthropology a social justice resource for public high schools.

Stay tuned for more information!


About The Belin Lecture

Since 1991, the Frankel Center has hosted an accomplished speaker to present the David W. Belin lecture in American Jewish Affairs. Following the annual lecture, each speaker provides a text version of their talk. This essay is then published in print format and is made available online. To request a specific year’s lecture book, please email JudaicStudies@umich.edu.