Ayala Fader's Mitzvah Girls presents an original and insightful analysis of how, through the intersection of particular forms of dialogue and embodied practices, hasidic girls are socialized into their appropriate roles as women in their community. In the past two decades, books about haredim and hasidim have multiplied; shedding light on behavior in yeshivas and other institutions of socialization, the attraction of secular Jews to Orthodoxy, the all-encompassing role of the rebbe, and how members sometimes, directly or indirectly, subvert the strict rules even as they maintain and uphold their positions in the community. Fader's book stands out among all these fine studies for its focused attention on the centrality of embodied practices in creating and performing hasidic identities. By listening to the everyday interactions between adult women and girls, in schools, homes, and elsewhere, she learned about the nonliberal discourses—that countered those of secular culture—through which hasidim strive to create an alternative moral culture within what they regard as the corrupt and immoral worlds that surround them. Children are raised to sanctify their everyday lives and the material world through the constant performance of rituals through which they seek to be holy, as God is holy. The ongoing dialogues between teachers and students, adults and youth, and parents and children guide the young to form an embodied, gendered, ethical self. The religious practices built into nearly all moments of their lives are constant reminders that as hasidim they are obligated to embrace techniques of the body that continually create and maintain the separation of the genders, as well as the boundaries between hasidim and the rest of the world.

Hasidic ritual practices are scrupulously divided by gender; girls and boys are separated from a young age so they can learn the distinct speech patterns, modes of comportment, and bodily behaviors essential to God's plans for creating a holy kingdom on earth. Gender differences are essentialized and naturalized: Young people learn that females and males are born with the significantly different traits that enable them to occupy distinct social spaces in which they carry out their God-mandated roles. Men's primary responsibilities are intellectual; their path to holiness is through spending their lives in the study halls of yeshivas, immersed in the analysis and interpretation of holy texts. In contrast, women are expected to do any and all tasks that help their sons and husbands continue their Torah studies, including engaging with the outside world to earn money and support their families, socializing their children to embrace the emotional and physical practices that create and maintain gendered selves, and to dedicate themselves to follow God's commandments and build up the Jewish people. Although women clearly have authority within their homes and in training their children, they must do so within the bounds of tzniyut—modesty, the most personal trait of a hasidic woman. The rules for modesty are derived from a biblical text that roughly translates as “the glory of the king's daughter is inward.” This trait is learned not only by following the community's divinely inspired strict norms for how they dress, comport themselves, and speak, but through cultivating a particular attitude to religious and social propriety. Women's practices of modesty shape their demeanor and self-presentation in all aspects of their lives; establishing and enacting this all-inclusive mode of being distinguishes them not only from the men in their communities, but from all non-Jews as well. The gendered division of behavior and labor supports the flourishing of hasidic Judaism.

So far in this review I have highlighted what I find most innovative and refreshing in Fader's study, her analysis of the centrality of linguistic and bodily practices in creating distinctly gendered individuals, who, in turn, socialize their children to follow their ways and reproduce their way of life. Mitzvah Girls, however, goes far beyond this particular focus to present a rich ethnographic account of the multitude of ways, throughout their daily lives, that children are disciplined, and taught to discipline themselves, into submission to a social and divine hierarchy. Fader provides elaborate depictions of the processes through which children are taught to shape and subvert their own individuality so they can fit in with communal—and God's—expectations. In order to survive within the modern world, but not be of it, the community has developed an arsenal of techniques for enforcing conformity. When children disobey or question, don't fit in, or ask questions that are deemed culturally or religiously inappropriate, they are taught that if they do not follow the religious norms concerning limits to questioning authority, they and their families will face negative consequences. Fader shows us that the community patterns for handling disruptive questions and subduing displays of defiance all reinforce the fundamental idea that hierarchies of communal authority based on age, gender, and religious authority are part of God's plan. Children are taught that defiance and questioning of parents or teachers is tantamount to questioning God. Through these means, children learn to discipline themselves and channel their curiosity and individual will. Over time, as they internalize these norms, they themselves become actors in this religiously civilizing project. By doing so, they differentiate themselves from the Gentiles—whose behaviors are labeled animalistic by hasidic adults—and learn to see them as a frightening and ever-present reminder of how low people can sink when they do not fight against their inclination for evil and practice self-control.

Fader began this project as a way to understand the processes of socialization through which hasidic girls switch from speaking Yiddish to English as they grow up, and the meaning of this shift in language. She soon learned, however, that linguistic practices are embedded in, and inseparable from, all other aspects of hasidic life. An understanding of language patterns requires attention to all other aspects of hasidic religion and Fader is a careful and astute observer. The rich ethnographic material she presents derives from her attentive listening to interactions between girls and their mothers and other socializing agents in the various settings in which girls are taught to be women: the home, classroom, playgrounds, and friends' homes. She uses these observations to demonstrate how gendered linguistic patterns intersect with gendered techniques of the body to transmit and inscribe hasidic morality upon the bodies of the young. Her book pushes the boundaries of anthropological linguistics to reveal the complex interconnections between language, religion, and culture, which come into being, and are made visible, through members' routines of bodily practices.

Many books on religious socialization focus on the role of ideas in shaping religious beliefs and practices; Fader's book starts with the material reality of the body and illustrates how beliefs arise from concrete, particular techniques of the body. Let her work be a model for further ethnographic studies of the essential role of bodily practices in the production and reproduction of religious and other identities.