Holy Cow: Religion, Race, and Milk in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

In the past 15 years, Lancaster County has increasingly become a thriving hub for Orthodox Jewish tourists seeking “kosher” leisure activities, including encounters with the Amish tourist industry. The expanding Orthodox Jewish tourist infrastructure has developed in tandem with an unexpected economic collaboration between some ultra-Orthodox Jews and local Amish and Mennonite farmers to produce unpasteurized kosher dairy products. Based on anthropological research with Orthodox Jewish tourists, dairy entrepreneurs, and local Amish/Mennonite farmers, Feldman and Fader show that kosher collaborations around milk, in particular, offer a lens to think through contemporary American racialized politics and minority religious identities in our
post-COVID-19 and post-Trump realities.

About the Speakers
Rachel Feldman is a cultural anthropologist and currently an assistant professor of religious studies/Judaic studies at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. Starting on July 1, she will be moving to Dartmouth College and will be joining the Department of Religion. Feldman is the author of Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary, a book that is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press and was recently awarded the Jordan Schnitzer first book prize by the AJS. She is also the co-editor of Settler-Indigeneity in the West Bank, a volume that will be available in July from McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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 (2009) and Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (2020). Fader’s research, supported by prestigious fellowships from the NSF and the NEH, appears in academic journals and more public venues. Fader is the co-founder of the Seminar on Jewish Orthodoxies at Fordham, is on the steering committee of the Haredi Research Group, and is a fellow at the American Academy for Jewish Research. As the director of Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology, Fader is currently collaborating on the Demystifying Language Project, which works to make linguistic anthropology a social justice resource for public high schools.

Co-sponsored by the Seminar on Jewish Orthodoxies and the Haredi Research Group.