[3] Upon finishing high school, Hayes returned to the United States to study at Harvard University and received her B.A.

After two years of working in the non-profit sector, Hayes returned to academia in 1986, pursuing a doctorate in Classical (biblical and rabbinic) Judaism through the Department of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley.

In 1993, Hayes was appointed assistant professor of Hebrew studies in the department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at Princeton University.

[7] In addition to publishing numerous books and publications, Hayes has also dedicated time to institutions supporting Jewish Studies research and scholarship.

Hayes' scholarship addresses a wide range of historical, literary, legal, and philosophical topics in biblical and rabbinic literature.

Her second book, Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud, is a work of cultural history.

It examines the diverse ways in which biblical, Second Temple, and rabbinic sources employ purity language to construct Jewish identity and to inscribe and police community boundaries with varying degrees of porousness.

Hayes argues that a third path was taken by the Talmudic rabbis, whose unique and surprising construction of divine law—as dynamic, mutable, and not necessarily rational or allied with a monistic "truth"—resisted the Hellenistic and Pauline conceptions that would come to dominate the Christianized west.