Members, Im Tirtzu
A smoldering resentment, bordering on political paranoia, is palpable in sectors of Israel's Left these days. Everywhere, it seems, powerful enemies are conspiring to undermine the centers of cultural influence that leftists have long regarded as their own property, and as beyond criticism. Their response bears a resemblance to the left-wing American affliction that the columnist Charles Krauthammer memorably labeled "Bush Derangement Syndrome."
What qualifies a literary work as "Jewish"? Debates on this subject, once conducted with rigor, have become sillier over the years, descending to the recent call for inducting the African American writer Walter Mosley—whose mother was Jewish, and in whose detective novels the heroes are all black men—into the Jewish literary pantheon.
The annual meeting of the board of governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem takes place this week in Israel's capital. Not unlike the state that it preceded into existence, the university, opened 85 years ago on Mount Scopus in northeast Jerusalem, is in the throes of crisis.
Since its creation in 1976, the Orthodox publishing empire known as ArtScroll has brought out hundreds of titles: English translations of classic texts like the Bible, the siddur (prayer book), the Talmud, and others as well as self-help books, histories, biographies, fiction, and even cookbooks. All are marked by traditional scholarship, decent English, handsome and often innovative typography and graphics—and an unabashedly ultra-Orthodox (haredi) viewpoint. Advertised and marketed with acumen and zeal, ArtScroll has swept the English-speaking Orthodox world and made surprising inroads among non-Orthodox readers as well.
A newly published study, Orthodox by Design, provides the first scholarly investigation of the ArtScroll phenomenon and what it has to tell us about contemporary Judaism. According to the author, Jeremy Stolow, ArtScroll's success lies in its distinctive mix of authority, perceived authenticity, and accessibility. This is achieved not only through the volumes' content but through their user-friendly "design," in both the verbal and the visual sense. By making accessible to a wider public what are usually closed books, notably the siddur and, even more so, the Talmud, ArtsScroll has lowered the formidable barriers, social and linguistic, to identification with ultra-Orthodox Judaism; analogously, its biographies, histories, and self-help books have succeeded in reworking popular contemporary genres to fit ultra-Orthodox principles.
In keeping with its editors' views, ArtScroll simply ignores the existence of other versions of Orthodoxy, let alone of other religious denominations or of Zionism. Its history and biography series, which Stolow barely mentions, not only sanitizes the rabbinic past (often to the point of vapidity) but explicitly rewrites and censors the words of even unimpeachable authorities whose writings are out of step with contemporary haredi ideology.
Yet that ideology itself is far suppler than is often imagined. As Stolow argues, the very success of ArtScroll demonstrates that ultra-Orthodoxy, far from being an enclave subculture fighting a doomed, rearguard action against modernity, is a coherent worldview with the ability not only to absorb contemporary techniques of aesthetics, marketing, and production but, by means of these techniques, to offer religiously meaningful experiences to people living well outside the ambit of haredi life.
ArtScroll's success is of a piece with traditional Judaism's so-called "swing to the right" of recent years, and the corresponding decline in the authority and organizational power of the more avowedly modern Orthodox. Perhaps the most intriguing analysis of this development is that of the historian Haym Soloveitchik, who in a now-classic 1994 essay argued that modernity's fierce ruptures blasted away most of traditional society's amalgam of study, belief, folkways, and communal intimacy. Amid the ruins, the texts remained, yielding a formalist religion firmly in the sway of authoritarian talmudists whose stringencies offer a haven from the relentless instability of contemporary life.
The example of ArtScroll rings interesting changes on this idea. Yes, contemporary Orthodoxy is markedly book-centered; but a book is more than just the sum of its words. Presentation and style, physical heft and presence, the ways in which books are bought, displayed, chanted, or read, are all very much a part of the life and power of texts, sacred texts above all. Even, or precisely, in this disembodied digital age, the printed book still projects a distinctive aura and wields a distinctive influence.
Jack Wertheimer
Third in a series on people and places fostering commitment to Judaism and the Jewish people.
It's not easy for a teacher to communicate in an entirely foreign language, especially to pre-schoolers. But that is what happens in an extraordinary experiment in Hebrew-language immersion launched seven years ago at the Jacob Pressman Academy, a Conservative day school in Los Angeles. Children entering the school between the ages of two and five have the option of spending half their day in classrooms where only Hebrew is spoken.
Jack Wertheimer
One class is analyzing a talmudic debate after having read it in the original Aramaic; in a neighboring room, students are conversing entirely in Hebrew; in a third, an "Ethicist" column from the New York Times is being examined in light of rabbinic sources; in still another, young men and women are working their way through a biblical text.
Jack Wertheimer
As if from a fantastical time machine, some 300 youngsters disembark in the woods of western Pennsylvania to find themselves at the building site of King Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. In a quick briefing they are introduced to the biblical passages describing the construction project, invited to imagine the challenges confronting the ancient builders—how to move and hoist heavy loads of quarried stone, how to shape metal into giant candelabra—and then immediately drafted into the mammoth task. Only when their labors are complete, two and a half hours later, do they begin the mundane assignment of meeting their counselors and locating their bunks.
Jack Wertheimer
As if from a fantastical time machine, some 300 youngsters disembark in the woods of western Pennsylvania to find themselves at the building site of King Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. In a quick briefing they are introduced to the biblical passages describing the construction project, invited to imagine the challenges confronting the ancient builders—how to move and hoist heavy loads of quarried stone, how to shape metal into giant candelabra—and then immediately drafted into the mammoth task. Only when their labors are complete, two and a half hours later, do they begin the mundane assignment of meeting their counselors and locating their bunks.
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