Page 84 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

3 Communicating Authority,

Consuming Tradition: Jewish

Orthodox Outreach Literature

and Its Reading Public

Jeremy Stolow

What has happened to religious authority in the information age? In our current
communications geography of electronic ®ow, expanding participation, and de-
regulated markets it is becoming increasingly dif¤cult to locate the institutional
and symbolic boundaries demarcating not only the private and the public but
also the secular and the sacred dimensions of communities and nation-states.
For some, these shifts are responsible for the emergence of new classes of inter-
preters empowered to appropriate religious systems of signi¤cation to their own,
autonomous ends. From another vantage point, claims about the democratiza-
tion of religious communication, the display of popular self-determination, and
the exercise of “consumer sovereignty” are overshadowed by the image of reli-
gious elites entrenching their authority in new ways, as they extend their pres-
ence across the horizon set by advanced communications technologies and as
they draw new populations into their orbit. However, in order to determine
whether religious authority is waxing or waning, diversifying or centralizing,
we must ¤rst decide what are the signs of religious authority and how they are
made visible. How, we should ask, are these signs produced and reproduced,
put to use, naturalized or fought over within speci¤c locales and among par-
ticular social groups? And to what, exactly, does the term “religious authority”
refer in the context of the mediated channels of communication shaping our
present?
I pose these questions from the vantage point of my engagement with a cul-
tural ¤eld encompassing an English-language Judaica publishing house, Art-
Scroll Publications, its constellation of authors and editors, and some of its local
sites of textual consumption. Since the early 1980s ArtScroll has sprouted from
its roots in Brooklyn, New York, to become one of the leading Judaica publishers
in the English-speaking Jewish world—in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia,
South Africa, and the anglophone community in Israel. ArtScroll furnishes this
international market with a broad range of materials of interest to Jewish read-