Page 86 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

as their books circulate beyond their reach and are put to diverse uses in local
contexts?
To answer these questions it is necessary to situate ArtScroll’s position in a
larger ¤eld of cultural production encompassing a range of competing presses
and institutions, merchants and customers, and local brokers. A study of this
¤eld shows that the ArtScroll authors address non-haredi readers without re-
course to any of the mechanisms of coercion that sustain the haredi society in
which they themselves are located (and to which they are beholden), such as
courts of religious law or the disciplining presence of haredi rabbinic elites as
neighbors, teachers, or counselors. Instead, these haredi authors are obliged to
compete with various contenders for the loyalty and attention of Jewish con-
stituencies, representing the distinct strands of institutionalized Jewish expres-
sion, from “modern” Orthodoxy to the Masorti (Conservative) movement, Re-
form, Reconstructionism, secular Zionism, and so on. This competition over
access to audiences, and the authority to represent their needs and desires, is
most palpably registered in the local contexts where ArtScroll books make an
appearance—such as bookstores, synagogues, schools, and libraries—and where
the activity of textual consumption is managed by intermediary ¤gures—
booksellers, rabbis, teachers, and librarians—who often do not represent Agudat
Israel and who do not necessarily subscribe to its haredi ideology; some, in fact,
are quite hostile to it. Lastly, it is evident that within this ¤eld the authority of
the ArtScroll cadre is attenuated by its very reliance upon the principles of com-
modity exchange. By addressing non-haredi Jews through the medium of the
market, they must accept its constraints of competition and ¤nancial viability,
which among other things grant to consumers/readers a certain degree of sov-
ereignty over the terms of reception and use of ArtScroll texts.
Nevertheless, ArtScroll’s success as a producer of popular Judaica literature
represents a signi¤cant incursion into the non-haredi Jewish imaginary. This can
be inferred from the practices of consumers, readers, and users who incorporate
ArtScroll’s print commodities into the habitus of their everyday lives, such as
in their performance of liturgical practices or kosher observance. Through the
seemingly uncoerced activity of consumption, readers and users succeed in
naturalizing ArtScroll texts, among other things, as sources of reliable informa-
tion and aesthetic pleasure, and as repositories of Jewish tradition. This process
of naturalization offers the ArtScroll cadre the opportunity to forge a path, as
it were, beneath the surface of Jewish society, and beneath the gaze of many of
its more “of¤cial” local authority ¤gures. At an even deeper level, ArtScroll’s
achievements in the market are coextensive with their success in having en-
shrouded their texts in an aura of “authenticity”—even from the vantage point
of those who appear to have little interest in embracing it. To the extent that
they are anchored by the authority of haredi scholarship and its mechanisms of
consecration, ArtScroll books invoke the presence of haredism as the sole legiti-
mate expression of Jewish tradition, promulgated by those who have taken the
hard road of noncompromise with modernity. And by ceding this ground of

Communicating Authority, Consuming Tradition 75