Page 89 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

whether near or distant, of a new life in the form of new ideas, new political
formations, new commodities, and new relationships with the institutions and
technologies of mediated communication. It is only against this broad transna-
tional backdrop of the modern Jewish imaginary that we can discern the signi¤-
cance of the major events that recon¤gured Jewish society over the course of
the twentieth century, most notably the waves of trans- and intercontinental
migration from Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, and the founding of the modern
Israeli state.
These cataclysmic events decisively rede¤ned the conditions of possibility
for participation in public communication across the Jewish transnation. The
adoption of Hebrew as Israel’s of¤cial language of state, national literature, sci-
ence, diplomacy, law, and commerce not only materialized the vision of an
autochthonous Jewish culture as promulgated by earlier generations of Zionist
intellectuals; it also effected a radical displacement of the diglossic hierarchy
between uniquely Jewish vernaculars and the traditional language of sacred
and scholarly discourse, leshon ha-kodesh. The centripetal force of a newly in-
digenized, Hebrew-speaking public sphere was further entrenched by the de-
cline of other Jewish vernaculars, such as Yiddish, especially in the wake of the
destruction of European Jewish communities in the Holocaust. The rising cul-
tural force of Hebrew is aptly illustrated in the case of Jews who emigrated from
Eastern Europe to the English-speaking world, and who in successive genera-
7
tions embraced English as their new vernacular. For in order to retain their
right of access to public Jewish life, English-speaking Jews have been obliged
to acknowledge Hebrew both as the Israeli language-of-state and as the time-
honored idiom of scholarly discourse and religious ritual (even if, for many, this
recognition does not amount to much more than a symbolic mark of their
membership in the Jewish imaginary).
It is within the context of these shifts in Jewish languages and hierarchies
of cultural literacy that one can best understand the ®ourishing of English-
language Judaica presses in the twentieth century. Most readily familiar to broad
sectors of this reading public, no doubt, are the “mainstream” Jewish presses
dominated by a Reform- and Conservative-af¤liated intellectual elite. But we
must also include here haredi publishers such as ArtScroll. This ¤eld is consti-
tuted through social structures of address commensurate with a reading public
that is simultaneously transnational and parochial, diglossic and monolingual.
It partakes of a global—and in many respects Israeli-centric—Jewish imaginary,
but at the same time it is restricted to the geographic spread of English (and for
much periodical publishing, further restricted to speci¤c regional contexts). It
is oriented to Hebrew, but principally as a mark of Jewish identity or as a basis
for participation in liturgy and ritual practice, and much less as a means of ac-
cess to works of scholarship, literature, news, or debate. For beneath the diglos-
sic surface of this public one ¤nds a predominantly monolingual readership, as
can be surmised from the high demand for Hebrew texts translated into English,
or for texts that assist the reader’s encounter with the Hebrew original by pro-

78 Jeremy Stolow