Page 90 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

viding an accompanying English translation, as is the case with much of the
ArtScroll corpus.

Reaching the People: The Haredi Rescue Operation
If the dispersal of the traditional Jewish corporation and the rise of
modern technologies of rapid communication were able to make visible new
imagined communities, they also rede¤ned the means of legitimating authority
and securing popular support within Jewish society at large. This certainly ap-
plies to the case of Agudat Israel, a movement that presents itself as a direct
legatee of God’s covenant at Sinai, and as the bearer of authentic Jewish prac-
tice, materialized in standards of observance proposed by the organization’s su-
preme governing body, the Moetzet Gedolei ha-Torah (Council of Torah Sages).
Nevertheless, it is striking how little this movement shares with the rabbinic
elite of the “traditional” kehila, which the Agudah claims simply to have re-
stored. Instead, like all modern Jewish institutions, Agudat Israel encompasses
a range of voluntary associations and cultural practices unique to the post-
Emancipation period and, more speci¤cally, that were formed as consequences
of the Holocaust and the destruction of European Jewish society (see Stolow
2004).
Although one can trace the intellectual roots of Jewish Orthodoxy back to
the nineteenth century (if not further), haredism really came to prominence in
the post–World War II context, which, I have suggested, is de¤ned by the emer-
gence of the new geography of Jewish diaspora inclined toward the English-
speaking world, and a secular state organized both ideologically and institution-
ally as a “Jewish homeland,” and heralded as a reversal of the centuries-old
condition of exile. Among other things, this new transnational space afforded
haredim opportunities to form organizational structures to which degree of af-
¤liation would be determined by individuals, and for which distinct rules and
directives could be formulated that would be binding upon those committed
8
members alone. On this basis, cadres of haredi intellectuals, including those
associated with Agudat Israel, have sought to reconstitute Jewish knowledge,
practice, and belief, as exempli¤ed by their innovation of “unchallengeable” ex
cathedra pronouncements within the realm of halakhic (Jewish-legal) decision
making. Thus have the haredim secured a formidable presence in the post–
World War II Jewish scene, as registered in their scholarship, and also their in-
tensive involvements in Jewish education and welfare provision, kosher certi¤-
cation, and electoral politics, both within and outside Israel.
Such in®uence can also be measured by the growing participation of haredi
intellectuals and cultural workers in institutions and practices of mass-mediated
communication. In this respect, one must acknowledge the distance of contem-
porary haredi elites from their “traditional” forebears, whose attitude toward
mechanical reproducibility was one of guarded suspicion. Of course, despite
the repeated complaints registered by rabbinic elites about the dangers of mod-

Communicating Authority, Consuming Tradition 79