Page 91 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

ern media, it is possible to trace a fairly long history of Orthodox involve-
ment in its institutions and technologies. Throughout the nineteenth century
an expanding market for print commodities presented Orthodox intellectuals
with new opportunities, and new obligations, to rescue “traditional” Judaism
from the obloquy heaped upon it by its detractors, and to communicate with
followers spread across the transnational landscape of Jewish society. By the
early twentieth century Orthodox Jews had become routine producers of daily
presses aimed at large sectors of the Jewish population in Central and East Eu-
rope. And by the post–World War II period such involvements in the daily press,
periodical publications, and other forms of popular literature had increased ex-
ponentially, especially in Israel and the United States, the two most important
sites of production for Orthodox literature. This growth in production deline-
ates the contours of an expanding haredi reading public able to express demand
not just for canonical texts but also for newspapers, journals, and popular lit-
erature.
But as I have also suggested, these expanding circuits of textually mediated
communication cannot be understood without reference to the dissolution of
the kehila and its customary mechanisms for regulating routine practices and
enforcing Jewish law. For post-Emancipation rabbinic elites, therefore, mass
communication technologies delineated a new horizon for the exercise of au-
thority, according to which “success” increasingly becomes equated with one’s
ability to reach out to others and to win their assent. In more recent years, and
especially over the past three decades, this principle has been deeply entrenched
within haredi circles and expressed as a growing concern to proselytize to Jews
who are “not yet” haredim, known in Orthodox parlance as tinookot shenishbu
(“children raised in [gentile] captivity”). This preoccupation consists of bring-
ing into the haredi fold nonaf¤liated or marginally af¤liated Jews by inducing
them to become ba’alei teshuva (“masters of return or repentance”), that is, Jews
who will voluntarily af¤liate with the haredi community, its prescriptions, its
discourses, and its cultural practices.
The urge to rescue lost Jews has been institutionalized through sustained
efforts at recruitment or outreach or, to use the haredi term, kiruv r’hokim
(“bringing closer those who are far away”). This kiruv movement consists of
a loose articulation of activists and institutions, encompassing an extensive
international network of yeshivot (religious academies) catering speci¤cally to
ba’alei teshuva (most notably, Aish HaTorah and Ohr Somayach, which both
run schools in Israel and in many countries in the diaspora), as well as out-
reach organizations such as the Central Forum for Worldwide Jewish Outreach,
the Association of Jewish Outreach Professionals, or the National Jewish Out-
9
reach Program. Within this framework, kiruv activists orchestrate a variety
of encounters with non-haredi Jews through such diverse offerings as Hebrew
lessons, public lectures, invitations to Shabbat dinners in haredi homes, crash
courses in Jewish history, or revival meetings in sports arenas. Unsurprisingly
kiruv efforts have also been manifested through such channels as radio, audio-
cassettes, the Internet, and print matter. Although they do not explicitly de¤ne

80 Jeremy Stolow