Page 92 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

themselves as a kiruv organization, ArtScroll devotes considerable energy to ad-
dressing, and thereby rescuing, lost Jews through the medium of liturgical texts,
rabbinic commentaries, and popular literature. To those extents, ArtScroll is a
notable example of a textually mediated kiruv strategy.

To Capture a Market: ArtScroll in the London
Jewish Community
The position ArtScroll commands within the market of English Judaica
literature is de¤ned by its success in catering to diverse constituencies of con-
10
sumers. These groups are distinguishable through their relation to different
genres within the ArtScroll corpus. For some, ArtScroll is known as a producer
of attractive and well-organized bilingual liturgical texts, most notably the Sid-
dur (daily prayer book) and Chumash (Pentateuch plus commentaries) (Scher-
man 1984, 1993). For others, ArtScroll is favored for its growing body of com-
mentaries and rabbinic works, starting with its ongoing project to translate the
entire Talmud. For others still, the press is associated with a range of ethical
works, novels, self-help books, children’s literature, histories, and biographies
and memoirs (mostly of key ¤gures within the history of Agudat Israel), all of
which are authorized by established haredi rabbinic elites as “Torah-true,” as
one can note from the frequent presence of haskamot (of¤cial letters of appro-
bation) in book prefaces, authenticating the texts in question and consecrating
them as works with which the devout are permitted to engage. But how suc-
cessful is ArtScroll in capturing, cultivating, and expanding these distinct mar-
ket niches? And to what extent does their exploitation translate into success for
the ArtScroll cadre in its larger mission of kiruv?
It is one thing to suggest that an author is able to craft texts within the con-
straints of speci¤c genres of writing, and at the same time win the loyalty of
consumers. It is quite another to propose that such accomplishments indicate
the assent of readers to the author’s address and its intentions. Because authors
and readers do not normally meet except through the medium of the market
and the local institutions that provide for the occasion to consume, notions of
authorial intent and reader response are only instructive when they attend to
the precariousness of negotiations over textual meaning and authority. This is
especially the case for modern Jewish public culture, where such negotiations
proceed outside the framework of power and privilege once enjoyed by the rab-
binic elites of “traditional” corporate society. The workings of this modern re-
gime of voluntarism are most clearly discerned at the local level, where ArtScroll
books make their appearance before consumers within speci¤c institutional set-
tings, and where consumers exercise their demand not simply in relation to au-
thors and their products but, more precisely, in the context of their ongoing
relationships with individual mediating ¤gures such as booksellers, librarians,
rabbis, synagogue administrators, or educational professionals, as well as fellow
consumers.

Communicating Authority, Consuming Tradition 81