Page 95 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

And the stuff for young couples—the relationship books—that’s amazingly banal.
It’s obviously written mainly for yeshiva bochurim [religious students], who don’t
know anything about girls. That comes through very clearly. 14
A partial opinion, no doubt. But one must not underestimate the in®uence li-
brarians, booksellers, rabbis, and other intermediaries enjoy over “common”
readers. Through policies of acquisition and distribution, whether formal or in-
formal, they consecrate texts and legitimate their use. This is indicative of the
dif¤culty the ArtScroll cadre faces when trying to speak directly to its target
audience, over the heads of local intermediary ¤gures. 15
In sum, although ArtScroll claims to be engaged in a process of reaching be-
yond the haredi community, addressing and thereby reclaiming a universal class
of Jews in search of authentic meaning, in practice the press succeeds only in
colonizing particular segments of the Jewish reading public, and wins a foot-
hold only within the local institutions that are receptive to the speci¤c advan-
tages which ownership of ArtScroll texts appears to entail.

Commodity Exchange and the Rhetoric of Authenticity

ArtScroll’s precarious in®uence among locally situated communities of
readers and users is aptly illustrated in the case of London’s Saatchi Synagogue,
an Independent Orthodox congregation founded in 1998 by the advertising mo-
16
guls Charles and Maurice Saatchi. Nicknamed “coolshul” and inaugurated
with a controversial campaign vowing to “ban boring services,” the Saatchi
Synagogue has de¤ned itself as “London’s leading venue for everything Jewish
for 25–45-year-olds,” “the missing generation.” Its rabbi, Pini Dunner, a yeshiva
graduate and former radio DJ, “London’s funkiest young rabbi,” has branded
the synagogue as “a young, hip place to be.” It incorporates, in one institu-
tion, an Orthodox service using hasidic niggunim (melodies), suppers and so-
cial evenings, an introduction service (which has led, apparently, to more than
four hundred marriages in less than three years), and a very popular public lec-
ture series featuring leading ¤gures in the Jewish world, as well as other politi-
cians and celebrities. In the course of its short life, the Saatchi Synagogue has
generated a considerable response, boasting a committed membership of more
than two hundred, a mailing list of three thousand, and roughly ten thousand
attendees of events per year. There are two collections of Siddurim at “cool-
shul”: ArtScroll’s basic bilingual Siddur and their new bilingual edition with an
added transliteration of the Hebrew text, designed speci¤cally for those without
suf¤cient knowledge to recite from the Hebrew script.
What are we to make of the presence of ArtScroll texts in this local commu-
nity? To answer this question, we must understand that the Saatchi congrega-
tion is engaged in a process of claiming for itself a class- and cohort-speci¤c
Jewish identity. This is an institutional haven for the current generation of
young professionals in the London area, who either have disaf¤liated from the
Jewish attachments of their parents or who grew up in unaf¤liated homes. They

84 Jeremy Stolow