Page 96 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

represent the category of “lost Jews” which has so preoccupied kiruv activists.
But their “return” to Jewish practice has not been carried out under the watchful
eye of haredi organizations like Agudat Israel. Theirs is an independently driven
project, underscored by their rabbi’s idiosyncratic conception of kiruv as the as-
sertion of Orthodox standards of observance, combined with the deployment
of a variety of aesthetic signi¤ers of youthfulness, cosmopolitanism, and civic
activism within the London Jewish community. Although this exercise is medi-
ated in part through the use of ArtScroll texts, it does not entail any speci¤c
ideological commitments to Agudat Israel, the movement to which the ArtScroll
cadre claims loyalty. Instead, ArtScroll serves as a vehicle for bringing this local
community into contact with the sources they seek to reclaim; the Siddur in
particular appears to function as a screen upon which members of the Saatchi
congregation can project their own representations of authentic Jewish practice
and meaning. Rabbi Dunner puts the issue this way:

For me, ArtScroll is an extremely valuable resource, whether or not I subscribe to
their ideology. I don’t know why people are so resistant to ArtScroll publications
just because they emerge from an agenda-driven source. Why should people care?
I think they [ArtScroll] have done an absolutely sterling job of opening up Jewish
texts and Judaism to a wide audience. People can read it, not agree with it, and not
have to worry about it. They take what they want to take. The publisher’s agenda
and the reader’s agenda don’t have to be the same. Readers aren’t unintelligent, so
let’s not insult them. 17

Rabbi Dunner’s caution is well taken. But selective use does not necessarily im-
ply a rejection of authority per se. Here we must guard against a naive popu-
lism that exaggerates the signi¤cance of the fact that “the masses” always en-
gage in processes of reinterpretation and creative reconstruction, extending the
meaning of the products they consume into ¤elds of semiotic productivity be-
yond the reach, let alone the original intentions, of the producer. It does not
follow, however, that such reconstructions are entirely without design or con-
straint. Nor is it the case that producers are denied the possibility of accruing
other sorts of dividends from the apparently uncoerced expressions of demand
by consumers: pro¤ts that may exceed the restricted economy of exchanging
money for books.
I suggest that the ArtScroll cadre succeeds in establishing a sort of hegemony
over its readership in at least two ways. The ¤rst is evident in the very incorpo-
ration of ArtScroll texts into the liturgy of constituencies of non-haredi Jews
such as members of the Saatchi congregation. Despite the proclamations of
nonaf¤liation with haredism, it is through their routine use that ArtScroll texts
are naturalized as reliable companions in the effort to recuperate authentic Jew-
ish meaning, thereby exposing local communities to the colonizing mission of
the ArtScroll cadre. ArtScroll liturgical works seem to enjoy this status because
they offer manifold instructions at a level of detail unrivaled by other prayer
books: how to inspect a tallis (prayer shawl) to determine its validity, the cor-
rect order of prayers to be recited while donning te¤llin (phylacteries), the cor-

Communicating Authority, Consuming Tradition 85