Page 97 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

rect b’racha (blessing) to recite while building a protective railing around one’s
roof or upon seeing a rainbow, when to bow to the right and when to the left
while reciting the Kaddish (mourner’s prayer), and so on. Such minutiae help
to secure the hegemony of ArtScroll books as “better products.” Among groups
of non-haredim in the London community, such as congregants at Saatchi, the
Siddur in particular has won favor as a text which, in their words, is “better
organized,” “more readable,” “well indexed,” “extremely well presented,” “more
complete,” “more easy to use”; it offers “better commentaries,” “clear instruc-
tions”; “it gives you all the choreography”; in short, it is “up-to-date,” “mod-
ern”; “I wouldn’t leave home without it.”
We might conclude from these paeans that the ArtScroll cadre consolidates
its grip on fellow Jews not by ¤at or through polemical victories but rather
through a molecular transformation of standards of observance, materialized
in the extensive codi¤cation of practice and in the plethora of detail concerning
its execution. Of course, this is a far cry from the sort of legitimate authority
sought by the ArtScroll cadre; there is no doubt something deeply unsettling
about being forced to obey the laws of commodity exchange, in competition
with a spectrum of intellectual producers seeking the attention and loyalty of
consumers. Nevertheless, even though local communities are not directly sub-
ject to the disciplining presence of haredi authorities, their appropriation of
haredi texts sets the stage for an assimilation of a different kind of authority,
one that is displaced onto codes of conduct and images of tradition, anchored
in the “accessible” prose of their texts. The pleasure evinced by users of Art-
Scroll is thus directly related not only to the handsome format of the texts but
also to their ¤delity as vehicles for coming into the presence of the divine, a
certainty secured by the scholarly prestige and communicative competence of
the ArtScroll cadre.
This mediated presence of haredi authority in the form of ArtScroll books
points to a second sort of hegemony, one that extends beyond questions of how
successfully the ArtScroll cadre manages to shape the everyday practices of spe-
ci¤c local communities through the codi¤cation of ritual or the dissemination
of haredi standards of observance. Hegemony can also be secured by orches-
trating the desire for authenticity and shaping the means of its attainment. Be-
cause modern Jewish public culture de¤nes the search for Jewish meaning in no
small measure through the consumption of what are taken to be the “most re-
liable” signs of Jewishness and Jewish tradition, consumerism becomes a ter-
rain for the strategic mobilization of haredi authority, now transmuted into a
bid for a monopoly in the economy of the authentic. Accordingly, through their
textual products, haredi authorities are able to present themselves as metonyms
of an authentic Jewish life, which is said to have existed before the destruc-
tion of traditional society, and which, they propose, can only be recaptured
through the adoption of haredi practices and habits, and the submission to its
structures of authority. In this way the past that is reclaimed for the lost Jew
is intimately linked with the possibilities of belonging in the present, within
which the haredim are ¤gured as the most legitimate bearers of tradition, and

86 Jeremy Stolow