Page 98 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

purveyors of the greatest knowledge of “correct practice,” even among those
who have little interest in accruing such capital.
In conclusion, the ArtScroll phenomenon is instructive as an instance where
new conditions of mediated communication have transformed, not dissipated,
religious authority according to the evolution of a logic of commodity ex-
change. The market principles which, from one vantage point, appear to cir-
cumscribe ArtScroll’s in®uence from another view allow for the extraction,
accumulation, and reinvestment of surpluses of symbolic value, so to speak, de-
rived from the activity of consumption itself. And as some local variants of this
story suggest, there is no reason to assume that the mantle of authority which
the ArtScroll cadre has won for itself within this ¤eld is about to slip.

Notes

Among the readers who have helped me to clarify this text, I especially thank Victoria
Heftler, David Lehmann, Birgit Meyer, Annelies Moors, Arvind Rajagopal, and Nurit
Stadler. I bear sole responsibility for failing to heed some of their best advice. Financial
support for this research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.

1. For a full booklist, see the ArtScroll catalogue on its website, http://www.artscroll.com.
2. To date, there has been no serious study of this cultural ¤eld. This is most evident
from the several disparaging critiques that have been advanced with regard to ArtScroll
texts as the product of careless scholarship and questionable ideological investment (see,
e.g., Levy 1983). Such indictments, however, tell us next to nothing about the degree of
resonance of ArtScroll with the popular Jewish imaginary, which is the focus of my dis-
cussion.
3. The term haredim translates literally as “those who tremble,” a scriptural refer-
ence to the righteous ones who fear the word of God (as in Isaiah 66.5). Vexing problems
of historical periodization and provenance, ideological ambiguity, and cultural speci-
¤city have plagued scholars in their efforts to produce a consistent de¤nition of hared-
ism. Given this ambiguity, the terms haredism, haredi, and the haredim are used here to
refer ¤guratively to a loosely de¤ned cultural formation. For key studies, see, inter alia,
El-Or 1994; Friedman 1986, 1987; Heilman and Friedman 1991; Silberstein 1993; and
Soloveitchik 1994.
4. On the rise of Agudat Israel, see Bacon 1996; Mittelman 1996; and Stolow 2004.
5. The ensuing discussion assumes an Ashkenazi-centric (i.e., a central and east Eu-
ropean) perspective on modern Jewish culture and history, and thus ignores develop-
ments within sephardi (Mediterranean) and mizrahi (Middle Eastern and Asian) commu-
nities. This choice of focus is legitimate only in so far as the key forces which have made
haredism in general, and Agudat Israel in particular, ideologically and institutionally ef-
fective appear to be of distinctly ashkenazic provenance (cf. Friedman 1987, 252 n. 12).
It is also of signi¤cance for this discussion that the majority of English-speaking Jews
are ethnically ashkenazim.
6. See Bartal 1993, 142–143. Leshon ha-kodesh must not be confused with either

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