Shaul Magid on Orthodox by Design
Shaul Magid reviews Jeremy Stolow’s Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution
Orthodox by Design is not about the accuracy of Artscroll’s translations or even about its ideological program. It is not even about “Artscroll Orthodoxy” per se. Jeremy Stolow is a scholar of media studies. He is not a scholar of Judaica, neither its textual tradition nor its social milieu. For Stolow, ArtScroll is a case-study for an examination of media and marketing in the “late capitalism” that marks America’s cultural productivity in the past thirty years. This media studies scholar sees ArtScroll as an instance of what Pierre Bourdieu termed “cultural production”; his interest is to “trace how [religious authority] is exercised and how it is transformed through the multilayered tissues of affect, technology, and institutionally coordinated actions that are redefining the place of media in the world today. “(29). What ArtScroll is doing, according to Stolow, is marketing a particular kind of “Judaism.” And Judaism, in Stolow’s book, is neither a religion, a body of texts, nor a lifestyle. It is a commodity.
…
As I read him, Stolow is “queering” the term “revolution” in the so-called “ArtScroll Revolution.” It is not only that ArtScroll is transforming American Judaism via its haredi ideology of authenticity to counter American Judaism’s assimilatory project. That is standard fare. ArtScroll is also transforming American haredism by accommodating to the upwardly mobile nature of its constituency and, in doing so, promoting (perhaps unwittingly) a project of acculturation all its own. Whether ArtScroll is succeeding more at promoting its bourgeois haredism or whether American consumerism and late capitalism is succeeding more in bringing haredism closer to its materialist and capitalist embrace is anyone’s guess and, in part, depends on whether one is “inside” or “outside” the community in question.
July 26th, 2010 at 10:38 am
The article is actually quite insightful, and if the book is as good as Saul Maggid’s review, then it will be very good, indeed. But I would guess it would be too subtle for most Artscroll readers. Artscroll knows that its been criticized (justly) for perverting traditions and cannonizing stupidity, as Adderabbi once remarked. But this review/book is an entirely different analysis, and I wonder if Artscroll and its readers would be capable of grasping it. In my experience that demographic has a pretty simplistic view of things: If you accept everything Artscroll does uncritically, you’re OK. If you don’t, you’re a hater, a “bitter” hater. Its rare to the point of non-existent to actually challenge the substance of what’s being addressed to them. That’s the black and white world inhabited by Artscroll and its denizens.