The ArtScroll phenomenon has been hiding in plain sight for decades. Which is not to say that it has gone unnoticed in the communities where its footprint has been largest, but only that it has rarely been treated as worthy of sustained analysis. While admittedly less consequential than Scholem's “discovery” of Kabbalah for an intellectual society schooled to disdain it by the intellectual habits of rationalistic Wissenschaft, Jeremy Stolow's Orthodox by Design provides a similar service by demonstrating the cultural and intellectual significance of what he calls the “ArtScroll revolution” in Jewish publishing. Stolow's account is as important for what it teaches about the conditions of ArtScroll's reception as it is for its detailed account of innovative publishing in the English-speaking world of Jewish Orthodoxy. Respectful of his subject matter, he also neatly avoids the implicit recapitulation of Lieberman's famous jibe against Scholem that “nonsense may be nonsense, but the study of nonsense is scholarship.” On the contrary, Stolow's task is precisely to demonstrate the deep cultural sense that vivifies ArtScroll and makes it so compelling (yet also so hotly contestable) to so many contemporary Jews.
The “ArtScroll revolution” involves form as well as content. The keywords are authenticity from the point of view of American haredism (ultra-Orthodoxy) and accessibility from the viewpoint of readers who may have limited fluency in Jewish languages, rituals, or hermeneutic styles. Thus, the ArtScroll siddur (prayer book) combines traditional Jewish liturgy with at least three different levels of commentary and instruction: didactic notes meant to compensate for a presumed lack of basic knowledge about the postures and bodily attitudes of prayer, a more extensive commentary printed at the back of the book to account for dilemmas in Jewish law that may arise in the course of prayer, and an ideological commentary culled mostly from classical sources that is designed to make prayer “meaningful” to participants. These commentaries have drawn strong criticism for the very qualities that makes them popular among ArtScroll consumers. The prescriptive and, according to some, (over)simplified approach to Jewish law may serve to flatten local traditions or to delegitimize the diversity that has historically inhered to halakhic practice, but it also allows users who could not otherwise do so to feel like ritual virtuosos or at least competent members of a prayer community, and this has made the prayer book attractive not just to newly ultra-Orthodox readers but also to Modern Orthodox and some Conservative congregations whose members appreciate its “user-friendly” ethos of religious authenticity.
Stolow differentiates sensibly between different genres of ArtScroll production, while drawing analytic comparisons between them. The prayer book has been well received even in places where the same publisher's historical volumes have been rejected for alleged revisionism or “dumbing down,” while the ArtScroll Talmud and Kosher by Design cookbooks clearly cater to distinct audiences, defined by gender as well as presumed scholarly ambition. Yet these diverse publications are each characterized not just by religious vetting but also by special attention to material aesthetics, including specialized fonts that have helped to make ArtScroll a standard against which other publishers (in the Orthodox world and beyond) often feel compelled to measure themselves. One theme that could use further elaboration in Stolow's exemplary work is the degree to which nondiscursive markers such as font size and style or color may contribute to ArtScroll's appeal to some potential readers and opposition by others. To what extent, in other words, is Pierre Bourdieu's conception of “taste,” as an embodied and class-dependent feature of social distinction, really an operative feature of the ArtScroll debates, alongside the self-justifying intellectual arguments levied by both critics and supporters? Similarly, how do apparently aesthetic decisions with regard to font size and style also serve as material gatekeepers that encourage some readers by age, gender, or education level while implicitly discouraging others?
Orthodox by Design is written as cultural history, informed by anthropology and supplemented by interviews and light ethnography. This methodological formulation allows Stolow to investigate ArtScroll to at least some degree on its own terms rather than replicate important but worn debates about just how accurate the histories are or how starkly ideological the commentaries on the prayer book may be. It must be said that Orthodox by Design is quite successful in these terms and is highly recommended for anyone who seeks to understand contemporary Orthodoxy or religion and media more broadly. At the same time, I believe that an even more resolutely ethnographic approach would have allowed the author to better develop some of his own most important claims. Stolow argues, for example, that sites of cultural anxiety ought to be watched closely for the cultural creativity they invite and embody. Yet the handful of interviews and site visits presented in the book give insufficient account of the depth and complexity of these dynamics. For the last two decades ArtScroll products have slowly but inexorably pushed older prayer books and Bibles out of common use in American Orthodox synagogues. From personal experience, I know that these are often complex and painful moments in the lives of communities that may need to relearn or unlearn well-rooted textual and hermeneutic practices, reconfigure notions of textual and rabbinic authority, or reconfigure their sense of themselves in relation to wider trends in the Orthodox world. Today, some congregations are beginning to have similar conversations around movement in the opposite direction, as products more closely identified with a Modern Orthodox ideology, like the new Koren prayer book, begin to challenge ArtScroll's hegemony in these settings. Yet Stolow has little time to spend on these dynamics beyond a few citations from relatively decontextualized interviews, and so we learn only a little of what must be at stake for members of communities that continue to spend time and resources wrestling with these issues.
By the same token and perhaps more significantly given Stolow's own methodological choice, is his broad homogenization of “haredi” Orthodoxy beyond what reasonable analysis may allow. ArtScroll's independence of specific institutional control by any synagogue or rabbinical organization and the breadth of its market does not, after all, erase significant cultural, theological, and sometimes class distinctions between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, between the Lithuanian-inspired yeshiva world and the various hasidic courts, between the suburbs and tight urban enclaves, or between those groups who welcome baalei teshuvah and those who do not. There is, moreover, a broad continuum between so-called “Centrist Orthodoxy” and haredism in the United States that is simply not encompassed by the simple distinction between haredi and Modern Orthodoxy. This may help to explain Stolow's surprising claim that ArtScroll prayer books, which are produced by an avowedly haredi institution, have had their smallest impact precisely in synagogues that the author identifies as haredi. My guess, without the benefit of any explicit discussion by the author of how he arrived at his classificatory scheme (he acknowledges that it is not emic, or self-ascribed), is that the boundaries of “haredi” Judaism have been drawn somewhat differently in each of the two halves of this equation.
The best that one can say about any academic book is that it covers new ground, poses important, generative questions, and sets the terms of future conversation in its field. All of these are undoubtedly true of Orthodox by Design. The fact that there is more to be done and there are questions left unanswered does not by any means negate this accomplishment.
