Jeffrey Shandler has the keenest eye of any scholar of recent American Jewish culture. From greeting cards to nearly forgotten radio programs, Shandler has a knack not only for unovering obscure expressions of Jewish life and—perhaps more importantly—for explaining what they might mean. He not only has an ability to call attention to neglected artifacts that deserve more attention (and then explain why they merit it), but also for assembling conversations among these scattered remnants of Jewish culture and for crafting thoughtful explanations about what all these things might mean.
Shandler's recent book exemplifies this quality of his work. He traces circuitous routes between the vernacular (bar mitzvah photos, video testimonials one can record for use at one's own funeral) the popular (Yiddish one-reelers, Holocaust memorial tours), and the spiritual (the meaning of cantorial music, effigies of the Lubavitcher Rebbe). He illuminates both the media of the book's title and the cultural practices that enable those media to become meaningful. Showing off greeting cards that acknowledge the “December Dilemma” is one thing, but recognizing that they “make the case for celebrating the problematic” (229) is something else entirely. The difference between Shandler and the rest of us is the ease with which he highlights the details of his story without allowing the details to become the entire story.
As he explains in his introduction, the book focuses “on the social practices of new media as they engage religiosity, broadly defined” (9). This means explaining and exploring what and how media and media technologies have come to shape Jewish life. Shandler concerns himself with the ways in which these media texts are made meaningful by their use. Bar mitzvah photos become more interesting for the ways in which they are shared and narrated, videos of the Rebbe are made more important in their role in new devotional modes for members of the Lubavitch community, and radio programs grow more significant for the ways in which they engender new rituals of listening.
Media, for Shandler, doesn't mediate between people or between people and events. Media have become constitutive of the event itself. In the chapter on home movies of rituals, Shandler keenly observes the ways in which watching the film (or viewing photos) of an event just past has become an important part of the event itself. Media, Shandler argues, is (and has long been) central to how Jews understand and organize themselves. If media mediate anything, they mediate Jews' perceptions of themselves.
This is most powerfully and prominently manifest not in blockbuster films, groundbreaking novels or popular television programs, but in the more quotidian media products that punctuate and illustrate Jewish life. Cantorial recordings, home movies, and even Holocaust memorials not only represent Jewish life, but structure it, as well. In this way, Shandler brilliantly situates these media texts in the hands, hearts, homes, and narratives of the Jews who use them to negotiate the meanings of the texts and their own lives.
Yet, despite his intention to focus on the use and meaning of media in context, most of the books' chapters focus on the media themselves, leaving claims about their use to rest on some thin evidence. The chapter on the December Dilemma is fascinating but ultimately, the book focuses too closely on the breadth of media and leaves little space to discuss how—if at all—these media are used and understood by their audiences.
Similarly, his chapter on cantors concludes with the following observation: “The cantor's life narrative models for the listener a project of one's own—investigating what this traditional expression of Jewish spirituality might mean in the unfolding life of the listener” (55). Though seductive, Shandler does not discuss who these listeners might be, nor is he able to present accounts of how these listeners imagine or instantiate their relationship to the media texts in question.
It is difficult to make claims about “the most telling consequences of new media on a community's religious life” (281) without exploring the community in question a bit more deeply. As a result, the book is weakest where it attempts to make claims about American Jews and their diverse engagements with media because Shandler, despite his ethnographic attentions, focuses more on the media than the audiences that make them meaningful.
In the space between Shandler's sophisticated eye for the importance of ephemera and his broader claims about the meanings of media for American Jews, the book feels a bit uneven. It is strongest by far in his close readings of media texts. His readings of films and tourist materials, of museums and memorials evidence a serious appreciation and a delicate understanding of those media. And there is nobody who even approaches Shandler's eye for the details of mediated Jewish life.
As gifted a reader of cultural texts as Shandler is, the book sometimes covers so much ground that the book sometimes glosses over some of the nuance in its pursuit of synthesizing a broad argument. It is as if the book too tenuously connects each chapter to the next, instead of allowing each to stand on its own as a provocative invitation to further investigations of the uses and meanings of media. Pulling on the thread that runs from the Jewish Daily Forward to The OC, or tracing the route from the “ill fated cantor Yoel-Dovid Strashunsky” (14) to the protagonist of the 2005 documentary A Cantor's Tale, evidences Shandler's finely honed sense of detail, but it forces a kind of strain on the level of synthesis—almost by necessity.
Each chapter could have been a book unto itself, and this is both the book's strongest quality and its weakness. The threads that stitch it together as a book do not hold up to the insightful provocations of each individual chapter.
The book's shortcomings reveal themselves only where Shandler tries to stretch his keen sense of the sublime into a broader argument where he doesn't have the data to develop. Yet, each of the chapters is so deeply thought provoking and inspiring that it will hopefully be a great source of scholarly conversation and argument for the next generation of scholars. In this way, as Shandler's argument goes, it is the practices more than the media that matter. Instead of closing off discussion, this book offers us a way to begin examining the relationship between American Jews and their media where these conversations always—by necessity—begin.
