For several decades now, many scholars of American religion have promoted the idea that religion’s central meanings may be found not just in written texts but also in material objects, pictures, and buildings. Those wondering what all the fuss is about need look no further than two new studies of Orthodox Judaism in America and beyond, which illustrate just how revealing a consideration of object and image can be. In the words of Maya Balakirsky Katz, an art historian who has published the stupendous monograph The Visual Culture of Chabad, religious groups represent themselves visually, and “visual culture”—what people look at and how they see—”not only reflects ideologies” and religious experiences “but also often creates them.”
Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution
University of California Press
284 pages
$29.95
Katz focuses on “the Chabad image bank”—that is, objects and images, ranging from photographs to keychains, produced by Lubavitch Jews. She argues that this “image bank evolved to advance specific religious, political and social goals.” For example, the last rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (who died without heirs in 1994), masterfully used photographs of himself to establish and maintain connections with Hasidim all over the world. This canny use of photography helped transform a religious community that had turned on a personal, seemingly intimate relationship between rebbe and individual practitioner into a sprawling international movement that numbered thousands of people who would never meet their rebbe or see him in person. One telling example: the rebbe rarely performed weddings, but he would marry couples who planned to serve as shelihim (emissaries who moved to far-flung posts, where they established Lubavtich communities and encouraged non-observant Jews to embrace religious practice). When the shelihim then settled in India or Idaho, they displayed photographs of their wedding ceremony prominently in their home, thus giving any guests a visual clue that their hospitality was blessed by the rebbe.
The Visual Culture of Chabad is filled with fascinating readings of individual images. As early as the 1940s, Schneerson understood that he was living in a visual age, and he began to pay “meticulous attention” to the logos and graphic designs that accompanied Lubavitch publications. He wanted them to look modern—Ess zul oys zehn vee Dick Tracy, he would tell the artist he commissioned to work on Lubavitch children’s magazines: It should look like Dick Tracy. But more than merely hip, the logos Lubavitch publishers created under Schneerson’s watch offered, Katz argues, visual protest against popular anti-Semitic images that suggested Jews’ dominance of international media. One 1944 printer’s mark, for example, positioned a modern-looking set of Ten Commandments tablets over a globe. This was a sort of visual response to imagery then in circulation on the covers of anti-Semitic books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: the Lubavitch image “asserts that it was not learned elders who controlled the world through international media influence, but the God of the Jews who bequeathed to them the Ten Commandments and controlled world events. Faced with images of conspiratorial financiers and media moguls, the logo for Chabad’s publishing house reorients the conversation … to the spiritual realm of divine omnipresence.”
The book concludes with Katz’s insightful analysis of the giant menorahs that Lubavitch rabbis have erected each winter from San Francisco to Burlington, Vermont. Katz traces the transformation of the menorah from a small, domestic candelabrum into a monument of public religion. She charts the religious establishment debates that the menorahs sparked in mayors’ offices and courtrooms, and the debates within the Jewish community about the propriety of these giant menorahs. Katz finds that Hasidim invoke a capacious idiom of religious pluralism to defend the menorahs: although Hannukah is, at one level, about Jewish resistance to assimilation, in explaining the monumental menorahs, Chabad rabbis speak in broad, generic terms about religious freedom and offering light to a dark world. Most interesting is Katz’s compelling argument that the menorahs create a visual counterpart, indeed a visual alternative, to Christmas trees: after all, as Katz notes, a Christmas tree (which is shaped like this: Δ) and a Chanukah lamp (∇) form “inverted images of each other.” Many Orthodox commentators may, as Katz suggests, try to avoid drawing too strong a parallel between Hannukah and Christmas, but the very shape of the holidays’ public artifacts invites the viewer to associate and contrast the two.
In Orthodox by Design, Jeremy Stolow considers a single Orthodox Jewish publishing house, ArtScroll. If ever a publishing house merits the attention of an entire monograph, it is this one: founded in 1976, ArtScroll is now a dominant presence—arguably the dominant presence—in the English-speaking Judaica market. Especially influential are the publishing house’s prayerbooks and their Schottenstein Talmud, although their self-help books, explications of Jewish law, and cookbooks are also quite popular. Many observers have commented on ArtScroll’s tacit theological orientation; although their books are (as Stolow shows) used by Jewish practitioners of many different stripes, the publishing house is rooted in the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world, and the books tend toward a right-wing, sometimes rigid interpretation of classic texts. But Stolow’s focus is not on the books’ theological location. Rather, he is interested in the ritual life the books make possible, and the way they “design” a particular kind of religious experience; he is interested in “the performative protocols, the legitimating structures, the modes of social address, and the material forces of consumerism, domestication, and communal affiliation that constitute modern religious, print-mediated public spheres.”
Stolow’s account of ArtScroll’s books opens a window onto the daily religious lives of English-speaking Jews. But beyond this, Stolow offers much insight into religious reading and prayer—insight that, mutatis mutandis, extends beyond Judaism to other religious worlds. Especially noteworthy is his discussion of ArtScroll’s siddurim, or prayerbooks. The prayerbooks are popular not only because they are bilingual and set in a highly readable typeface, but also because they contain a wealth of supplementary material: footnotes with biblical citations; a commentary on the bottom of each page, containing interpretations of the prayers and references to germane rabbinic works. Perhaps most important for users who come to ArtScroll books in the midst of a journey from a non-religious life to a life of Jewish observance, the siddurim contain precise directions for how properly to pray each prayer—when and how to ritually wash one’s hands, when and how to bow, and so forth. This supplementary material, the publishers argue, helps practitioners experience the meaning of the prayers, and the ArtScroll customers Stolow interviewed single out the practical instructions and the interpretive glosses for praise. Far, then, from a narrow investigation into one publishing house, this book illumines how liturgy works in people’s lives, and how the objects from which and with which one prays shape people’s prayerful experiences.
I found myself musing about what an ArtScroll-inspired edition of the Book of Common Prayer might look like—I imagine that quite a lot of my co-religionists would appreciate precisely the kind of guidance and auxiliary information that ArtScroll siddurim supply. I can also imagine the fights on the committee convened to draft such an edition; and that musing, of course, leads back to Stolow’s interest in religious authority, in how “religious authority … is exercised and how it is transformed through the multilayered tissues of affect, technology, and institutionally coordinated action that are redefining the place of media in the world today.”
Stolow is especially persuasive when he turns his attention to ArtScroll books as objects. He notices the power ArtScroll authors assign to the books themselves: the house’s authors suggest to readers that “the mere sight of a holy book can jog the memory of previous acts of reading, thereby eliciting meritorious behavior in the present.” And Stolow astutely analyzes the significance of the leatherette or “pleather” covers of many of the ArtScroll prayerbooks—practitioners know that the books aren’t real leather, but even the “authentically fake” leatherette imbues the book with a special status. Once upon a time, I prayed daily from a brown leatherette ArtScroll siddur, and Stolow’s analysis of the pleather strikes me as spot-on. It is not just the holy words inside the covers but also the specialness of the cover itself that prompted me to open that book, and that still commands from me the respect one pays a sacred object. As for my navy blue Book of Common Prayer, its imitation-leather binding sets it apart from the other books in my library, and gives me subtle hints about the kind of book this is, about how it is to be used, how to be revered.
The book’s main limitation is Stolow’s specialist prose. Perhaps it is unfair of me to argue with Stolow about his prose-style—he clearly was not writing for a broad readership, but for fellow academics who will move easily enough in his multilayered tissues of affect, technology, and institutionally coordinated action. Still, precisely because he offers such shrewd analyses of topics that are of vital import to pastors and laypeople in many different religious communities, it is frustrating that few non-specialists will make it through this study. I hope Stolow will draft a lecture or a magazine article that will be a bit more accessible to the so-called ordinary people in the pew. We need his wisdom.
Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School. For the academic year 2010-11, she is a visiting fellow at Yale’s Institute for Sacred Music. She is the author most recently of A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Yale Univ. Press).
Copyright © 2011 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.
