Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature and the Condition of Contemporary Orthodoxy

by Yoel Finkelman

For centuries, fervently observant Jewish communities have produced thousands of works of Jewish law, thought, and spirituality. But in recent decades, the literature of America’s Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] community has taken on brand-new forms: selfhelp books, cookbooks, monthly magazines, parenting guides, biographies, picture books, even adventure stories and spy novels― all produced by Haredi men and women, for the Haredi readership. What’s changed? Why did these works appear, and what do they mean to the community that produces and consumes them? How has the Haredi world, as it seeks fidelity to unchanging tradition, so radically changed what it writes and what it reads? In answering these questions, Strictly Kosher Reading points to a central paradox in contemporary Haredi life. Haredi Jewry sets itself apart, claiming to reject modern secular culture as dangerous and threatening to everything Torah stands for. But in practice, Haredi popular literature reveals a community thoroughly embedded in contemporary values. Popular literature plays a critical role in helping Haredi Jews to understand themselves as different, even as it shows them to be very much the same.

Genres: Judaism, Jewish, Nonfiction

258 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to start this review with an aside about the author. Fear not, goodreads -- what I have to say is positive.

Years ago I applied for a research grant for a study on newly Orthodox Jewish women. I put together a proposal and wanted feedback. I happened upon Yoel Finkelman online, who went on to write this book. We didn't know each other at the time and haven't interacted since, but Yoel was kind enough to thoroughly read my proposal and offer detailed feedback which greatly improved it. I hope that by writing this review and publicizing his book, I'm in some way repaying the kindness he did for a total stranger.

So maybe I'm a little biased when it comes to Yoel Finkelman, but the topic of this book is one that fascinates me. The basic question of the book, as I understood it, is how American Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] popular literature -- be it books for lay Haredi audiences on parenting, history, theology, fiction, etc. -- paradoxically creates a symbolic boundary between the Haredi community and the outside world, denying influences from the larger community or at least wrestling with their existence, while at the same time incorporating elements of the outside world into contemporary Haredi culture. It's an academic book that's heavily footnoted but the language is accessible and the book is not a particularly difficult read.

The book begins with background on the Haredi community and its relatively new development of popular books. According to Finkelman, until the 1970s Jewish books tended to be didactic. My sense is that many if not most of these books were written in Hebrew and meant to be studied rather than read for enjoyment or entertainment. Since the 1970s, Jewish books have become more accessible and genres have proliferated, moving beyond theology (although this is still a genre, if written in a more user-friendly style) into history, parenting books, fiction, cookbooks, and other genres that you might find in any bookstore.

This change in Jewish publishing reflected changes in the Orthodox community. After World War II, the formerly waning American Orthodox community experienced a resurgence which may be attributed to a variety of factors -- the arrival of European Holocaust survivors with a closer connection to tradition, 1960s-1970s countercultural movements making it cool to be ethnic and different as opposed to the previous "melting pot" ideal of American homogenization, etc. Orthodox Judaism evolved from a dying movement to a vibrant way of being Jewish, subdividing into several different communities which Finkelman categorizes as Hasidic, Haredi, and modern Orthodox.

Finkelman focuses on the Haredi community which he describes as paradoxical in certain ways. According to Finkelman, the Haredi community is both isolationist and acculturated -- defining itself as isolated from and superior to the surrounding culture while unavoidably integrating and influenced by elements of the surrounding culture. The Haredi community is also both voluntary and authoritarian -- although there is no centralized formal or legal authority, informal community norms wield a great deal of power over individual decisions. Conformity to these norms is strongly reinforced, and departing from them is deeply unpleasant and threatening. Finkelman examines these tensions and their various manifestations through analyzing the community's popular literature, a research method close to my heart for a variety of reasons and relevant to my own dissertation.

Finkelman describes three ways in which Haredim, as mirrored by Haredi popular literature, attempt to negotiate Haredi paradoxes, mainly the one of isolation vs. acculturation. The first strategy is "coalescence" -- combining the Jewish with the American, e.g., Haredi music with lyrics from traditional Jewish texts and tunes that imitate contemporary popular music; self-help books that integrate contemporary American cultural ideals like personal happiness and self-esteem while couching these ideals as existing within the tradition of mussar, or classical Jewish self-improvement. The second strategy is filtering, i.e., embracing aspects of general culture which are viewed as desirable and consistent with Haredi ideals (e.g., aspects of psychological theory and research) while rejecting other, unwanted aspects of general culture (e.g., excluding any aspect of sexuality from popular texts). The third strategy is monopolizing -- creating a culturally endorsed version of the attractive aspects of secular culture so that Haredim need not look outside the community for it. Haredi cookbooks and nutrition guides would fall into this category.

Are Haredi authors self-aware as they are doing this? Or is the process unconscious? Finkelman writes about the range of responses among Haredi authors to the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously rejecting and incorporating aspects of the surrounding culture. One response is denial, stating overtly that one's ideas are traditional and ancient and not a reflection of the surrounding culture. This approach maintains the dogma that everything comes from the Torah but is often inauthentic and lacking in self-awareness, which can lead to internal contradictions and diminished author credibility for the critical reader. A second response is acknowledgement, stating that secular sources and ideas have been incorporated and defending the decision to do so. Certainly this honesty makes the author and the text more credible, but it also raises questions about what makes the author's ideas uniquely Jewish. The third response, more rare, is to suggest that contemporary secular approaches might actually be superior to traditional ones. This is usually not stated explicitly but rather implied. Finkelman describes these strategies in a variety of Haredi popular genres, including parenting books, self-help, and fiction.

Finkelman then turns to Haredi popular history, which tends to be polemical and to emphasize inspiration over historical accuracy and three-dimensionality. He describes the emphasis on Eastern European Jewish life, described idyllically and one-dimensionally and held up as a model for contemporary Haredi orthodoxy. Aspects of this period such as infighting in yeshivot and secularization remain unacknowledged in a homogenized picture of blissful yeshiva attendance; Religious Zionists are unrepresented; maskilim (Jews who were influenced by the Enlightenment) are painted with a broad brush as pernicious influences attempting to destroy Orthodoxy even though maskilim as a group were actually far more heterogeneous in their levels of secularization and relationships with religiosity. These books are consciously intended to be inspiring, and are therefore selective in what they include. They work to create a collective memory for Haredi Jews which is less about an accurate picture of their origins and what they are ostensibly modeling themselves after, and more about reinventing that picture to serve an ideal that they have constructed.

Haredi popular theology is similarly agenda-driven and at times disingenuous. Haredi books have a complicated relationship with science, denying its validity while simultaneously using it to buttress their positions. Like the aforementioned works of history, some Haredi works of theology and Jewish law attempt to present a unified picture that leaves out any complexity or dispute. Notions of truth are painted as absolutist in many contemporary Haredi books, though this is in contrast to some more classical Jewish sources. A more unified picture of the ingroup strengthens the symbolic boundary between the ingroup and the outgroup.

Finkelman's final topic is that of Haredi internal criticism. Finkelman discusses the conflict for writers, and more so editors, of the need to acknowledge and address criticism and imperfection on the one hand, and the need to promote the prevailing ideology on the other. Using several examples from popular Haredi magazines, Finkelman writes about the careful selection of criticism to acknowledge and the cautious ways in which this criticism is framed. I related to this chapter in particular, having attended a religious girls' high school which consciously prided itself on "open-mindedness" and "encouraging questioning" but was really quite narrow and limited in terms of the spheres in which this was the case. In general, authorities often think of themselves, and/or present themselves, as far more open than they actually are. Finkelman discusses the internet as an uncontrollable counterpoint where Haredi internal criticism is expressed in unfiltered and unstructured ways.

Overall, Finkelman challenges the Haredi idea that their way of doing things is a direct continuation of ancient, or at least more recent Eastern European, religious norms. Haredi Jews are actually far more acculturated and contemporary than they want to acknowledge, a fact which is highly threatening to their identity. Finkelman, through the lens of Haredi popular literature, explores the way in which Haredim strive to maintain a symbolic boundary between themselves and the outside community in order to preserve their fragile sense of self. Although this boundary is porous, Haredim place a high priority on maintaining their integrity which is legitimately threatened by the attractions of a society with a far less restrictive lifestyle.

[Eli Mandel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book very much.

I came to this book after having seen a few detailed reviews of it, therefore I was surprised to see that there were plenty of treasures left for me to uncover.
All the reviews I saw focused on Finkelman's critique of the Hareidi self-help genre. In fact the book focuses on a few distinct areas of Hareidi writing:
1. Popular literature and its extensive efforts at building division between the Hareidi community and the rest of the world.
2. Hareidi historical writing and the Hareidi founding myth.
3. Hareidi theological writing, for internal as well as external consumption.
4. Self-help genre and its supposed Torah roots
5. Music
6. News/internal criticism

Throughout the book you see a community whose only strength lies in its separateness from everyone other than itself, the contradictions, tensions, outright lying or distortions, willful ignorance and general chicanery which is required to uphold this system is breathtaking.

One thought I had while reading the book is that the distortions described in the book are so subtle, it’s hard to imagine that anyone without direct experience with the Hareidi community would understand the big deal being made. One example might suffice. The author, after explaining that the Hareidi community does provide secular education to its children, finds himself obliged to explain what is different about the secular education they provide from the secular education provided by others to their children. The best explanation he could muster is to juxtapose the attitude toward secular education in the Hareidi world with that of the Modern Orthodox world. Whereas in the MO world secular education is seen as something positive, in the Hareidi world it is seen as b’dieved, something to be accepted as a burdensome necessity. If you don’t know first-hand how this attitude affects kids growing up in that community their entire lives you’ll probably think that this is just some academic hair splitting on the part of the author. But it isn’t and I can’t explain it any better, but my personal, first-hand experience allows me the dubious honor of knowing that it’s a lot more than hair splitting, that silly, minute difference has a very big impact on a lifetime of education and knowledge.

On a personal level (because until now I haven’t been personal about this), I learnt a lot of new things from this book. I grew up reading the books Yoel Finkelman analyzes so ably here and instinctively I had a lot of the questions and criticisms he makes so explicit. I read Akiva Tatz whom he methodically, though sparingly, criticizes, I read the popular literature and was left scratching my head and begging my parents to allow some more Louis L’Amour into the house (yes, it’s that bad!), I distinctly remember the brouhaha over the Jewish Observer’s issues regarding “kids at risk” and the opinion people had at the time that the Jewish Observer finally decided to talk about the issue 15 years too late and they did it in the most ridiculous fashion – giving opinions from the top down, lecturing parents on why it’s their fault if their kid didn’t make it in the yeshiva system. Finkelman devotes close to 15 pages to that piece of history, which is nice.

And what a nice surprise to see Unpious and Da’as Hedyot mentioned! Really a treat.

Since this criticism wouldn’t be complete without any criticism, I’ll criticize too.
One thing I wanted the book to do right up front was to give a definitive definition of Hareidi. It only clarified that the book was not going to focus on MO or Hasidic, but the “in between”, “the Hareidi or Yeshivish”. Somewhere in the middle of the book in an offhand way he quoted a part of a definition by someone else and that made me even more want a fuller discussion about that.
While the author begins almost each chapter with a description of what he is about to discuss and ends almost each chapter with a recap of what he discussed and what will be shown in the following chapter, he doesn’t do it consistently. I know that some, or all, of these chapters had been published previously as articles in various journals, I felt like it could have used a little more robust editing.

I got this book from the library, but I would really like to own a copy, simply for the extensive endnotes and bibliography.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clear analysis of the chareidi community and culture. As someone that grew up in that community, this book really helped me to understand how the community works. I can validate the legitimacy and truth to his claims and conclusions.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it when it was published. Even at the time, it was limited by the sample of literature that it deals with, which is not a look at the complete oeuvre. It's also a book likely to become dated very fast. But certainly a fascinating, insightful, relevant read.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a thoughtful, well-articulated response to this book sitting somewhere in my brain, but for now I'll just say that I really enjoyed the scholarship and evenhandedness of this book; how it never shied away from the topic, but never devolved into a jeremiad (as it undoubtedly would have in the hands of may other authors).
Topically, the book was fascinating, but I can't imagine it has a particularly broad appeal - either you hear what it's about and immediately want to read ir, or you're uninterested in the topic and the book won't change your mind.
One note - I was very pleased to find that, despite being a profoundly academic book, this work was mostly free of jargon. It's much harder to write an academic text in a coherent manner than it is to just fling a post-modern word salad at the page and see what sticks, so my hat is off to Rav Finkelman (though, you know, not in public) for managing to write so clearly.

[Marsha Altman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good analysis of Haredi literature, focusing on Litvak English and Anglo books and articles. Nice to see some books discussed that I've seen in Judaica stores. Also I'm in favor of any book that tears Lawrence Keleman apart. That said, it does get a little boring and academic.