Strictly Kosher Reading: Kipa Reviews SKR

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Kipa Reviews SKR

Rabbi Yonah Goodman, a fascinating educator who works at the Orot College in Israel and writes on the Religious-Zionist website Kipa, sees the American Haredi model described in SKR as parallel in many ways to what is happening within Religious Zionism. I agree, though there are certain differences. (If I get permission, I'll post a translation of his review here.)

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Strictly Kosher Reading

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: self-help 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 reader. 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 as 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.