Strictly Kosher Reading: December 2011

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Unpious

Unpious.com, one of the more fascinating and diverse websites for no-longer Haredi Jews, just posted a really nice review of the book. You can read it here: http://www.unpious.com/2011/12/book-review-strictly-kosher-reading/

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Congratulations

The marketing department at Academic Studies Press just let me know that SKR has already sold over 500 copies since publication under six months ago. Not yet Harry Potter, but by the standards of academic monographs on admittedly obscure topics, not bad at all. Ken Yirbu!

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.