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How to Read This Book: Jewish Lights Publishing and the Pragmatics of Spiritual Reading
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2021
Abstract
This paper considers how print culture was mobilized in the early 1990s to transmit spiritual beliefs, experiences, and emotions through an examination of the pragmatics of reading endorsed by Jewish Lights Publishing (founded in 1990). Using interviews, advertisements, internal memos, books, jacket copy, and reviews, this study reconstructs the ecology out of which Jewish Lights Publishing emerged, as well as the goals and assumptions about Judaism, Jews, and books that animated the creation of a new, and specifically spiritual, Jewish press. I argue that what makes Jewish Lights a spiritual press is not only the content and design of the books, but also the instructions the press offers for how to use the books it produces. This paper is not only about the production and circulation of spiritual Jewish books, but the production and circulation of beliefs about what spiritual Jewish books do for an imagined community of readers.
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- Copyright © 2021 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
Notes
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5 Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper, 2005); Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010); Pamela E. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
6 Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2005); Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
7 Iddo Tavory and Yehuda C. Goodman, “‘A Collective of Individuals’: Between Self and Solidarity in a Rainbow Gathering.” Sociology of Religion 70, no. 3 (2009).
8 Penny Schine Gold, Making the Bible Modern: Children's Bibles and Jewish Education in Twentieth-century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Daniel Boyarin, “Placing Reading: Ancient Israel and Medieval Europe,” in The Ethnography of Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
9 Jonathan Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888–1988 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989); Jeremy Stolow, Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
10 William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 9.
11 From McLuhan's The Guttenberg Galaxy, as cited by Graham, Beyond the Written Word, 39.
12 Boyarin, “Placing Reading,” 11. I don't mean to suggest that the reading practices of American Jews are modeled after those of the ancient Israelites; rather, understanding Israelite reading practices opens different ways of thinking about the activity of reading and its role in the formation of a shared culture.
13 Sarna, The Americanization of Jewish Culture; Stolow, Orthodox by Design.
14 David Stern, “The First Jewish Books and the Early History of Jewish Reading,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 163–202.
15 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 96.
16 Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 (Summer 1994).
17 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 95.
18 John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916).
19 Arthur Green, “Awakening the Heart,” Sh'ma 44/708 (April 2014): 1.
20 Advisory Board Meeting, memorandum, February 26, 1991. The Jewish Lights collection resides at The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
21 Stuart Matlins, “Thank You, Teacher,” Reform Judaism, Spring 1995.
22 Unpublished note, handwritten on back of “Reaching Out to the Alienated: Ideas and Programs That Are Working” conference schedule, 1983. The Jewish Lights collection resides at The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
23 Joseph Aron, “Jewish Publishing in Woodstock?” The Jerusalem Post Special Edition, April 16, 1993, 9 (reprinted from Jewish Book World).
24 Benjamin Maria Baader, “When Judaism Turned Bourgeois … 1750–1850,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 46, no. 1 (2001): 113–24; Julie Lieber, “Crafting the Future of Judaism: Gender and Religious Education in Vienna 1867–1914,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 55, no. 1 (2010): 205–48.
25 Eve Jacobson, “Publisher Markets Jewish Spirituality,” Jewish Daily Forward, February 14, 1992.
26 Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (London: Routledge, 2004), 32.
27 David Tuller, “New Age, Old Subject Surges in the ‘80s,” Publisher's Weekly, as cited by Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 114. The New Age movement is a loosely connected web of eclectic interests and practices. It does not map directly onto our object of study, spirituality, but was an important precursor to it. Many features of New Age spirituality have been absorbed into the culture of spirituality. The word spirituality did not become a popular term until the 1990s.
28 Kathleen A. Hughes, “As New Age Books Prosper Publishers Squeeze All They Can into the Category,” Wall Street Journal, March 10, 1988.
29 John Niasbitt and Paula Aburdene in Megatrends, as cited by Heelas, The New Age Movement, 114.
30 Michael Shudson, “General Introduction: The Enduring Book in a Multimedia Age,” in David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson, A History of the Book in America: The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, vol. 5 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 16.
31 Martin E. Marty, “An Old New Age in Publishing (Editorial),” Christian Century, November 18, 1987, 1019.
32 Marty, “An Old New Age in Publishing,” 1019.
33 Paul C. Gutjhar, “The Perseverance of Print-Bound Saints: Protestant Book Publishing,” in A History of the Book in America: The Enduring Book, Print Culture in Postwar America, vol. 5, eds. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 377.
34 David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson, eds., A History of the Book in America: The Enduring Book, Print Culture in Postwar America, vol. 5 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 16.
35 Arthur Kurzweil, “New Age Judaism: Looking for Teachers,” New Age Retailer, October 1993, 51.
36 Kurzweil, “New Age Judaism,” 54.
37 To gain insight into the reception of Jewish Lights Publishing, I relied on reader comment cards and the reviews of Jewish Lights books in Jewish communal media and trade publications. Although this is a fairly narrow body of evidence, it is instructive in understanding the reception of Jewish Lights books, particularly among Jewish elites (as represented by reviewers). That being said, the aim of the article is not to make claims of how readers were changed so much as to elucidate beliefs endorsed by the press's founders about the potential of books to reshape American Jews.
38 Rahel Musleah, “Sacred Texts: Exploring Judaic Wisdom,” Publishers Weekly, October 9, 1995.
39 Publishers Weekly, March 8, 1993; Publishers Weekly, May 10, 1993.
40 Book Review, Christian Century, November 20–27, 1991.
41 Parabola, Summer 1999, meditation issue; What Is Enlightenment, Fall/Winter 1999.
42 Other Side, November/December 1999; Sojourner, April 2000.
43 Advisory Board Meeting, Memorandum, February 26, 1991. The Jewish Lights collection resides at The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
44 Advisory Board Meeting, Memorandum, August 19, 1993. The Jewish Lights collection resides at The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
45 Eve Jacobson, “Publisher Markets Jewish Spirituality,” Jewish Daily Forward, February 14, 1992.
46 Although Jewish feminists were at the forefront of articulating a contemporary American Jewish spiritual ethos, their expertise and voices were conspicuously absent in the early years of Jewish Lights, both in the press's leadership and its author list. For example, the Fall/Winter 1991 Jewish Lights catalog included no books authored by women. That same year, the Jewish Lights advisory board was made up of eleven people, and included only one woman, Rabbi Rachel Cowan. In the mid-1990s, Jewish Lights began to publish books with both female and feminist perspectives, beginning with Rabbi Debra Orenstein's two-volume Lifecycles. By the late 1990s, some Jewish Lights catalogs included a category it called “Women's Issues.” In 2000, Jewish Lights published The Women's Torah Commentary, edited by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, which was seen as a key text in the effort to elevate Jewish women's leadership in spiritual and religious life. For more on the relationship between gender, Jewish feminism, and the emergence of American Jewish spirituality, see Arielle Levites, “The Taming of the Jewess: Gender, Emotion Management, and Contemporary American Jewish Spirituality,” paper presented at the Association of Jewish Studies 49th Annual Conference, Washington, DC, December 19, 2017.
47 Jacob Neusner, “A Journey Well Begun,” National Post and Opinion, October 27, 1999. Dr. Neusner and Stuart Matlins subsequently exchanged letters. I do not include the contents of these letters as they seem to be more about personal attacks.
48 Advisory Board Meeting Memorandum, February 27, 1996. The Jewish Lights collection resides at The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
49 To provide a larger sense of the kinds of books Jewish Lights published in this era, I include here a complete list of new titles promoted in the year 2000. By the end of its first decade, the Jewish Lights front list reflected the kinds of books the press sought to make available to an American Jewish readership. How To, Guide, and gerunds figure prominently in adult titles and signal an active reader: Because Nothing Looks Like God (children's title); Bringing the Psalms to Life: How to Understand and Use the Book of Psalms; Broken Tablets: Restoring the Ten Commandments and Ourselves; The Business Bible: 10 New Commandments for Bringing Spirituality and Ethical Values into the Workplace; The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought; Does the Soul Survive? A Jewish Journey to Belief in Afterlife, Past Lives and Living with Purpose; For Heaven's Sake (children's title); God Said Amen (children's title); God Whispers: Stories of the Soul, Lessons of the Heart; The Jewish Gardening Cookbook: Growing Plants and Cooking for Holidays and Festivals; Jewish Paths toward Healing and Wholeness: A Personal Guide to Dealing with Suffering; Moonbeams: A Hadassah Rosh Hodesh Guide; More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction; Restful Reflections: Nighttime Inspiration to Calm the Soul, Based on Jewish Wisdom; Sacred Intentions: Daily Inspiration to Strengthen the Spirit, Based on Jewish Wisdom; Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Jewish Community; Soul Judaism: Dancing with God into a New Era; Torah of the Earth: Exploring 4,000 Years of Ecology in Jewish Thought; The Way into Jewish Prayer; The Way into Torah; The Women's Torah Commentary: New Insights from Women Rabbis on the 54 Weekly Torah Portions.
50 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 23. We can relate this to other historical practices of reading such as the medieval scholastic Christian practice of lectio divina or the Jewish practice of higayyon (which comes to be understood as meditation in the medieval period). For a beautiful account of medieval Jewish reading practices see Profiat Duran's (Efodi) introduction to Ma'ase Ha'efod, which outlines a number of incorporating practices for reading the Hebrew Bible.
51 Meditation is described as a latent, prediscursive category of experience that one can properly access through book reading. Also worth noting is the associative jump between transcendental meditation and Breslover Hasidism, suggesting a seamless relationship between the teachings of the twentieth-century Hindu Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the eighteenth-century Hasid Rabbi Nahman of Breslov. The jump elides a gap of twenty years between Matlins's assumption of a regular meditation practice as dictated by the transcendental meditation book and his meeting with Kramer in the early 1990s. It also suggests a natural affinity between two sets of spiritual practice separated by a significant historic, geographic, and cultural gap.
52 Joseph Aron, “Jewish Publishing in Woodstock?” The Jerusalem Post Special, April 16, 1993, 9 (reprinted from Jewish Book World).
53 Rahel Musleah, “Tapping into the Jewish Soul,” Publisher's Weekly, February 14, 1994, 42.
54 Musleah, “Tapping into the Jewish Soul,” 42.
55 Sandee Brawarsky, “Wedded to the Word,” Publisher's Weekly, January 18, 1991, 13–19.
56 See, for example, Brawarsky, “Wedded to the Word,” 14; Arthur Kurzweil, “New Age Judaica,” New Age Retailer, May/June 1991, 28.
57 Musleah, “Tapping into the Jewish Soul,” 42.
58 Musleah, “Tapping into the Jewish Soul,” 42.
59 Unpublished letter from Robert A. Epstein to Jewish Lights staff person Theresa Jones Vynhal, June 30, 1995. The Jewish Lights collection resides at The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
60 Epstein to Vynhal.
61 Epstein to Vynhal.
62 See Ivan Markus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.)
63 Joel Hecker, Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah, Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 121.
64 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970).
65 Riv-Ellen Prell, Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989).
66 Jeffrey K. Salkin, Putting God on the Guest List: How to Reclaim the Spiritual Meaning of Your Child's Bar or Bat Mitzvah (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1992). Salkin is also the author of the scholarly entry “New Age Judaism,” in The Blackwell Companion to Judaism, eds. Jacob Neusner and Allen J. Avery-Peck (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).
67 Ann Brenner, Mourning and Mitzvah: A Guided Journal for Walking the Mourner's Path through Grief to Healing (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1993).
68 Brenner, Mourning and Mitzvah, iv.
69 Musleah, “Tapping into the Jewish Soul,” 42.
70 Musleah, “Tapping into the Jewish Soul,” 43.
71 Emile Durkheim. Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1912/1995); William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1902); Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, eds. Peter Gay and James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1927/1961).
72 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 1st English ed. (Torrington, CT: Martino Fine Books, 1917).
73 See, for example, Corrigan, John, ed. Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riis, Ole and Woodhead, Linda, A Sociology of Religious Emotion (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
74 Eve Jacobson, “Publisher Markets Jewish Spirituality,” The Jewish Daily Forward, February 14, 1992.
75 There were certainly other, less flattering, tropes about American Jewish bodies in circulation. Jews were not only hyperrational, but also mercenary and neurasthenic. Notably, materialism and anxiety were characteristics that could not coexist with the tranquil, spiritual self promoted in American culture.
76 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
77 Prell, Prayer and Community, 37.
78 In 2016, the Matlins's LongHill Publishers sold Jewish Lights Publishing to Turner Publishing. Matlins explained in an interview (Personal communication, July 19, 2018) that he had expected Turner to continue to publish new Jewish spiritual books. As of the time of writing, Turner only offers Jewish Lights backlist titles via print on demand.