Overview

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.

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9781618110022

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Reviews

Yoel Finkelman critically investigates a community that he simultaneously inhabits and questions. A modern Orthodox Jew himself, he discovers an often hypocritical grooming of the literature, its publishers and hierarchy within the Ultra Orthodox Haredi community. . . . Finkelman stands with only a handful of scholars such as Jeremey Stolow (author of Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the Artscroll Revolution, 2010) who have taken a risk to reveal and criticize their own Jewish community. This scholarship calls for more critical analysis and post modern identity theory in Jewish Studies internationally. --Tamar H. Havilio, Hebrew Union College. Review published in the American Studies Journal, Vol. 52, no. 3

Author Information

Yoel Finkelman (Ph.D. Hebrew University) is a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University. He teaches Talmud and Jewish Thought at Midreshet Lindenbaum in Jerusalem, and is the Director of Projects and Research at ATID, a Jerusalem-based organization that provides resources and training for Jewish educational leadership.

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