Peer Press-ure: Cultural and Market Forces and the Orthodox Press

Yoel Finkelman

History has a way of laughing at us. When Belzer Hasidim began publishing Mahzikei Hadas in Galicia in 1879, they were met with significant opposition. German Orthodox Jews had their newspaper, and the maskilim in Eastern Europe had cornered the market for Jewish papers there, pushing for increased general education and communal reform. Mahzikei Hadas’s decision to publish a newspaper of its own was laced with irony, particularly regarding the use of modern technological tools to combat modernity.

Voices in less compromising Eastern European Orthodoxy thought that the Belzers had gone too far, and that the format of a newspaper inevitably diminished Torah discourse, which should follow traditional formats and be printed in age-old media. By now, however, every Orthodox Jewish community creates and reads its own print newspaper.

We can add newspapers to the list of matters—such as sermons in the vernacular, school-based Torah education for girls, or the value of exercise—that were once subjects of divisive debate and are today part of the consensus among essentially all Orthodox communities. When market and cultural forces appear that push for an Orthodox media, it comes into being and takes on the forms that those forces dictate. Examples of Orthodox newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries—in Europe, Israel, and the United States—show a print culture adapting to cultural conditions.

Mass produced print media play a homogenizing function. In his important work, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson famously argued that newspapers were critical in the formation of national identities, since they enabled people across a wide geographical and cultural expanse to participate in the same discourse and to imagine themselves as part of one collective. The wealthy urban elite of Paris shared news, opinions, and ideas with the farmer of the South, and thereby came to share also a sense of self and attachment to the developing French nation.

Whether or not he overstates the claim that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, Anderson is certainly right that newspapers and magazines can play an important role in homogenizing disparate individuals into long-distance collectives. Hence, it is not surprising that newspapers and mass-produced print media have found a comfortable home in Orthodox Judaism. After all, Orthodoxy, perhaps Judaism as a whole, depends on a trans-geographic sense of group identity that binds people together, despite physical separation. Rabbi Yaakov Ettlinger’s Der treue Zionswächter and Rabbi Marcus Lehmann’s Der Israelit played a role in Germany of forging a Neo-Orthodox identity and, if not in actually combatting Reform, at least in creating a group of Jews who shared a rejection of Reform as a key part of their commitments.

In a similar vein, in the United States, the unapologetic and unabashedly isolationist version of Orthodoxy that consolidated in the decades after World War II found its mouthpiece in The Jewish Observer, founded in 1963. This magazine became one of the leading voices of right-wing American Orthodoxy toward the end of the twentieth century.

But another, indeed opposite, dynamic is also at work. Mass produced periodical literature enables a shrinking of collective identity, since it allows smaller and smaller sub-groups to be linked by a narrow shared discourse. This can fragment Jewish communities. Orthodox Jews who prefer to avoid the real or imagined anti-Orthodox biases of the New York Jewish Week can read the Queens Jewish Link or Five Towns Jewish Times. They gain access to material of local interest, but the split loosens solidarity across the full range of the Jewish community.

This centrifugal impulse applies not only to communities bound by geography, but also to those bound by ideology. Proliferation of media fragments the existing Orthodox minority into smaller and smaller subgroups. For instance, the Hamodia newspaper represented and reflected all of Agudath Israel in Israel, until Rabbi Elazar Menahem Man Shach’s insistence on separating the Lithuanian elements of Agudah from its Hasidic components. Solidifying that separation required a new newspaper, and so Yated Ne’eman was founded in 1985.

Then, as Israeli Lithuanian Haredim split again between the more moderate Bnei Brak branch and the more militant Jerusalem branch, Hapeles emerged in 2012 to reflect the Jerusalem branch’s values and to attack in the sharpest terms the moderates. Advocates of the Yated initiated a boycott of advertisers in Hapeles, while advocates of Hapeles began badgering supporters of the Yated, eventually leading to arrests in 2015 of Hapeles activists.

This splintering becomes a matter of great significance, since newspapers are perceived as a critical mouthpiece for articulating the Torah-true ideology and beliefs of a given sub-group, and to garner political and social support of leaders and parties.

Both of these trends—creating and then splintering of identity-groups that transcend geographical location—are magnified by the virtual discourse of the Internet. Blogs, social media, and online editions of print newspapers make it even easier for individuals across geographic boundaries to share and participate in the same culture and discussion. But they also make it even easier to find just the niche and sub-niche in which a person feels comfortable, sharing an online community even if there is not a critical mass of like-minded people in walking distance.

In this context, newspapers struggle mightily to survive in the context of digital media and reader-created web 2.0. But Orthodox print media are alive and in some cases thriving. While general print newspapers are leaking readers to online venues and non-traditional media sources, Orthodox print media have weathered the storm well, largely for two reasons.

First, the Haredi community in both North America and Israel has fought an ongoing and at least partially successful battle against internet use. In these communities, print media has less competition, thus allowing America’s Satmar Hasidim to support several papers, for example.

More broadly and certainly more importantly, Shabbat restrictions have made Orthodox print media particularly resilient to the destructive impact that internet journalism and social media have had on traditional print journalism. For a time, weekly parashat ha-shavu’a sheets—distributed freely in synagogues on a weekly basis, and in most cases much more like weekly news and entertainment magazines than works of Torah—were Israel’s only growing branch of print media.

Similarly, Israel’s religious-Zionist weekly, Makor Rishon, has extremely wide distribution among Israeli religious Zionists. Like so much of the historical Jewish press, it is delivered on Friday morning, and its editorials, discussions of religious ideology in its Shabbat supplement, and at times sharp editorial cartoons, have become a go-to staple for readers to fall asleep on after Friday-night dinner.

Much of this is, of course, driven by the market as much if not more than ideology. Haedah, the Jerusalem-based Yiddish and Hebrew mouthpiece of the more radically anti-Zionist branch of the Edah Haredit, does not sell enough copies to make ends meet, and it is supported philanthropically out of ideological conviction.

But that cannot be said of all Orthodox print media, where stiff competition between similar magazines and papers have editors jockeying for readership which can be translated into subscriptions and advertising inches. Binah magazine competes mightily with Family First, Mishpacha’s women’s supplement, for the allegiance of English-speaking, moderate Haredi housewives. The two magazines are virtually indistinguishable from one another, including the bizarrely ironic policy of not publishing pictures of women in a women’s magazine.

A similar competition for market share can also have authors playing to their intended audience, leading at times to a kind of editorial posturing. Authors write to the editorial and marketing agenda of editors and subscribers; their personal convictions play a lesser role. Esther Reider-Indorsky had no personal problem writing in her own name, but her column on Israeli politics still appeared under the male psuedonym Ari Solomon for years, in order to meet the standards of not publishing women’s names that some Haredi readers desire.

Many authors with whom I have spoken would be more than happy, or at least would not oppose, the inclusion of photographs of women in right wing Orthodox periodicals, but they are not willing to fight the inevitable battle that would ensue should the policy change. Chatting about something else with a fellow who wrote often for Israel’s Bakehilah weekly magazine, I commented that I thought the magazine’s competition, Mishpacha, was more interesting, innovative, edgy, and daring. He agreed and commented wryly that if he were paid to write for Mishpacha he could also write more freely. But Bakehilah plays to the market of people who won’t read Mishpacha precisely because of its edge.

The historical debates over the very legitimacy of mass-produced Orthodox print media have faded into the background. Such newspapers and magazines are a fact. Measuring their impact, however, is more complicated. Do these publications merely reflect the existing beliefs and values of Orthodox readers? Or are they agents of change, modifying and forming the beliefs and values of the community? Methodologically, this is difficult if not impossible to gauge. But an understanding of contemporary Orthodoxy requires a thorough analysis of print periodicals and their readers.