Jewish Lights Publishing and the Formation of Jewish Spiritual Reading and Feeling Publics

• In Event: After THE JEW IN THE LOTUS: American Jews, Eastern Religions, and a New Culture of Jewish Spirituality

Abstract

The 1990’s saw the emergence of a Jewish spiritual sub-culture in the United States, for whom books played a crucial consolidating force. Lacking many formal institutions, the publication of books such as Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus, Kushner’s God Was In This Place & I, I Did Not Know, and Diamant’s The Red Tent became touchstones around which reading communities formed.

This paper considers how print culture was mobilized in the early1990’s to transmit spiritual beliefs and experiences, 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.

The rhetoric of spirituality emphasizes interior meaning-making and personal experience, masking how highly individualized experiences may share a common history and social milieu, and may be mediated through material culture and habits of consumption. Reading, too, is often depicted in western culture as a solitary and private pursuit, obscuring the social nature of reading practices and the potential for books to promote religious and ethnic cohesion. Individual publishing houses have often played an outsized role in constructing, legitimating, and transmitting a normative Jewish culture in America.
In this paper 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.

author

• Arielle Levites, New York University