A Golden Era for Jewish Books

With the announcement of the 53rd annual National Jewish Book Awards, Rabbi Moshe Corson, President of the Jewish Book Council and Yosef I. Abramowitz, CEO of Jewish Family & Life! and publisher of JBooks.com, got together to talk about books, the awards, and the state of Jewish publishing. The following is an excerpt of their conversation.

 

Yosef Abramowitz: What is it with Jews and books?

Rabbi Moshe Corson: That's an interesting question; in trying to answer it, we often quote Mohammed's famous statement about the people of the book. We have this very deeply engrained literary propensity going all the way back to the biblical period. In the west, the Jews have been the people who have particularly been associated with learning and book learning from the earliest period of handwritten manuscripts and published books. Today, we’re still living off of that tradition.

Jewish reading has to do not only with our legacy of literacy and of interest in books, but probably also with our unique socioeconomic position. Jews today, particularly in the west, tend to be middle-class. They tend to be educated. They tend to have some leisure time. And I think that middle class people who are educated and who have some leisure time because of the nature of their vocations probably are the bulk of the reading public. If Jews are disproportionately represented in that demographic grouping, it's not surprising that we would be probably very heavily associated with reading.

But it goes beyond that because if you go to any bookstore you’ll see a disproportionate number of books on things that Jews are interested in or written by Jews. There is this cultural legacy of attachment to books; the writing and the reading of books is very much a part of what it means to be a Jew regardless of how one defines oneself.

YA: Where did you get your love of Jewish books?

MC: When I was around 14 years old, I wandered into a bookstore in south Philadelphia and Milton Steinberg’s book, Basic Judaism, had just come out. It was a thin little book and eminently readable and I bought it with what few pennies I had in my pocket. From then on I have been addicted to this business of reading Jewish books, looking for answers, learning. Books really are the way in which a person can open up new intellectual vistas and enrich oneself at nominal cost and at nominal inconvenience.

YA: Is there a connection between walking into that bookstore when you were 14 and becoming a rabbi?

MC: Oh, yeah. I think that helped me form my own career goals. There were other factors—early involvement in Jewish youth groups, AZA in particular, BBYO—which played a central role in my life, but the two I think meshed together.

YA: As president of the Jewish Book Council, how would you assess the state of Jewish book publishing? Where are we? How are we doing?

MC: The easy answer is, 'Oh, there’s tremendous numbers of books that are published. All the secular publishers, Random House, Doubleday, etc., etc., they’re all publishing lots and lots of books not only of Jewish interest but written by Jewish authors and with Jewish titles.' And that's true. We should note that the bulk of Jewish scholarship today is being published by state university presses. It’s serious. They are willing to publish doctoral dissertations. They are willing to publish books at under 5000 copies, which is not a big money maker. And then you have still a handful of viable Jewish publishers who are publishing books. So one could say this is a very healthy environment. It is a very healthy environment, from the quantity point of view.

The challenge for people like us—because we’re interested not only in quantity but in quality—is to match the readers with the quality books that are being published. Of course there are many quality books and a lot of books that are not of great quality. America, in its popular culture, is a dumb-down culture in many ways. And that works against quality. The challenge for the people who are involved in Jewish books seriously and for the Jewish Book Council is to make that critical connect between quality books and the Jewish reader.

Now that poses another conundrum because there are a lot of quality books that are being published but many of them are quite esoteric and, for the lay leader, not accessible. So the National Jewish Book Award process tries to find a place between elitism and populism. That is, a kind of 'quality center', a book that an intelligent layperson would be able to read and understand and appreciate and learn from; our job is to identify these books, let the Jewish reading public know about them, and encourage them to read them.

YA: What do you hope the National Jewish Book Awards represent for the Jewish people and what are you looking for in those books that get chosen?

MC: We hope to give people a short list of those books that warrant their attention this year—because they have been viewed and judged worthy by panels that include both experts and laypeople. We do insist on lay participation in the award selection process. We try to get intelligent, literate laypeople. We try to balance them with experts in the various areas.  We hope that out of that process will come a book which has appeal and credibility and worth.

If someone says, 'What do you want to come out of the book awards?'  I say, take a look at the award winners, see if there is a category within those award winners that you are interested in or that you think someone else might be interested in. If it’s somebody else, buy that book as a Hanukkah gift for them; if it’s for yourself, buy it for yourself. If you are a donor to your synagogue or communal library, buy the book and give it to the library. Circulate it—because that book has passed muster of a group of people who are interested in trying to give you a head start on selecting something that’s worthwhile spending time reading.

YA: How Jewish are the Jewish books that are considered for the awards? How do you draw those lines and where are those sensibilities? Right now I'm reading Triangle: The Fire That Changed America and it’s about Jews—but is it a Jewish book?

MC: It’s a slippery slope. For example, Bernard Lewis, who is the foremost authority on Islamic culture and civilization, has written a lot of books. I would highly recommend any of Lewis’ three most recent books to any Jewish reader—but I don’t consider them Jewish books. They are books that talk about a subject of great interest to Jews and Americans in general, but they are not Jewish books. They weren’t written for that purpose. Although Lewis is a Jew and, I think, a committed Jew, an identified Jew, I would not call his books Jewish books in a parochial sense.

The Triangle fire is a piece of American Jewish history. Triangle has Jewish content—Jews interested in the American Jewish experience would be uniquely and especially drawn to the book. At the same time, the fire was part of the development of the labor movement in America and of the history of New York. So it fits in both camps comfortably. There are a lot of books like that; it’s not an easy, quick, clean decision. And it’s very subjective.

YA: Where are we lacking as the people of the book? What kind of writing and publishing would you like to see more of?

MC:     I would like to see more books of fiction that are really quality books that deal with the kinds of things that Jews struggle with. As a Driven Leaf is the most outstanding book that comes to mind—for that you have to go back to Milton Steinberg, my early teacher. That was unique, but I would like to see more books that are serious, that explore that dimension of Jewish life.  It doesn't have to be in a historical setting.  And there are some that are written of that nature, but I would like to see more.

I would like to see books that responsibly popularize Jewish scholarship and that are attractive for lay readers to look at. There’s a lot of information that Jews think they have about Judaism which really is distorted, incorrect, and I would like to see Jews have a better understanding of the reality of Jewish tradition and Jewish history, warts and all. Very little is written of the warts and what’s written of the warts is not contextualized so therefore it becomes an attack. I'd like to see more of those kinds of books.

I don’t really read children’s books but my sense is that quality Jewish children’s books is probably a major challenge and a major area that we need to attend to. Those are the areas that I’m interested in.

YA: Fifty-three years ago American Jewish publishing was not really thought of with any great respect. What does the explosion in Jewish publishing say about the state of the American Jewish community, as compared to Israel—is there a Babylon/Jerusalem model here?

MC:     Let’s talk about that. Israel is becoming increasingly Americanized culturally and economically. A growing number of Israelis take their graduate degrees in American universities, so that there is an American educational impact on Israeli society, which I think is very healthy. As president of the Wexner Foundation, I was interested in improving the quality of Israeli government service and so forth, and our program has had a beneficent effect by bringing over Israeli mid-career public sector professionals to the Kennedy School of Government and giving them a one-year experience there. And that’s been replicated by people who have come over on other programs and independently. That’s a good thing.

But having talked about the Americanization of Israeli culture, I think we need to understand that Israeli culture is very different in many ways from American culture. Jewish identity formation in Israel is quite different from Jewish identity formation in North America, and so are the attitudes towards Jewish tradition and religion. We really don’t have a significant group of Jews in North America, anymore, who are hostile to Jewish tradition or Jewish religion, but Israel still has a large number of people who have really negative perceptions—even though in their personal lives they might pick and choose, as do North Americans, certain pieces of that tradition to observe. I know Israelis who build a Sukkah [a booth traditionally built for the festival of Sukkot] but will never step foot in a synagogue. I know people who will go to a synagogue on Yom Kippur but are avowedly atheistic. We need to understand that and we need to build bridges between the two communities.

Now, Israel is a very literate society. I met with Margalit Avisar, who is the director of Bar Ilan Press, when I was last in Israel and I was amazed at the world of Jewish books that they publish. I think Bar Ilan Press is probably the most prolific publisher of Jewish scholarship books in the world. And who knows that in North America? I mean I didn’t know it until I happened to be sitting with my dear friend Shamma Friedman and I saw two books that were published by Bar Ilan including his new book, Tosefta Atitkta. I said, 'My God, I have to learn more about this.' So I came back with a shipload of books from Bar Ilan Press and I went through them and I wrote a kind of omnibus review for the next issue of Jewish Book World. They’re all in Hebrew, of course. American Jews, including probably the bulk of American Jewish academicians, don’t even know about this stuff. It’s amazing. It’s rich, it’s attractively published and printed, they’re user-friendly. I would love to see American Jews and American Jewish academicians and rabbis and educators more intimately familiar with and using these resources.

The problem, of course, is that we are a unilingual society in North America and Hebrew isn't spoken and read as it once was. When I was a youngster there were Hebrew speaking camps, Massad and even Ramah in its early days; these were attempts to promote Hebrew speaking. Today that pretty much does not exist anymore. Hebrew speaking and the reading of Hebrew literature is at a lower ebb than it should be. And most day schools have really given up on trying to teach Modern Hebrew or Hebrew literacy. That’s something that needs to be reexamined.

Now, the Orthodox world is interesting … the bulk of people who identify as Orthodox are either baalei tshuvah [i.e., those who have come to Orthodoxy as adults] or have grown up in that community and have Yeshiva educations. The ones that have Yeshiva education are pretty literate. But they’re not literate enough always to take a rabbinic text by themselves. So you have this incredible institution called ArtScroll and they come out with this incredible new edition of the Talmud, the Schottenstein edition, and I have to give credit to my friend Jerry Schottenstein from Columbus, Ohio for funding this operation. It is a remarkable publication. And, of course, Steinsaltz’s English edition, which is not nearly as popular but which has tremendous quality to it as well and is extremely helpful. So now you have attempts to introduce English speaking people into the Hebrew and Aramaic world of rabbinic literature, and that’s terrific. There’s more Talmud learning going on today probably than ever before in Jewish history. That’s an amazing story.

Sura and Pumbeditain Babylonia were smaller institutions than the major yeshivot in Israel are today. That’s historically proven. Even compared to the heyday of Eastern European Jewish learning, there are more havurot [small study groups] learning Gemarrah, more individuals studying Gemarrah today, more people involved in Sium Ha'Shas [studying the entirety of the Talmud] today than ever before in Jewish history. So we’ve got these two trends, a unilingual English speaking American Jewish community, but at the same time you have this explosion of engagement with the study of rabbinic literature, which as a young man I would have never ever been able to predict would happen. These are different trends—which trend will be victorious is hard to say.

YA: Your enthusiasm is certainly coming through for these developments. It's said that inside of every one of us there’s at least one good book that’s waiting to come out. What’s your book?

MC: You remind me of my dear friend Rabbi Sidney Greenberg, alav ha'shalom, who authored some 28 or 30 books himself. He would always say, Maurice, you’ve got to write a book. I don’t know that I have it in me to write a book, but I will say this: my next birthday I will be 70 years old.  I have never been more enthusiastic or optimistic about Jewish life and the Jewish world than I am today. I really want to communicate that because a lot of people look at the half empty glass in Jewish life. Certainly we have all kinds of problems and the situation in Israel is very disturbing and very dismaying, and I don’t know that I have the answer or the light at the end of the tunnel is visible to me either, but I do believe that things will get better. And, of course, we have problems in American Jewish life. I don’t have to recount them; you know what those problems are. But having said all that, I do believe we’re living through an unprecedented golden era. A golden era of Jewish creativity, a golden era of freedom for Jews, lack of persecution, economic security, a golden era in which Jews can reengage, if they choose, with Jewish learning, Jewish experiences—an era in which there are many many different windows and doors to enter Jewish life. That is unprecedented, enormously strengthening, and enormously encouraging. So I am one of the big optimists on the future of this enterprise, which we call the Jewish people and the Jewish experience.

YA: If you could keynote a conference of aspiring Jewish writers—and, of course, they would want the designation one day of having been a National Jewish Book Award winner—what would you say to them? 

MC: I might be a little philosophical at this point and say that a book, unlike a sermon, has a lifetime beyond ourselves—hopefully. I know all these books, that are remaindered at the Strand or in other places, they don’t seem to have much of a lifetime. But a good book has a lifetime. Come back to Milton Steinberg: he’s long gone, but his writings continue to inspire and inform and they will for a long, long, long time.  And so I would say if you’re an aspiring Jewish writer, try to write a book that’s the best you can write.  Follow your passion; in so doing, you will hopefully become another link in this unbelievable chain of Jewish literature that stretches back in time to the early authors of the biblical accounts and reaches up to the present and stretches into the unforeseen and unknown future.