Reading Jewish Signs - The Socialization Of Multilingual Literacies Among Hasidic Women And Girsl In Brooklyn

Reading Jewish signs: The socialization of multilingual literacies among Hasidic women and girls in Brooklyn, New York* AYALA FADER

Abstract In this article literacies are defined as a set of interconnected signifying practices interpreted by semiotic ideologies, that is, cultural beliefs about signs. This approach integrated with a language socialization approach to literacy provides a way to go beyond the reproduction of the normative social scientific categories of religious or secular literacies, orality and literacy, tradition and modernity. The focus of the article is the literacy practices of Hasidic Jews, an example of a nonliberal (fundamentalist) religious community. Hasidic Jews present a particularly relevant case study because their critique of secular modernity includes e¤orts to dismantle distinctions between the secular and the religious, thus creating an alternative religious modernity. This becomes evident through an exploration of multilingual (Hebrew/Aramaic, Yiddish and English) literacy socialization practices between women and girls. The article focuses on how girls begin to acquire literacy in Hebrew/Aramaic in kindergarten, comparing and constrasting girls’ simultaneous acquisition of Yiddish and English literacy. Included are an examination of leisure literacy practices and new genres of Englishlanguage books for children. Across contexts, languages, and genres of Hasidic literacy socialization, distinct semiotic ideologies share an interpretive project: to teach girls to decode signs as nonarbitrary, that is, as divinely intended, and to turn what seem to be arbitrary or Gentile/secular signs into Jewish ones. Keywords:

1.

nonliberal religious community; language socialization; semiotic ideologies; gender; multilingualism.

Introduction

Studies of literacy in nonliberal religious communities (Mahmood 2005) can provide insight into the formation of modernities, secular and 1860–7330/08/0028–0621 Online 1860–7349 6 Walter de Gruyter

Text & Talk 28–5 (2008), pp. 621–641 DOI 10.1515/TEXT.2008.032

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religious. Ethnographic approaches to literacy from the 1980s onward have challenged the implicit evolutionary framework of dichotomies informing previous research, such as modernity/tradition, literacy/orality, history/myth (Collins and Blott 2003). The secular/religious dichotomy similarly has underlying connections to a western narrative of secular modernity (Asad 1993, 2003); however, this dichotomy has rarely been problematized in studies of secular or religious literacies. In this article I develop an approach to literacy which moves beyond assumptions that the secular and the religious are necessarily discrete categories. Instead, through an analysis of multilingual literacy socialization practices among nonliberal Hasidic Jews, an inflection of Jewish Orthodoxy, I attend to the ways that cultural/religious beliefs about signs, what Keane (2007) calls ‘semiotic ideologies’, are taught to the next generation of believers. This approach can tell us not only about the dynamics of religious and secular literacies, but also how children’s socialization into particular relationships with signs are integral to the formation of subjectivities. Hasidic Jews o¤er a particularly relevant case study because their critique of secular modernity includes e¤orts to dismantle distinctions between the secular and the religious, thus creating an alternative religious modernity (Fader forthcoming). This becomes particularly evident in an exploration of multilingual (Hebrew/Aramaic, Yiddish and English) literacy socialization practices between women and girls across a range of contexts and genres. There is a small but growing body of scholarship on religious literacies both with sacred languages and religious genres, such as prayer and ritual (e.g., J. Boyarin 1993a; Keane 1997, 2002, 2004). Some suggest that a defining feature of sacred language is that the sign is not arbitrarily related to its referent, but rather is divinely designated by God (Elster 2003; Haeri 2003). Indeed, loshn koydesh ‘holy language’ (a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic), the language of the Torah, its commentaries, and prayer is believed by Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox Jews to be a supernatural language from which the world was created (Glinert and Shilhav 1991: 70–71). This belief about religious language and signs has important implications for Jewish literacies. For example, in his discussion of religious Jewish reading practices, J. Boyarin notes that every linguistic feature in the Torah is believed to be divinely intended and needing human interpretation. This shapes how Jewish texts are translated or not, interpreted, read, and studied (1993b; see also Handelman 1992; Spolsky 1983). Further, D. Boyarin (1993) has discussed the distinctiveness of Jewish religious study for complicating the categories of orality and literacy. Noting that reading in biblical Hebrew was historically a form of speech act, he suggests that even today in a ‘traditional context one could fairly say that

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reading in the European sense (that is, privatized and individualized) just does not exist’ (Boyarin 1993: 17). This valuable body of work does not address how age or gender shape access to religious language, text, and literacy. Among the Hasidic Jews with whom I worked in Boro Park, Brooklyn, it is primarily men and boys who study sacred texts written in loshn koydesh. Hasidic women and girls’ religious obligation is to mediate the secular world in order to protect Torah-studying men from potential distraction. The multiple languages read, written, and spoken within the community are gendered as well. Loshn koydesh is the language of prayer for all community members. Men and boys predominantly speak a Hasidic variety of Yiddish, which I call Hasidic Yiddish, with minimal English use. Even during the study of Torah, boys’ discussion of the loshn koydesh text is conducted in Hasidic Yiddish. In contrast, women and girls use a Hasidic variety of English, what I call Hasidic English, as their vernacular and use Hasidic Yiddish as a register, appropriate for contexts of religious study or education and for speaking to young children and males.1 Gendered divisions of languages and labor have implications for the gendered socialization of literacies. Because girls have limited access to loshn koydesh texts, their education includes, by default, more exposure to secular subjects, English books, and morally didactic Yiddish stories than boys have. Girls acquire literacy in all three languages; however, they do so in di¤erent ways and for di¤erent purposes than boys. My aim here is to explore the relationships among these di¤erent literacies in di¤erent languages. Girls are socialized in the context of religious loshn koydesh literacy to understand signs as God-given and nonarbitrary. How, then, do they interact with texts that are not specifically religious and are in the vernaculars of Hasidic Yiddish, Hasidic English, or a more standard English, such as Yiddish primers or English young adult fiction? More broadly, what can Hasidic girls’ literacy socialization tell us about the secular and the religious, orality and literacy, modernity and tradition? To address these questions I integrate Keane’s (2002, 2007) discussion of semiotic ideologies and representational economies with a language socialization approach to literacy (e.g., Heath 1986; Schie¤elin and Gilmore 1986; Ochs and Schie¤elin 1984; Schie¤elin and Ochs 1986). Studies of the socialization of religious literacy have focused on the ways that children or novices are socialized across a range of contexts into moral values through language and socialized to use and interpret texts and language in culturally specific ways (e.g., Baquedano-Lo´pez 2004; Kulick and Stroud 1993; Reder and Reed Wikelund 1993; Schie¤elin 1996, 2000; Zissner 1986). Two recent studies, among Roma children in Spain

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(Poveda et al. 2005) and Yemeni American girls in Michigan (Sarroub 2002), suggest some of the ways that literacies mediate boundaries of the secular and the religious in school contexts. Further, studies in multilingual contexts have shown how literacies can be functionally di¤erentiated according to language (e.g., Jones and Martin-Jones 2001; Scribner and Cole 1981), while dependent on historical and cultural context for meaning (e.g., Duranti et al. 1995). I build on this scholarship, but frame literacy as a ‘representational economy’, that is, interconnecting modes of signification in a particular historical and social formation (Keane 2002: 410). This approach takes us beyond assumptions about what constitutes secular or religious contexts, and most important, can account for dynamics among multiple languages and genres; oral, written, and read communicative practice; and relationships between language and materiality, in this case, narrative and text. Interconnections among di¤erent signifying practices are made comprehensible by semiotic ideologies, what Keane (2002: 419) defines as ‘basic assumptions about what signs are and how they function in the world’. I discuss three distinct activities of Hasidic girls’ literacy socialization and the semiotic ideologies that interpret each. First, I show how girls begin to acquire literacy in loshn koydesh in kindergarten and first grade. Next I compare and contrast the same girls’ simultaneous acquisition of Yiddish literacy and English literacy, primarily reading practices but also some English writing. Finally, I examine less formal literacy practices outside of the classroom, analyzing adult censorship practices, as well as a group of new literacy materials in English that are produced by Orthodox Jews for children and young adults. Across contexts, languages, and genres of Hasidic literacy socialization, distinct semiotic ideologies share an interpretive project: to teach girls to decode signs as nonarbitrary, that is, as divinely intended, and to turn what seem to be arbitrary or Gentile/secular signs into Jewish ones, signs which defy categorization as either secular or religious, and ultimately, ask us to rethink definitions of modernity and tradition.

2.

Background

Founded in eighteenth-century Europe as a radically democratizing, mystical, and ecstatic variant of Orthodox Judaism, Hasidic Jews organized themselves into sects, followers of a charismatic leader or rebbe. Today, they lay claim to immutability through their contemporary interpretation of a body of sacred texts, though research has shown that the authority given to texts today is actually a recent innovation, one aspect of an

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unexpected increasing religious stringency (Friedman 1992; Heilman 2006; Heilman and Friedman 1991; Soleveitchik 1994). Recent scholarship has made important contributions toward our understanding of the contemporary life of Hasidic Jews in North America, Canada, and Israel (e.g., Belcove-Shalin 1995; Goldschmidt 2006; Heilman 1992; Kamen 1985; Kosko¤ 2001; Kranzler 1995; Levine 2003; Mintz 1992; Morris 1998; Poll 1962; Rubin 1972; Sha‰r 1974). There has, however, been less attention to Hasidic language and literacy practices, particularly those of children and women (except see El-Or 1994; Glinert 1999; Isaacs 1999; Jochnowitz 1981). Boro Park, Brooklyn, the site of my research, is a diverse New York neighborhood with many di¤erent Hasidic sects and even some una‰liated Hasidic Jews. There are also Italians and Latinos, as well as a smaller population of Jews with di¤erent levels or styles of religious stringency. These include Litvish ‘Lithuanian’ Jews, who are equally religiously stringent but not Hasidic, as well as the less stringent Modern Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jews. Much of the scholarship on multilingual and minority literacies has emphasized success or failure in public schools. Hasidic Jews, in contrast, support their own private, gender-segregated schools where orientations to knowledge and truth are echoed across contexts by parents, teachers, and religious authority figures (Fader 2006). The data for this article were collected in a Bobover Hasidic girls’ elementary school I call Bnos Yisroel and in Bobover and other Hasidic homes where I primarily had access to girls, young boys, and women.2 The school day for girls is divided into what are called ‘Jewish/ Yiddish’ and ‘secular/English’ subjects. The Jewish subjects in the morning are taught by a Hasidic teacher and use Hasidic Yiddish as the medium of instruction and cover loshn koydesh literacy, Yiddish literacy, Bible stories, holiday preparations, and instruction in Jewish character building. The afternoon classes, taught by a Litvish teacher, use the medium of a more standard English and cover state-mandated subjects such as math, social studies, English literacy, language arts, and science.

3.

Loshn koydesh literacy: Decoding God’s signs and cultivating piety

For young girls, the di¤erent signifying modes of reading loshn koydesh text and the oral recitation of loshn koydesh prayers have related yet distinct semiotic ideologies, shedding light on Hasidic gendered notions about the person, the word, and the text. From the time they are infants, Hasidic children are instructed through oral repetition and prompting by

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parents, siblings, and relatives to recite a set body of loshn koydesh prayers believed to be divinely inspired and intended to sanctify the material world. By the time boys and girls are thirteen and twelve, respectively, they will be responsible for reciting the prayers, for example, upon waking up, after going to the bathroom, before eating, at bedtime, etc., independently. When girls enter preschool at age three, they can recite many if not most of these prayers by heart, even if they sometimes make mistakes which adults good-naturedly correct. The school curriculum includes times for group loshn koydesh prayer and girls chant these prayers together out loud, initially led by a teacher, although as they get older, the teacher has the girls pray without her. Girls also recite prayers aloud individually when religiously required. I did not observe any attempt to translate or interpret the meaning of the prayers. Oral recitation of loshn koydesh prayers focus on accuracy, fluency, and the performance of earnest intention. During loshn koydesh oral prayer, teachers encourage girls to display culturally appropriate emotions that focus on individual intention, most often manifested through prayer which is hoyekh un klor ‘loud and clear’. Loudness and clear articulation of the prayers is not a mirror of sincere individual intention. Rather, these are tools, along with God’s language, that help develop internal religious desires through enunciation of loshn koydesh prayer. Teachers consistently reminded their students whenever they were distracted or inattentive during prayers, ‘Me davent nisht far a mora. Me davent far de aybeshter, in er iz iberal’ (‘You don’t pray to a teacher. You pray to God, and he is everywhere’).3 Indeed, one of the categories for the school-wide monthly award ceremony is davent mit kavune ‘prays with sincere intention’. Participation in loshn koydesh oral prayer is part of a broader Hasidic semiotic ideology where signifying practices of ritual cultivate the interior self. Teachers told me that even if girls do not have the right ‘feelings’ during prayer, these are bound to develop over time through repetitive ritual practice, especially when girls energetically enunciate the words loudly and clearly. Oral loshn koydesh prayer is part of the Hasidic agenda of training young bodies through prayer with the cultural expectation that this process will eventually create the internal desire to fulfill God’s commandments. However, acquiring loshn koydesh literacy is di¤erent. Beginning in preschool, girls are formally introduced to the Hebrew alphabet and over the next few years begin to learn to read in loshn koydesh. Di¤erent Hasidic sects have di¤erent beliefs about teaching sacred text, if any, to girls in school. The most religiously stringent Hasidic groups (e.g., Satmar Hasidic Jews) will not allow girls to read any texts, believing this to be a ‘modern’ innovation and, hence, a danger to Jewish continuity.

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Instead, teachers are given short synopses of the biblical portion of the week which they then translate into Yiddish and narrate orally to their students. In the more moderate Bobover Hasidic school I worked in, girls were allowed to read from the Bible and pray from the prayer book (siddur) once they were able to read in loshn koydesh. Both books are considered holy and part of girls’ socialization included learning how to comport themselves in the presence of these texts. For example, girls who accidentally put their feet on loshn koydesh books which they kept under their desks were always chastised by their teacher. In preschool, teachers present the Hebrew alphabet, one letter a week, including the diacritic vowels which girls practice reproducing on worksheets and orally. When girls enter first grade, at age five or six, girls sit in rows all facing the teacher. Girls’ early reading in loshn koydesh is carefully monitored by teachers and requires no display of individualized affect as does oral recitation of loshn koydesh prayer. The goal of girls’ loshn koydesh literacy at this point is for girls to learn to read from a prayer book rather than recite orally. Ultimately, once they are older, girls should be able to read from the prayer book silently and by themselves with the culturally appropriate internal emotions. Other than concentration, older girls and women rarely display much a¤ect while reading prayers. The first grade class I observed over the course of a year worked in an aleph-binu (a book that teaches Hebrew phonics). They began by reviewing Hebrew consonants and diacritic vowels. Girls then combined vowels and consonants to orally produce consonant–vowel clusters. Eventually, these sounds were combined into recognizable loshn koydesh words. Early on, the teacher, Mrs. Silver, placed emphasis on having each girl individually name a letter, a vowel, and then produce the sound accurately. Little attention was paid to how girls enunciated, in contrast to oral prayer, as long as their reading was audible to the teacher. For example, when girls learned the diacritic vowel kumets, each girl took a turn reciting, beginning with, ‘kumets aleph (‫[ )ָא‬u], kumets bayz (‫[ )ָב‬bu]’ and continuing through the alphabet. Mrs. Silver placed a great deal of importance on ‘knowing the plats’ ‘place’ when it was one’s turn to read aloud, often rewarding girls with a gumdrop when they were able to follow along with other girls’ reading. The acquisition of literacy in loshn koydesh focuses on the ability of each girl to decode the written text and orally produce the correct sounds. Part of the girls’ task was to attend to the reading of peers, making this a group activity, although they did not correct their peers. The teacher is an ever watchful presence, making sure that girls correctly produce the sounds and eventually words. Even when the girls were able to haltingly read in loshn koydesh by the end of the year from the prayer book, the

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emphasis was on accurate pronunciation aloud, rather than a¤ective performance or interpretation of the meaning of the text, which some teachers told me does occur in higher grades. In a few cases, I observed a firstgrader sound out a loshn koydesh word and then recognize its meaning. Mrs. Silver acknowledged the girl’s insight by nodding, but just encouraged her to continue reading. Emphasis on accurate verbal production of written text may be similar to studies of Muslim children’s literacy acquisition of the classical Arabic in the Qur’an (Moore forthcoming; Wagner 1993). When the written language is believed to be the actual words of God, being able to decode and produce accurately is critical. However, as Keane (2007) notes, representational economies are composed of interconnected signifying practices mediated by semiotic ideologies. It is girls’ reading of loshn koydesh texts for accuracy that prepares them to increasingly pray out loud with the appropriate external displays of a¤ect. Both of these loshn koydesh practices prepare girls to participate performatively and internally, in terms of desire, as pious Jewish women.

4.

Hasidic Yiddish literacy: Interpretation and comprehension

In contrast to loshn koydesh literacy, which is about religious practice, a¤ect, and desires, Hasidic Yiddish literacy cannot be characterized as secular or religious. Its multiple uses, its linguistic relationship to loshn koydesh, and its historical association with Jewish women’s morality literature make it a suitable medium for girls’ (Jewish) academic progress, as well as their moral development. The semiotic ideology of Hasidic Yiddish literacy emphasizes an authoritative interpretation of text and the importance of individual comprehension. This directly contrasts to the semiotic ideologies around individual decoding and a¤ective performance of loshn koydesh literacy and loshn koydesh oral prayer. The semiotic ideology of authoritative interpretation was evident in the weekly loshn koydesh biblical portion, which was always translated by a school administrator into Hasidic Yiddish and narrated by Mrs. Silver. In contrast to the rote recitation and reading of loshn koydesh prayer, the translated narratives addressed contemporary Hasidic gendered concerns. The story of the Jewish holiday of Purim, for example, included a fairytale-like rendition of how a Persian king chose the Jewish Esther to be his new Queen. Mrs. Silver described how Esther’s simple beauty shone out from her Jewish soul in contrast to the vain materialism of the Gentile girls also vying to be queen. Girls sat quietly and listened enthusiastically to Mrs. Silver, although they rarely asked or were encouraged to ask questions. In these

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oral Yiddish narratives of sacred text, there is one authoritative interpretation that girls are encouraged to understand as a model for their own lives, although girls certainly do not always follow this model (see Fader 2006, 2007b). Hasidic Yiddish literacy is formally taught in Bnos Yisruel during the morning classes beginning in first grade. Using a phonics approach, teachers build on girls’ knowledge of loshn koydesh script, which is the same as Yiddish script excluding the diacritic vowels. Once girls can recognize the distinct Yiddish vowel system, their familiarity with loshn koydesh and their fluency in Yiddish from home enables them to read quite easily from a series of Yiddish primers published by the school. Each chapter of the primer opens with a Yiddish phonics lesson and then uses the target words in short, morally didactic stories that socialize girls into ideals of Hasidic femininity. For example, one day the lesson focused on the Yiddish vowel ‫[ יי‬aI] using the assonances fayn, klayd, vays, maydl ‘fine, dress, white, girl’. The story was about a good little girl named Chanele who always listened to her mother and helped her get ready for the Sabbath. Another story girls read aloud together was about Devorele, a little girl who was so dirty that she had no friends. Even a little bird would not play with her. When she realizes she must clean herself up, she is no longer sad and has many friends. Hasidic Yiddish literacy here not only has girls practicing certain vowels, it is also presenting a model for the social consequences for little girls who are not neat and clean, as well as the loving rewards for girls who help their mothers. This moral component to Hasidic Yiddish reading is explicitly gendered as it has been historically (Shandler 2005). Hasidic Yiddish literacy instruction includes testing for individual comprehension. For example, one day after Mrs. Silver introduced the target words and students repeated them, Mrs. Silver had students do a reading comprehension exercise that is both an individualized task and a group activity. (1) 1 Mrs. Silver: 2 3

S1: Mrs. Silver:

Circle de rikhtige vort, vus maynt ringl arim? Circle the right word, what does ringl arim mean? Circle (to a student) Di host gemakht a line, underline. Ringl maynt circle. Number ayns. Chanele iz zek, akht oder tsen yur alt? (to a student) You made a line, underline. Ringl means circle. Number one. Chanele is six, eight, or ten years old?

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4 5

Ss: Mrs. Silver:

6

Ss:

7

Mrs. Silver:

() Zeks, ringl arim zeks, in the parentheses du . . . Number tsvay, Chanele is aros shpatsirin mit ir shabes oder vokhn klayd? Six. Circle six, in the parentheses there. . . . Number two. Chanele is taking a walk with her Sabbath or weekday dress? Shabes. Sabbath. Shabes. Sabbath.

Girls have to individually circle the correct answer, but they are also able to call out the answer first and be sure that it is correct. These activities are similar to reading comprehension activities that occur in North American public schools. Yiddish is being treated as an academic subject, a distinctly postwar phenomenon, where the emphasis is on accurate reading of a text and the ability to display comprehension of its meaning (Shandler 2005). They even learn the Hasidic Yiddish words for the academic activities of circling and underlining. However, as I noted, the literacy activities which aim to practice reading aloud and which emphasize comprehension are also often infused with moral didactism which is part of the broader socialization of Hasidic femininity. In the acquisition of Hasidic Yiddish literacy, gendered character building and academic instruction are mutually constitutive, all overseen by an authorized adult, Mrs. Silver, who makes sure that girls understand and interpret narratives and educational texts in the only ‘right’ way. 5.

English literacies: Resignifying the secular

In contrast to first-grade girls’ morning literacy activities, the afternoons are English medium (often a more standard English as teachers were rarely Hasidic). Subjects are state mandated and include science, social studies, math, and language arts. Rather than the communally produced Yiddish readers and religious texts used in the mornings, in the afternoons, girls use standardized textbooks produced by the New York State Board of Education. Nevertheless, underlying Hasidic semiotic ideologies about language, texts, gender, and Jewish–Gentile di¤erence created a continuity of purpose between the Jewish morning and secular/English afternoon sessions. The secular teacher, Mrs. Nathan, presented English-language literacy without the explicit moral content that Hasidic Yiddish literacy included

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or the religious authority inherent in loshn koydesh literacy. Like Hasidic Yiddish literacy instruction, the emphasis in English literacy instruction was on phonics, repetition, and comprehension. By first grade, girls were already familiar with the mechanics of English literacy and were able to read and write simple sentences. The pedagogy in the afternoon was the same as the mornings and did not include any child-centered learning. After Mrs. Nathan presented a brief language lesson of the day, students would practice the target letter or blended sound both through group recitation and through individualized work in workbooks. When girls read aloud from an English reader, they each took a turn, just as they read aloud in loshn koydesh or Hasidic Yiddish. In contrast to Hasidic Yiddish literacy lessons, there was little discussion between teacher and students about the content of the stories as meaningful to the girls’ lives. Indeed, many of the lessons seemed quite remote from the girls’ experiences. This was especially the case in science lessons which, during the observation period, emphasized animals and the natural world, both of which are outside of most urban Hasidic girls’ experiences. Mrs. Nathan expressed little concern that girls did not know, for example, that colt meant a baby horse or the di¤erence between a hawk and a chicken. A subtle message may have been that English secular subjects are a necessary part of girls’ responsibility for Jewish communal survival, but are not especially relevant to girls’ lives. Sometimes, however, the very di¤erent topics and images in textbooks created the opportunity for teaching girls to read a di¤erent set of signs from those printed on the page; girls could also ‘read’ signs of Jewish difference from Gentiles, the unmarked, normative figures in these texts. Peshkin (1986), in his study of a fundamentalist Christian school in North America, similarly notes that teachers integrated Christian texts and declarations of faith into the teaching of secular subjects. Christian teachers explained that their e¤orts helped distinguish themselves from the ‘secular humanism’ which they said was the unspoken religion in the public schools. For example, one afternoon, a lesson in science simultaneously became a lesson in how to recognize embodied and material signs of Gentile di¤erence in a secular text. Mrs. Nathan was presenting the concept that all living beings need food to live. As a group they looked at a picture in their textbooks that showed a family eating dinner together. Mrs. Nathan asked questions printed in the teacher’s manual, guiding students through the lesson. (2) 1 Mrs. Nathan: Ok, girls, what’s going on here (in the picture). 2 Ss: They’re eating supper.

632 3 4 5 6 7

Ayala Fader Mrs. Nathan: Ss: Mrs. Nathan: S1: Mrs. Nathan:

Why do they have to eat? (Silence). Why do they have to eat? So they could be, so they should be able to live. Ok, so they should be able to live, grow.

Then, deviating from the teacher’s manual, Mrs. Nathan asked girls to look more closely at the picture. It was then that she realized that she had to point out that the family was not Jewish. (3) 1 2 3 4 5

Mrs. Nathan: S2: Mrs. Nathan: S3: Mrs. Nathan:

6 7

S4: Mrs. Nathan:

8

S4:

9

Mrs. Nathan:

10 11 12 13 14

Ss: S5: Mrs. Nathan: S5: Mrs. Nathan:

What do they look like they’re eating over there? Chicken Chicken. Broccoli. Good, that green thing is broccoli. What are they drinking? Milk. (long pause). Well, obviously they’re not Jewish. Right? We don’t eat chicken and milk together. (Incredulously) They’re drinking and eating milk with their . . . I know, but they’re not Jewish, right? Are they wearing yarmulkes [‘skullcaps’] and tsistis [‘ritual fringed undergarment’]? No. And they have short sleeves. What? We see their elbow. (Reading from the text). Why do people need food? All living things need to eat.

Mrs. Nathan is confronted with a family who mixes milk and meat. For Jews whose laws of keeping kosher include separation between milk and meat, this is a violation of one of God’s commandments. Her response is to quickly point out to the students that these are not Jews, and so not obligated by Jewish law. The fact that they could be unobservant or less observant Jews is not discussed, as this is considered a complicated and problematic topic. Then, Mrs. Nathan read the other embodied signs which reveal that the family in the picture is Gentile. They are not dressed the way that Jews dress. The boys do not have the ritual garments that mark them, and as the student points out, the girl’s elbows are exposed, which is considered immodest. Implicit to this science lesson is that Jews

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can be recognized in secular texts by embodied and material signs that index moral Jewish persons. Those without these signs are by default Gentiles. Writing in English, in contrast to reading, emphasized what I have described as values of Hasidic femininity: neatness, following directions, and conforming the body. These issues, like being clean and unmaterialistic, will ultimately be important valued personal qualities on the matchmaking market. For example, during the research period the English principal in charge of secular subjects decided that penmanship among the girls was su¤ering. She instituted a weekly handwriting contest for the elementary school, with the winner’s work being displayed in the hallway for all to see. A winning paper perfectly copied the stenciled example, which had a sentence and some numbers. Letters had to be formed the same way as the stencil, hit all the same lines on the ruled paper, and contain no erasures. Once a week, Mrs. Nathan checked the handwriting assignment and criticized or praised each letter and number the girls made. Her comments to students as she walked up and down the rows included: (4)

Round, a round ‘e’, a round ‘n’, round. Is this the way my ‘e’ looks like? This is how you write your name? That’s not how you write it. Boy, it looks awful. Why is that ‘w’ so big? Now, write small and neat.

Even a social studies lesson about the formation of the United States became an opportunity for Mrs. Nathan to stress handwriting as students copied a short paragraph about the first thirteen colonies on the blackboard into their notebooks. When a student asked what the word ‘colonies’ meant in the paragraph, Mrs. Nathan briefly told her, ‘Before it was America, it used to be made up of a few little groups of people.’ There was no other discussion about the content of the paragraph. Mrs. Nathan’s concern seemed to be that girls learn to copy the paragraph neatly and accurately. The semiotic ideology that informs the socialization into English-language penmanship includes a rote, embodied aspect which shares some features of acquiring literacy in loshn koydesh. Both focus on producing the correct form rather than comprehension; however, there is also a di¤erence. In loshn koydesh reading, comprehension of the text is less important than accuracy of the sacred words of God, preparing girls to more a¤ectively participate in their oral recitation of loshn koydesh prayers. Comprehension of North American history in Mrs. Nathan’s class takes a backseat to developing qualities that are valued for Hasidic girls, including neatness and the ability to follow

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directions. Through this activity, girls are most likely being socialized into a strategy for taking Jewish ‘truth’ from Gentile texts through interpretation of signs.

6.

Children’s literature: Censoring and transforming the secular

In the context of leisure literacy practices, the majority of which are in English, adults must check texts for potentially dangerous signs. Censorship practices by adults of mainstream English books make explicit what and whom Hasidic women fear their girls might encounter. Further, to address concerns over inappropriate reading, a transformation process is currently underway where the North American genre of children and young adult literature is made Jewish; Orthodox publishers increasingly put out morally edifying narratives that use Jewish material and linguistic signs. Although Hasidic girls go to private Hasidic schools, are forbidden from watching television or going to the movies, they are hardly living in hermetically sealed communities in the middle of Brooklyn. Mainstream English language books and magazines are within easy reach, and girls, in contrast to boys whose school schedules are more intense, have some time for reading as an individualized activity. Parents and teachers told me that English goyishe mayses ‘Gentile stories’ in contrast to Jewish ekhte mayses, the ‘true’ stories told to girls from the Torah and its commentaries, have the potential to contaminate and pollute the pure souls of Jewish girls in much the same way that the ingestion of non-kosher food will physically degrade a Jewish person’s body and mind. Indeed, books are described by teachers, mothers and even girls as ‘kosher’ or ‘not kosher’, as are other cultural forms such as music or clothing. In the school library, censorship practices are mandated from the administration. For example, texts with inappropriate displays of the body, even bathing suits, are simply blacked out or entire series of books are forbidden. The school is especially vigilant over mainstream English books that portray any kind of romance between men and women. When, for example, a student brought in a story of Cinderella (based on the animated Disney movie) for her kindergarten teacher to read, the teacher first went to consult the principal. She came back and told the girls that there was not enough time to read the book. When I asked her about the decision after school, imagining that the plunging neckline of Cinderella’s ball gown had been the problem, she told me that the issue was that Cinderella dances with the prince and kisses him in public. This, she told me, will not be these girls’ lives, so why should they be exposed?

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The school also attempts to monitor the leisure reading practices of its students outside of the school by, for example, forbidding students from going to the public library even if supervised. This is an example of increasing levels of religious stringency, as most of the girls’ mothers actually had grown up going to the library. When the school administration heard that some families were still going to the public library, they ordered spot checks of girls’ school bags, confiscated any library cards and ripped them up. Children whose families allow the library always have a chaperone, an adult or an older child, who checks each book and makes sure it is kosher. Topics such as divorce, for example, common in North American children’s literature, are not considered kosher. In addition to censoring English leisure reading for girls, Jewish presses in New York and in Israel have been publishing alternative English fiction for girls. A clerk from the popular Eichler’s Books in Boro Park reported that the market for Jewish fiction aimed particularly at girls has expanded rapidly within the last fifteen years. Previously, he noted, reading material for children and young adults was translated from Hebrew and was mainly nonfiction. Today, Jewish fiction is written either by an individual woman or a group of women, often based in Israel or Brooklyn and supervised by rabbis who ensure that books are kosher. These books, like the Yiddish primers I discussed above, draw on shared belief about the purpose of girls’ literacy: regardless of language, reading should be morally didactic. Most of these books are not for boys who, their mothers told me, get their moral education from immersion in Torah study. Similarly, in a phone interview, an editor at Targum Press told me, ‘Boys just don’t have time to waste on that kind of reading (fiction). They’re busy studying Torah.’ A notable innovation for girls’ books is the explicit claim made by publishers that the books are simultaneously ‘fun and entertaining’. As the English-language Judaica Press (located in Flatbush, a Litvish Brooklyn neighborhood) put up on its Web site: ‘‘Our books (for children) find that delicate balance between teaching important lessons and still being fun and enjoyable’’ (www.JudaicaPress.com). Often called Yiddishe ‘Jewish’ books, the new English-language genre strives to both entertain and transmit a specifically Orthodox Jewish message for girls, one which avoids reference to anything which would be unkosher and which promotes the values of Orthodox Jewish femininity. Yiddishe books in English are marked not only by morally didactic narratives. They include Jewish signs, linguistic, embodied, and material. For example, the majority of the books are written in a variety of English, similar to Hasidic Yiddish but more standard, that has influence from

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Yiddish and loshn koydesh lexica. In a book aimed at boys and girls ages five through eight, The Shabbos Queen and Other Shabbos Stories (Fuchs 2002), the Yiddish or loshn koydesh words, such as shabbos ‘Sabbath’ or mitsve ‘commandments’, are transliterated but not translated or explained. Many are not marked by italics but are simply integrated into the English text. The homes have Jewish ritual objects throughout. All the males in the story wear large yarmulkes, ritual prayer fringes, and have long side curls. Men have long, uncut beards. The mother figure has her hair covered completely with a kerchief (tikhl ) and is wearing modest clothing. Personal names are also marked as Yiddish/loshn koydesh names, such as Mashie, Malkie, Moyshie, or Dovid. Yiddishe books in English appropriate and transform the form and function of secular North American fiction for children and young adults. On the basis of cultural and religious beliefs about signs as nonarbitrary and God-given, Hasidic adults mine the entertainment value of mainstream children’s genres while redeeming their ‘true’ Jewish meaning through Jewish signs and stories.

7.

Conclusion

Conceptualizing literacy as a series of interconnected signifying practices and signs interpreted by semiotic ideologies problematizes easy assumptions of what constitutes religious or secular literacy, orality or literacy, and ultimately even modernity and tradition. Attending to how young girls are socialized into literacy’s representational economy provides insight into how nonliberal girls are taught to understand texts, interpretation, rote repetition, ritual performance, a¤ect, entertainment, comprehension, and the ‘true’, Jewish meanings waiting to be redeemed from secular and Gentile texts and cultural forms. The range of semiotic ideologies I have discussed in di¤erent languages, genres, and contexts share a broader, overarching semiotic ideology, one where signs are not arbitrary and there is one ‘truth’ given by God. Across a diverse group of literacy signifying practices and material forms, Hasidic women teach girls that every sign must be read in the right, Jewish way, something which is taught by communal hierarchies of authority from God, to the rebbe, to a teacher or a ‘mommy’. It is this belief about signs that creates connections among literacy activities which may be framed as secular or religious, but which are shown to fall neatly into neither of these social scientific categories by claims to ‘the truth’. Hasidic literacy socialization practices, I suggest further, are part of a broader nonliberal project of denying that modern civilization should be

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secular, that religion is a discrete set of private practices, or that all religions and cultures are equally valid. The autonomous model of literacy (e.g., Goody 1977) was based on the belief that literacy was a transformative practice that could create the conditions for a modern, industrialized society. Hasidic women and girls’ also believe that literacy is transformative. However, despite their active participation in the modern urban industrialized world, Hasidic women and girls hope that their reading and writing (in addition to other practices) will build up the Jewish community and, ultimately, bring the final redemption. The Hasidic case study highlights the necessity of ethnographically investigating literacies at the level of signifying practices across contexts, languages, and genres. This kind of research will not only shed light on literacies in nonliberal religious communities; it can also simultaneously clarify secular (and to some extent Protestant) ideologies of reading in North American educational contexts as well (see Elster 2003: 663). When, for example, a young high-school girl can express her faith in God in a poem written in her ‘secular’ language arts journal, she is engaging with secular literacy’s form, but using that form to individually express the timeless ‘truth’ of Judaism: Water ¼ Torah Water . . . The life of a seed For water is its need To sprout and bloom and grow Into a beautiful tree Water. . . . For fish to swim and live and multiply For swans and ducks to enjoy as time goes by For anything to live and prosper To be able to behold nature Torah ‫ היא נמשלה למ׳ם‬to water4 On which Jews live forever For just as water is a basic need To Torah every Jew must heed Torah . . . A little boy studying diligently With his father at his side, shaking accordingly As he chants those words quietly That is how he lives daily Torah. . . . A life to live in this world

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For every Jew to do the best he could Torah is the life for me and you Torah, you taught me what I am, A GOD FEARING JEW

Notes *

1.

2. 3.

4.

Special thanks to Laura Sterponi and the two anonymous reviewers for Text & Talk. The broader research on which this article is based was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Jewish Memorial Foundation, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Lucius Littauer Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Spencer Foundation. The writing of the article was supported by a Fordham Faculty Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am very grateful to all. Hasidic English and Hasidic Yiddish are syncretic varieties of English and Yiddish, respectively, which I describe in Fader (2007a) and Fader (forthcoming). Briefly, each linguistic variety incorporates lexical, phonological, orthographic, and grammatical items from the other language and also from loshn koydesh. Hasidic women call their Yiddish most often hasidishe Yiddish ‘Hasidic Yiddish’ or haymishe Yiddish ‘Homey Yiddish’ and they call their variety of English either Yinglish or simply English. It is also important to note that Yiddish and loshn koydesh share an orthography, and many loshn koydesh words are integrated into Yiddish, along with Germanic and Slavic elements. For more on Hasidic history and sociology, see Rosman (1996) or Hundert (1991). For more on the politics of Jewish ethnography, see Fader (2007b). All translations are from Yiddish. Yiddish is in italics. Routinized code switches/ borrowings from English into Yiddish are italicized and underlined. I transcribe Yiddish from its Hebrew script using a modified version of the YIVO system (see Weinreich 1990). This was done to best represent the dialect of Yiddish spoken by Boro Park Hasidim. Unclear utterances are in blank parentheses ( ) and context notes are in plain text in parentheses (context notes). In the original text, the loshn koydesh is handwritten by the author and is a translation of ‘Torah is like water’.

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