How to Read This Book: Jewish Lights Publishing and the Pragmatics of Spiritual Reading

Abstract

This paper considers how print culture was mobilized in the early 1990s to transmit spiritual beliefs, experiences, and emotions 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. 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 for an imagined community of readers.