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 so-
cial scientific categories of religious or secular literacies, orality and liter-
acy, tradition and modernity. The focus of the article is the literacy prac-
tices 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 English-
language books for children. Across contexts, languages, and genres of
Hasidic literacy socialization, distinct semiotic ideologies share an interpre-
tive project: to teach girls to decode signs as nonarbitrary, that is, as di-
vinely intended, and to turn what seem to be arbitrary or Gentile/secular
signs into Jewish ones.

Keywords: nonliberal religious community; language socialization; semi-

otic ideologies; gender; multilingualism.

1. 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 Text & Talk 28–5 (2008), pp. 621–641

Online 1860–7349 DOI 10.1515/TEXT.2008.032
6 Walter de Gruyter
622 Ayala Fader

religious. Ethnographic approaches to literacy from the 1980s onward

have challenged the implicit evolutionary framework of dichotomies in-
forming 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 mo-
dernity (Asad 1993, 2003); however, this dichotomy has rarely been pro-
blematized 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 cat-
egories. Instead, through an analysis of multilingual literacy socialization
practices among nonliberal Hasidic Jews, an inflection of Jewish Ortho-
doxy, I attend to the ways that cultural/religious beliefs about signs,
what Keane (2007) calls ‘semiotic ideologies’, are taught to the next gen-
eration of believers. This approach can tell us not only about the dynam-
ics of religious and secular literacies, but also how children’s socializa-
tion into particular relationships with signs are integral to the formation
of subjectivities. Hasidic Jews o¤er a particularly relevant case study be-
cause their critique of secular modernity includes e¤orts to dismantle dis-
tinctions between the secular and the religious, thus creating an alterna-
tive 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 de-
fining 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 im-
plications 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 interpre-
tation. This shapes how Jewish texts are translated or not, interpreted,
read, and studied (1993b; see also Handelman 1992; Spolsky 1983). Fur-
ther, D. Boyarin (1993) has discussed the distinctiveness of Jewish reli-
gious 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
 Reading Jewish signs 623

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 lan-
guages read, written, and spoken within the community are gendered as
well. Loshn koydesh is the language of prayer for all community mem-
bers. 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 educa-
tion 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 liter-
acies in di¤erent languages. Girls are socialized in the context of religious
loshn koydesh literacy to understand signs as God-given and nonarbi-
trary. How, then, do they interact with texts that are not specifically reli-
gious 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 so-
cialization 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 lan-
guage in culturally specific ways (e.g., Baquedano-López 2004; Kulick
and Stroud 1993; Reder and Reed Wikelund 1993; Schie¤elin 1996,
2000; Zissner 1986). Two recent studies, among Roma children in Spain
624 Ayala Fader

(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 multilin-
gual 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 mean-
ing (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 con-
texts, and most important, can account for dynamics among multiple lan-
guages 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 socializa-
tion 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 acquisi-
tion 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, lan-
guages, 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 cate-
gorization 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, mys-

tical, 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 author-
ity given to texts today is actually a recent innovation, one aspect of an
 Reading Jewish signs 625

unexpected increasing religious stringency (Friedman 1992; Heilman

2006; Heilman and Friedman 1991; Soleveitchik 1994). Recent scholar-
ship 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‰li-
ated Hasidic Jews. There are also Italians and Latinos, as well as a
smaller population of Jews with di¤erent levels or styles of religious strin-
gency. These include Litvish ‘Lithuanian’ Jews, who are equally reli-
giously 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 fig-
ures (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 morn-
ing 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 me-
dium 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
626 Ayala Fader

parents, siblings, and relatives to recite a set body of loshn koydesh pray-
ers 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 wak-
ing up, after going to the bathroom, before eating, at bedtime, etc., inde-
pendently. When girls enter preschool at age three, they can recite many
if not most of these prayers by heart, even if they sometimes make mis-
takes which adults good-naturedly correct. The school curriculum in-
cludes 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 consis-
tently reminded their students whenever they were distracted or inatten-
tive during prayers, ‘Me davent nisht far a mora. Me davent far de ay-
beshter, 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 in-
tention’. 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 re-
petitive 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 expec-
tation 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., Sat-
mar Hasidic Jews) will not allow girls to read any texts, believing this
to be a ‘modern’ innovation and, hence, a danger to Jewish continuity.
 Reading Jewish signs 627

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 con-
sidered holy and part of girls’ socialization included learning how to com-
port themselves in the presence of these texts. For example, girls who ac-
cidentally 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 work-
sheets 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 care-
fully monitored by teachers and requires no display of individualized af-
fect 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 review-
ing 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 individ-
ually name a letter, a vowel, and then produce the sound accurately. Lit-
tle 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, be-
ginning 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 re-
warding 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
628 Ayala Fader

emphasis was on accurate pronunciation aloud, rather than a¤ective per-

formance or interpretation of the meaning of the text, which some teach-
ers told me does occur in higher grades. In a few cases, I observed a first-
grader sound out a loshn koydesh word and then recognize its meaning.
Mrs. Silver acknowledged the girl’s insight by nodding, but just encour-
aged 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 lan-
guage is believed to be the actual words of God, being able to decode and
produce accurately is critical. However, as Keane (2007) notes, represen-
tational 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 ap-
propriate external displays of a¤ect. Both of these loshn koydesh practices
prepare girls to participate performatively and internally, in terms of de-
sire, 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 liter-
ature make it a suitable medium for girls’ (Jewish) academic progress, as
well as their moral development. The semiotic ideology of Hasidic Yid-
dish literacy emphasizes an authoritative interpretation of text and the
importance of individual comprehension. This directly contrasts to the se-
miotic ideologies around individual decoding and a¤ective performance
of loshn koydesh literacy and loshn koydesh oral prayer. The semiotic ide-
ology of authoritative interpretation was evident in the weekly loshn koy-
desh biblical portion, which was always translated by a school adminis-
trator 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 ren-
dition 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 Jew-
ish 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
 Reading Jewish signs 629

oral Yiddish narratives of sacred text, there is one authoritative interpre-

tation 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 rec-
ognize the distinct Yiddish vowel system, their familiarity with loshn koy-
desh 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 Cha-
nele 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 com-
prehension. 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: Circle de rikhtige vort, vus maynt ringl arim?
Circle the right word, what does ringl arim mean?
2 S1: Circle
3 Mrs. Silver: (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?
630 Ayala Fader

4 Ss: ()
5 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?
6 Ss: Shabes.
Sabbath.
7 Mrs. Silver: 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 Amer-
ican public schools. Yiddish is being treated as an academic subject, a dis-
tinctly postwar phenomenon, where the emphasis is on accurate reading
of a text and the ability to display comprehension of its meaning (Shan-
dler 2005). They even learn the Hasidic Yiddish words for the academic
activities of circling and underlining. However, as I noted, the literacy ac-
tivities which aim to practice reading aloud and which emphasize com-
prehension are also often infused with moral didactism which is part of
the broader socialization of Hasidic femininity. In the acquisition of Hasi-
dic Yiddish literacy, gendered character building and academic instruc-
tion 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 after-
noons, 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
 Reading Jewish signs 631

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 rec-
itation 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 discus-
sion 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’ ex-
periences. 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 secu-
lar subjects are a necessary part of girls’ responsibility for Jewish commu-
nal 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 dif-
ference 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 dec-
larations 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 Gen-
tile 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 pic-
ture 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 Ayala Fader

3 Mrs. Nathan: Why do they have to eat?

4 Ss: (Silence).
5 Mrs. Nathan: Why do they have to eat?
6 S1: So they could be, so they should be able to live.
7 Mrs. Nathan: 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 Mrs. Nathan: What do they look like they’re eating over there?
2 S2: Chicken
3 Mrs. Nathan: Chicken.
4 S3: Broccoli.
5 Mrs. Nathan: Good, that green thing is broccoli. What are they
drinking?
6 S4: Milk.
7 Mrs. Nathan: (long pause). Well, obviously they’re not Jewish.
Right? We don’t eat chicken and milk together.
8 S4: (Incredulously) They’re drinking and eating milk
with their . . .
9 Mrs. Nathan: I know, but they’re not Jewish, right? Are they
wearing yarmulkes [‘skullcaps’] and tsistis [‘ritual
fringed undergarment’]?
10 Ss: No.
11 S5: And they have short sleeves.
12 Mrs. Nathan: What?
13 S5: We see their elbow.
14 Mrs. Nathan: (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
 Reading Jewish signs 633

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 de-
scribed as values of Hasidic femininity: neatness, following directions,
and conforming the body. These issues, like being clean and unmaterialis-
tic, will ultimately be important valued personal qualities on the match-
making 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 hall-
way for all to see. A winning paper perfectly copied the stenciled exam-
ple, 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 be-
came an opportunity for Mrs. Nathan to stress handwriting as students
copied a short paragraph about the first thirteen colonies on the black-
board into their notebooks. When a student asked what the word ‘colo-
nies’ 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 socializa-
tion 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; how-
ever, 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
634 Ayala Fader

directions. Through this activity, girls are most likely being socialized into
a strategy for taking Jewish ‘truth’ from Gentile texts through interpreta-
tion 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. Censor-
ship 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 commen-
taries, 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 ko-
sher’, as are other cultural forms such as music or clothing.
In the school library, censorship practices are mandated from the ad-
ministration. 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 an-
imated 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 Cin-
derella 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?
 Reading Jewish signs 635

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 in-
creasing levels of religious stringency, as most of the girls’ mothers actu-
ally had grown up going to the library. When the school administration
heard that some families were still going to the public library, they or-
dered 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 ko-
sher. 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 fic-
tion for girls. A clerk from the popular Eichler’s Books in Boro Park re-
ported that the market for Jewish fiction aimed particularly at girls has
expanded rapidly within the last fifteen years. Previously, he noted, read-
ing 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 Brook-
lyn 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 pub-
lishers 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 mes-
sage for girls, one which avoids reference to anything which would be un-
kosher and which promotes the values of Orthodox Jewish femininity.
Yiddishe books in English are marked not only by morally didactic nar-
ratives. 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
636 Ayala Fader

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 ex-
plained. 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 koy-
desh 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 assump-
tions 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 in-
sight into how nonliberal girls are taught to understand texts, interpreta-
tion, rote repetition, ritual performance, a¤ect, entertainment, compre-
hension, and the ‘true’, Jewish meanings waiting to be redeemed from
secular and Gentile texts and cultural forms. The range of semiotic ideol-
ogies 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 connec-
tions among literacy activities which may be framed as secular or reli-
gious, but which are shown to fall neatly into neither of these social scien-
tific 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
 Reading Jewish signs 637

secular, that religion is a discrete set of private practices, or that all reli-
gions and cultures are equally valid. The autonomous model of literacy
(e.g., Goody 1977) was based on the belief that literacy was a transforma-
tive practice that could create the conditions for a modern, industrialized
society. Hasidic women and girls’ also believe that literacy is transforma-
tive. However, despite their active participation in the modern urban in-
dustrialized world, Hasidic women and girls hope that their reading and
writing (in addition to other practices) will build up the Jewish commu-
nity 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 reli-
gious communities; it can also simultaneously clarify secular (and to
some extent Protestant) ideologies of reading in North American educa-
tional 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
638 Ayala Fader

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

* 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 An-
thropological Research, and the Spencer Foundation. The writing of the article was sup-
ported by a Fordham Faculty Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Human-
ities. I am very grateful to all.
1. Hasidic English and Hasidic Yiddish are syncretic varieties of English and Yiddish, re-
spectively, which I describe in Fader (2007a) and Fader (forthcoming). Briefly, each lin-
guistic 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 impor-
tant to note that Yiddish and loshn koydesh share an orthography, and many loshn koy-
desh words are integrated into Yiddish, along with Germanic and Slavic elements.
2. For more on Hasidic history and sociology, see Rosman (1996) or Hundert (1991). For
more on the politics of Jewish ethnography, see Fader (2007b).
3. 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).
4. 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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Ayala Fader received her doctorate from New York University with a specialization in lin-
guistic anthropology. She is currently an assistant professor of anthropology in the Depart-
ment of Sociology and Anthropology at Fordham University. Her research interests include
Jews in contemporary urban contexts, multilingualism, gender, childhood, and religion.
Her book, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, is
forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Address for correspondence: Department of
Sociology and Anthropology, Fordham University, Lincoln Center, 113 West 60th Street,
Room 916, New York, NY 10023, USA 3fader@fordham.edu4.