THIS VOLUME grapples with the common assumption that media-driven popular culture has weakened ethnic-religious ties of community with each advance in communication technology, and has been especially detrimental to traditioncentred groups such as Orthodox Jews. Popular culture theorists have long asserted that the very notion of ‘popular’ works against the survival of ethnic-religious groups socially interacting in locally bounded areas (Nye 1970: 6). A leader in this school of thought, Russel Nye, asserted that the idea of popular culture, associated with urbanization and industrialization, depends on artists and agents who exploit media and create cultural standards. He proclaimed that in order to create for a mass audience made possible by communication technology, ‘the popular artists cannot take into consideration the individualities and preferences of minority groups’. Nye explained that ‘since the popular arts aim at the largest common denominator, they tend to standardize at the median level of majority expectation’, and that objective of standardization typically cut out marginalized Jewish urban enclaves in the diaspora (1970: 6).

Importantly for the discussion among authors in this volume, Nye theorized that the process of popularization depends on a mass audience, consuming secularized cultural expressions that became accessible in Western societies through communication media on a national and even global scale after the eighteenth century. To establish this audience, composed of strangers to one another, institutions as well as industries often function in the areas of entertainment to convince a populace whose primary social frame of reference is the localized face-to-face community that benefits accrue from consumption and communication through mass media, rather than localized, often oral conduits. These promised benefits might include more individual freedom and mobility, coupled with diminished control by an elite class or local religious authorities. The advent of popular culture purportedly diminishes the need for public space and peer pressure, since consumers can make private choices about what and when information is consumed. Brokers for popular culture implied that the embrace of mass market products was progressive, in the sense of fostering change in the future by erasing the hold of elders and emphasizing imaginative, trendy possibilities for the individual desires for gratification of urbanizing, ‘modernizing’ youth.