The Skirball Cultural Center has awarded the 2023–2024 Howard I. Friedman Memorial Graduate Essay Prize (The Friedman Prize) to Alona Bach for her essay, "Electric Yiddishkeit." 

In her essay, Bach reflects on how electric lighting technologies shaped and were shaped by Orthodox Sabbath observance in the United States. Bach uses her sources to reveal a non-hegemonic relationship between technology and religious observance that is based on entanglement and adaptation, rather than antagonism or replacement. 

As the winning entry in this nationwide competition, Bach has received the prize of $5,000 and recognition in the Skirball's Oasis magazine. Bach was also recognized at a public program on December 3, 2024 featuring Skirball Rabbi in Residence, Beau Shapiro and 2023-24 Friedman Prize runner-up, Sophia Shoulson.

"My family didn’t, of course, pray to dynamos or sing psalms about batteries. But we certainly talked about electrical technologies in the context of religion, frequently enough that my understanding of their relationship could involve no antagonism, no supersession, no irony. Moreover, it was not a matter of faith or belief to me but of practice—of materiality, habitus, lived religion. How and when I used electric lights was inseparable from my religious practice: my yiddishkeit, Jewishness, was electric."

—Alona Bach, "Electric Yiddishkeit"

The first person who taught me to look at electricity as the antithesis of religion was the historian Henry Adams. He was dead, so he spoke through a chapter in his autobiography. In 1900, he had “haunted” the Great Exposition in Paris, gazing with wonder at the great hall of dynamos. The scale of the hulking electrical generators entranced him. In “the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross;” soon, he wrote of the dynamo, “one began to pray to it.” There is a kind of heresy to praying to a dynamo, to seeing it as another Cross. Did the Virgin mean anything to US-Americans anymore, Adams wondered, or was this source of occult electric power the only sublimity to which they were sensible? Was it true that technology had superseded religion; had it become a new god for the modern age?

Just over ten years after the first public printing of The Education of Henry Adams, Eugene O’Neill posed a similar question about electricity in his play Dynamo, which premiered in New York in 1929. It is a dark, tortured play whose dramatic structure hinges on the contrast between the religious, un-electrified household of Reverend Hutchins Light, and that of his atheist, technology-loving neighbors. Young Reuben Light escapes his father’s constricting fundamentalism only to start to worship the dynamo, but the machine—God’s purported opposite —turns out to be a divinity that is just as unforgiving. By the end of the play, one dogma has simply superseded another.

It is not an accident that these two writers of the early-twentieth-century United States both transposed spiritual fervor onto the dynamo. This was the age of systems, of immense technological projects that dazzled with their scale, of what historian of technology David Nye calls “the American technological sublime”—railroads, bridges, skyscrapers, factories. And electricity. Faced with these new symbols of power, it must have been easy to believe that modernization produced new mechanical gods. “It is to […] the divinity of machinery that we must look for the salvation of society,” prescribed a 1920 article in The Independent, channeling Adams’ piety and O’Neill’s cynicism into both aspiration and policy proposal. 

Many historical actors and theorists alike believed wholeheartedly that the passage of time would necessarily transform religious enthusiasm into technological enthusiasm. Religion comes first, they wrote; then applied science (and, by extension, technological development) follows, with an updated road to salvation. It is an enticingly neat progression. 

But it doesn’t quite hold: in practice, there is no march of progress, no single path. Neither technology nor society is deterministic; religiosity is not always overwritten with the advent of bigger, better, more powerful machines. In fact, most contemporary historians of science critique the “technology-versus-religion fallacy” as being reductive and passé, tinged by implicit Western Christian—particularly Protestant—hegemony. And so to understand other actors and communities beyond that hegemony, we need alternative models of social and technological change. 

Reading these scholars was a relief to me, because they carved out room for my own history (my childhood, my present) alongside Adams, O’Neill, and The Independent. My family didn’t, of course, pray to dynamos or sing psalms about batteries. But we certainly talked about electrical technologies in the context of religion, frequently enough that my understanding of their relationship could involve no antagonism, no supersession, no irony. Moreover, it was not a matter of faith or belief to me but of practice—of materiality, habitus, lived religion. How and when I used electric lights was inseparable from my religious practice: my yiddishkeit, Jewishness, was electric. And this itself had a long history—one that stretched back to Adams’ time and beyond. 

* * *

I grew up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family in the United States, nearly a century after Adams’ epiphany in the dynamo hall. Before I knew much else, I knew about Shabbos, which we observed every Friday night and Saturday. Here is how I understood the day of rest as a toddler: (1) we went to synagogue, (2) we had big meals, (3) we didn’t do art projects, and (4) we didn’t turn the lights on or off. Instead, preparing for Shabbos meant, in part, preparing the lights: leave the bathroom light on, leave the hallway light off. Put the living room light on a timer. Tape over the light switch in the refrigerator, so it doesn’t turn on when you open the door. Plug in the Shabbos lights in the bedroom, the ones where the bulb stays on all 25 hours, but whose light aperture can be completely blocked with a panel by turning the wooden top when you want to go to sleep.

In the community I grew up in, this was unremarkable, absolutely mundane. It was simply what Shabbos was. When my non-Jewish friends would ask me what “Shabbos” entailed, that’s how I’d start to explain it to them, too: “It’s a day when we can’t turn lights on or off.” 

Two decades later, when I began to research the incorporation of electric lights into homes and businesses—a process which began in earnest in the 1880s, and which scholars call the “domestication” of electric light—I also began to wonder if, and when, other Orthodox Jewish children in the United States had begun to identify Shabbos with use-practices of electric light. And I found one answer—my answer—in the early-twentieth-century US-American Yiddish press.

* * *

There are many centers of Yiddish writing, and many centers of electrification, but one crucial, well-documented place of convergence was New York City. The opening of Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street Substation in 1882, Jennifer L. Lieberman argues, marked the start of a new paradigm of electric light in the public sphere—a cultural inflection point that signaled that the business of electrification was beginning with zeal. 

Indeed it was: New York’s cityscape was changing. Electric streetlamps installed in 1880 along Broadway between 14th St. and 26th St. became the first electric lights to shine along “The Great White Way;” Lady Liberty’s torch burned electric-bright in the harbor beginning in 1886. New York City’s first large electric sign was installed on Broadway at Madison Square in 1892, and by 1927, Times Square dazzled with over 350 electric signs during the day. 

The Yiddish-speaking population of New York City was ballooning in parallel. Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, increased antisemitic violence and political instability provoked a large migration of Jews from Eastern Europe. A significant number of the Jewish migrants fleeing these conditions made their way to the United States, and approximately 85 percent of the 2.5 million Eastern European Jews who arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1924 came through New York City. Many stayed. New York soon grew into a center for Yiddish writing and culture, even exporting ideas back to Eastern Europe. During those decades, Hasia Diner argues, New York’s East Side became “paradigmatic” of Jewish (and Yiddish) Americanness, leaving its mark on Jewish culture via Yiddish newspapers with national—even international—circulation.

While the East Side’s Yiddish press was electrifying its readers worldwide, it was also being electrified in turn. An electric sign for the Yiddish socialist daily Forward shone atop the paper’s ten-story Beaux-Arts building, constructed in 1912. Halls and shops also touted their electrical fittings in print to attract customers. “A thousand electrical lights; it's a true Garden of Eden!” Avenue D’s Lafayette Hall crowed in a representative turn-of-the-century Yiddish advertisement. On that same page of the Forward, Delancey Street’s New Atlantic Hall boasted that, when hosting weddings, “the full names of the bride and groom [would be] displayed in electric lights.” Then, as electric lights expanded into the private sphere—often presented as cleaner, safer, less pungent alternatives to kerosene or gas lighting—they began transforming from a luxury to a social service, from a spectacle to a part of everyday life.

Historians such as Amy Sue Bix and Ira Robinson have noted that the proliferation of incandescent bulbs had yet another result: it posed religious quandaries for Orthodox Sabbath observers. Clearly, one could not light a candle or kerosene lamp on the Sabbath, because it was forbidden to light a fire. But did heating the filament of a bulb until the point of incandescence also transgress the biblical commandment to “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy?” If so, which of the 39 categories of forbidden “work” did doing so contravene? How, overall, were incandescent bulbs to be understood within the context of halacha, Jewish law? From Vilna, Jerusalem, Frankfurt, Montreal, and beyond, rabbinic texts and responsa addressed the newlysalient question of electric light and Shabbos. A general consensus emerged among the Orthodox rabbinate that heating a filament until it glowed was biblically forbidden on the Sabbath. In 1929, a government-mandated rabbinical conference in Lithuania passed a resolution “to warn the Jewish population not to turn on electricity or drive automobiles on the Sabbath.” It was a divisive meeting of representatives of religiously and politically distinct groups, and little else could be agreed upon.

* * *

By the time the Yiddish daily Der morgen zshurnal (The Jewish Morning Journal) published its article about the 1929 rabbinical conference, Sabbath observance was already a frequent subject in its pages, where it hewed to an Orthodox editorial line. From the paper’s offices on the East Side’s “Yiddish newspaper row”—just a twenty-minute walk from Thomas Edison’s old Pearl Street substation—the Morgen zshurnal circulated to over 100,000 readers at its peak distribution in 1916. Sabbath observance was taken up as a theme by its columnists (“never in its existence has the Sabbath had such a difficult and bitter fight for its life as it does now”), and flagged in the paper’s classifieds (“presser, experienced, all styles, pajamas and new shirts, Sabbath-observant, seeks a job”).

Electric light, of course, figured in the Morgen zshurnal’s pages too. There were profiles of Thomas Edison, reports of the installation of electric lights in synagogues, advertisements for bulbs. And at the intersection of these two topics, the paper also devoted space to the issue of using electric lights on Shabbos.

The Lithuanian rabbinical conference of 1929 had been right to acknowledge that a changing technological landscape also meant changes to the practical, material norms of keeping Shabbos. Cost-conscious consumers of electric light could use the long-standing practice of asking a Shabbos goy (a non-Jewish person who performed tasks forbidden to Jews on the Sabbath) to turn a light on or off, as had been the practice for centuries with candles, oil, and gas lamps. Or they could employ new technological fixes, such as electric timers: the Morgen zshurnal even promised a “Shabbos timer” as a prize for subscribers in 1936. Meanwhile, the next generation of children from Orthodox Yiddish-speaking children were growing up with a new understanding of what, precisely and practically, Shabbos entailed. 

Reports of these children primarily appeared in a daily column called “Children’s Wisdom,” which had debuted on the paper’s “family page” in November 1923. Older relatives or acquaintances could submit quotes and quips from their children, pitched to elicit chuckles or knowing smiles from readers. On March 25, 1924, the Morgen zshurnal published a letter attributed to B. Wasserman of 21 Morrell St. in Brooklyn: 

        My little girl, Hennie, 3 years old, wanted to go to the bathroom at night. She said to me: ‘Papa, turn on the electricity — today isn’t Shabbos, you don’t bentsh likht [say the blessing over candles at the start of the Sabbath], you can turn the electricity on.’

A David Faynerman wrote in to the Morgen zshurnal in a similar vein: 

        My granddaughter, Khaye Sorele Faynerman, 3 years and 11 months old, of 495 East 171st Street, Bronx, was with me all Shabbos. After mayrev [the evening prayer, recited after the conclusion of the Sabbath], Grandma turned on the electricity. The child asked her grandmother: ‘Bubby, no more Shabbos?’ Grandmother told her that it was ‘no more Shabbos.’ My granddaughter replied: ‘So come and play piano with me.’

A curious theme united these two stories: both toddlers told time, reportedly, by the use of electric lights. To Hennie and Khaye Sorele, the equation was simple: Shabbos meant not turning on electric lights, and so turning on electric lights meant it was not Shabbos. Recalling my own toddler-logic, I felt an immediate kinship with the versions of them preserved on the page. And, as a historian, I recognized these stories as one marker of the extent of the normalization of the new practices of electric yiddishkeit—that they could be invoked in conversation or in humor, and even plausibly attributed to young children.

If the pages of the Morgen zshurnal are any indication, children like Hennie and Khaye Sorele did not necessarily grow out of linking Shabbos with electric light (non)use, nor were they expected to do so. Instead, adult writers continued to invoke electric light use-practices on Shabbos as rhetorical barometers of observance style. Columnists predicting a slackening of the standards of Orthodoxy could write that “in twenty or thirty years, our children and grandchildren will […] press an electric light button on Shabbos with permission.”28 Or they could describe a not-strictly-Orthodox household by saying that “on holy days our daughter sits at the piano, our son turns on the electricity, or someone calls me on the telephone,” all forbidden activities.29 When a 1928 editorial in Der tog (another East Side Yiddish daily, which would merge with the Morgen zshurnal in 1952) wondered about the possibilities of a “Jewish intermarriage” across different levels of observance, the description of breaking Shabbos was also centered on electric light:

        How will Lily L. feel when she sees her husband keeping a cap always on his head, when she is accustomed to feel that no gentleman remains covered in the presence of a lady? […] When he objects to her pushing the electric-light button on or off on the Sabbath, when he watches her piling milk-dishes together with meat dishes in the sink? […] Is there any solution?

In the pages of the Morgen zshurnal, I was reading the birth of a new shorthand for Orthodox Shabbos observance. Moreover, this shorthand was so widespread that even toddlers could conceivably be echoing it. Hennie and Khaye Sorele were just two of many. Seventy years later, my parents might have written the same kinds of things about me. 

* * *

In his discussion of “black vernacular technological creativity,” Rayvon Fouché argues that traditional studies of technology are limited by “systematic disregard for technological activities that are peripheral to the dominant society’s.” However, he notes, that the pivot towards considering technology-users, rather than inventors, can reveal “a multitude of coexisting technological meanings for a variety of social groups.” Indeed, the ways that Morgen zshurnal writers and readers discussed electric light and Shabbos in one breath, from the perspective of technology-users, offer a glimpse of one such culturally-specific relationship. In counterpoint to Adams, O’Neill, and other hegemonic actors who produced their own supersession-based accounts, these Morgen zshurnal chronicles of electric light are less about spirituality than materiality, not about finding God in a machine but rather about how technological objects were enlisted in religious practice.

In fact, within this particular imagined community of Yiddish-speakers living in the United States, Orthodoxy influenced both the norms of electric light use and its social meanings. The action of turning on an electric light was legible to Morgen zshurnal readers in a multitude of ways it would not have been legible to Adams or O’Neill—as an indicator of observance style, for example, or the rhythms of the week.

Instead of reifying separate spheres for technology and religious practice, then, a history of electric yiddishkeit also offers a window into the development of a long and continuous tradition at their nexus. On the one hand, it involves religious innovation (in interpreting strictures and applying them to new technologies and contexts, thereby encouraging new use practices, as rabbinical authorities did). On the other, it involves technological innovation (inventing or adapting new technologies to fit religious precepts, as businesses and individuals have done with Shabbos lamps, Shabbos timers, Shabbos modes on refrigerators and ovens, and more).

Of course, this is not only true about electric light, and it is not only true about Yiddish speakers or Orthodox Jewry. Historians have recovered similar histories about, for example, Amish communities and the telephone, or international patents geared towards Muslim consumers. Other scholars have written about the relationship of contraception and other reproductive technologies to Jewish law, or how the Internet facilitates connection among ultraOrthodox “heretics” seeking a forum to address their religious doubt. There is no end to examples of entanglements, if you know where to look. And so it is important to look, and to keep looking, to expand the kinds of histories of technology that it is possible to tell and to retrieve.

So why add electric lights to the list? For a start, they reach far beyond their interfaces— buttons, switches, or cords—impacting the lives of far more secondary users than the single person who has turned the light on or off. Widespread in both public and private spheres, it is their very mundanity that makes them important. And, within the pages of the Morgen zshurnal, electric lights illuminate entangled histories of religion and technology that demand not only that the two be linked, but also that they be peopled with a wider range of actors. Rabbis, of course, but toddlers too.
 

Alona Bach is a Ph.D. candidate in MIT's Doctoral Program in HASTS (History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society), where she works at the intersection of the history of technology and Yiddish studies. Her dissertation project focuses on representations of electric light in the interwar Yiddish-language press. Alona holds an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and a BA in History of Science from Harvard University. As a Yiddish-language instructor, she has taught at Brandeis University, Oberlin College and Conservatory, and various community organizations. Her illustrations have appeared in publications including The British Journal for the History of Science, AJS Perspectives, Afn shvel, Forverts, and In geveb, and, as a theater-maker, she has performed in the US, UK, and in Ukraine.

The Howard I. Friedman Memorial Graduate Essay Prize and related programs are made possible by generous support from the following donors:

Pamela and Jeffrey Balton
Howard Bernstein
Alyce and Philip de Toledo
The Friedman Family
Marcie and Cliff Goldstein
Dennis Holt
The Lenart Art Education Foundation
Jessie Kornberg and Aaron Lowenstein
Madeline and Bruce Ramer
May and Richard Ziman