For Judaism, the Age of Reading is Never Over

If Rose Horowitch's most recent essay was intended to start an argument, it succeeded. Within days of publication, "The Age of Reading Is Over" had become one of The Atlantic's most discussed cover stories in years. The article has generated a flood of responses from educators, writers, publishers, and reading advocates, many of whom agree that Horowitch has identified a genuine cultural shift even if they dispute the scale of her conclusions. Experts have weighted in, agreeing that we seem terrifying close to 'postliterate society' while laymen reflected on their own experience and admitted sadly that Horowitch's conclusions are all too true.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the debate, however, is that even many of Horowitch's critics conceded the central observation from which her essay begins: sustained, book-length reading is under unprecedented pressure from smartphones, short-form video, and AI. The disagreement is therefore less about whether reading habits have changed than about what those changes ultimately mean. There is little doubt, however, that reading of books – especially without being coereced by schools to do so – is becoming very much a niche interest.

Long before universal literacy became a modern ideal, Judaism made reading a religious obligation. Unlike many ancient civilizations, where literacy was largely confined to scribes and elites, Jewish life revolved around a sacred text that every generation was expected to know, study, and transmit. The Torah itself commands, "You shall teach them diligently to your children" (Deuteronomy 6:7), and later instructs that once every seven years, at the Hakhel assembly, the entire nation—"men, women, children, and the stranger within your gates"—should gather to hear the Torah read publicly (Deuteronomy 31:10–13). The public Torah reading instituted by Moses and later reinforced by Ezra the Scribe (Bava Kamma 82a) transformed reading from the privilege of scholars into the heartbeat of communal life.

The rabbis went even further, making literacy itself a religious value. The Talmud (Bava Batra 21a) praises Joshua ben Gamla for establishing a network of schools throughout the Land of Israel, declaring that "were it not for him, the Torah would have been forgotten from Israel." Maimonides codified Torah study as a lifelong obligation resting upon every Jew, rich or poor, healthy or infirm, young or old (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Talmud Torah 1:8). Study was never viewed merely as a means of acquiring information. The sages regarded immersion in texts as a spiritual discipline that shaped judgment, character, and one's relationship with God. As the Mishnah teaches, "Turn it over and turn it over, for everything is in it" (Avot 5:22), while the Psalmist describes the righteous person as one whose "delight is in the Torah of the Lord, and who meditates upon it day and night" (Psalm 1:2).

This culture of reading helped sustain the Jewish people through centuries of exile and dispersion. Wherever Jewish communities settled, one of their first communal institutions was not only a synagogue but also a beit midrash—a house of study. Travelers and historians repeatedly remarked on the unusually high levels of literacy among Jewish men, and often among women as well, by the standards of their time. More than a repository of religious law, the written word became Judaism's portable homeland. In the famous image of Rabbi Saadia Gaon, "Our nation is a nation only through its Torah." For nearly two millennia, books were not simply objects of learning; they were the thread that bound together communities scattered across continents and generations.

The evidence, updated

It would be easy to treat all of this as pious nostalgia—a nice story about the past that has little bearing on how Jews actually behave now, in the same postliterate America that Horowitch describes. But the data suggests otherwise, and the pattern shows up in two very different places: in how religiously engaged Jews relate to Jewish books specifically, and in how they relate to the very text at the center of the tradition, the Talmud.

Pew Research Center's 2020 study of American Jews found that roughly four in ten often or sometimes read Jewish literature, history, or biographies—ahead of watching Jewish-themed television or following Jewish news. But the more telling finding is who is doing that reading: Orthodox Jews are markedly more likely than Jews affiliated with other denominations to say they regularly read Jewish literature. Reading tracks religious observance almost precisely—the more traditionally engaged the respondent, the more likely they are to be a reader of books in the first place.

Then there is Daf Yomi, which may be the single most dramatic counter-example to the postliterate thesis operating anywhere in American life today. The program asks participants to read one page of Talmud a day, every day, for seven and a half years straight, until the entire 2,711-page text has been covered. When the cycle concludes, the celebration—Siyum HaShas—fills a stadium. More than 90,000 mostly Orthodox Jews gathered at MetLife Stadium in January 2020 to mark the completion of that cycle, with thousands more watching at Barclays Center and around the world. By several accounts it was the largest single gathering of American Jews in the country's history—assembled not for a concert or a rally, but to celebrate finishing a book. In a culture where, per NEA data cited in Horowitch's essay, fewer than half of American adults read a book of any kind in 2022, tens of thousands of people filled a football stadium to mark seven and a half years of daily reading.

What reading is for

None of this means religious Jews are simply better disciplined, or more nostalgic for the printed page, than everyone else. What it suggests is something more specific: reading survives, at scale, in cultures that have a settled answer to the question of what reading is for.

For most of the reading public Horowitch describes, that question has quietly gone unanswered. Books compete with everything else that fills a phone screen, and without a strong claim about what a book uniquely delivers, the phone typically wins—it is faster, easier, and just as stimulating. But in the tradition sketched above, reading was never justified on the grounds of stimulation, or even of information. Opening the Torah was understood as encountering God's own words directly. Opening the Talmud was understood as entering a conversation with the sages that had been running, unbroken, for two thousand years, and joining it in real time. That is not a claim about the pleasure or utility of reading. It is a claim about presence—about who, or what, a reader meets on the page.

That claim is what makes a costly, difficult habit sustainable across a lifetime and across generations. A once-a-week Tanakh class, or a nightly half hour with a page of Talmud, is not sustained by willpower any more than synagogue attendance is sustained by willpower. It is sustained by a culture that has decided, communally and repeatedly, that this is worth doing because of what it grants access to. Strip that conviction away, and reading reverts to being one entertainment option among many—competing, and generally losing, against a feed engineered to win. Keep it, and reading becomes something closer to a discipline of encounter, worth defending even as the rest of the culture moves on.

If reading becomes a forgotten art, it won't be because reading itself failed — it will be because most people stopped believing there was anything on the other side of the page worth meeting. Observant Jews never stopped believing that. Which is why, if reading becomes a forgotten art, they'll still be practicing it.