ArtScroll at 50: A Blessing, a Bias, and a Revolution
Ten years ago, I gave a Jewish history class on ArtScroll to mark its 40th anniversary. Now, a decade later, the publishing powerhouse is celebrating its golden jubilee. With a yearlong retrospective underway, I figured it was the perfect time to revisit a story that has hit remarkably close to home for so many of us.
ArtScroll isn’t just a corporate success story; it’s the saga of how American Orthodoxy evolved from a purely Hebrew-literate culture into a vibrant, bilingual Torah ecosystem.
It all started in Brooklyn in 1975. Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz was running ArtScroll Studios, a high-end graphic design shop producing invitations, ketubot, and awards. When a close friend tragically passed away without children, Zlotowitz wanted to honor his memory with something enduring. He decided to publish a fresh English translation and commentary on Megillat Esther.
He asked Rabbi Nosson Scherman, then a yeshiva principal in Boro Park, to write the introduction. The chemistry was instant, and the timing was electric: the first edition sold over 20,000 copies in just two months. They knew right away they had tapped into something profound.
With the encouragement and blessings of major Orthodox rabbinic figures—including Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky, Rabbi Mordechai Gifter, and Rabbi Yaakov Ruderman—Zlotowitz and Scherman began expanding the project.
First came the other four Megillot, and then an extraordinary succession of projects: Chumash, Tanach, Siddurim, Machzorim, the Mishnah, the Haggadah, Jewish law and thought, biographies and history, children’s books, fiction, cookbooks, and eventually the entire Talmud.
By 1990, ArtScroll had already published more than 700 titles. Today, the company says it has produced more than 3,500 titles in five languages.
That growth tells you something important: ArtScroll wasn’t simply filling a gap in the Jewish publishing market. It was creating a new market.
For me, and for so many others, ArtScroll’s most personal impact came not from the Talmud, but from the Siddur.
Before ArtScroll, you could walk into shul, follow along, and recite the words, yet still miss the depth of what you were saying. The ArtScroll Siddur placed a lucid English translation and rich commentary right alongside the Hebrew. Suddenly, ba’alei teshuvah, day-school grads, and lifelong daveners alike had instant access to the meaning, structure, and theology of our prayers. At the time, this was revolutionary. It sent a warm, welcoming message: You don’t have to choose between authentic tradition and the English language This became one of the company’s defining philosophies.
ArtScroll also mastered the art of typography and design. They understood that a Jewish book could be simultaneously traditional, beautiful, scholarly, and user-friendly.
The typography was elegant. The pages were carefully laid out. The English was formal without being archaic. That combination became one of its trademarks.
However, the project that transformed ArtScroll from an important publisher into a phenomenon was undoubtedly the Schottenstein edition of the Talmud.
The ambition was almost breathtaking: ArtScroll took the extraordinarily complicated Aramaic dialectic of the Gemara and provided an English-language guide through it—without turning it into a popularized substitute for Talmud.
The project ultimately consisted of 73 volumes of the Babylonian Talmudand took approximately 15 years to complete. This forever changed the accessibility of Daf Yomi and Talmud study for English-speaking Jews. A person who previously could not follow a Gemara without a shiur or a teacher could now sit down with a page and work through the complex material.
That created an enormous democratization of Torah learning.
I think there are five major reasons why ArtScroll became so important:
1) It made Torah accessible without making it feel diluted.
2) It created a common Orthodox vocabulary among disparate communities.
3) It turned English into a legitimate language of Torah.
4) It combined scholarship with extraordinary typography and graphic design.
5) It created an entire library covering every stage of Orthodox Jewish life.
However, with all that said, there is an important asterisk that I must add to the praise I have just showered on Artscroll.
ArtScroll is not ideologically neutral – and it doesn’t pretend to be. Its translations and commentaries are deliberately produced from a Haredi framework. That has generated criticism, particularly from scholars and Jews outside that theological framework. Many have argued that ArtScroll sometimes presents interpretive choices as though they were simply the definitive translation, when in fact they reflect very specific Orthodox assumptions.
As an example, ArtScroll decided to forego the literal translation of Shir haShirim and instead used the Midrashic allegorical explanations. A second example: When translating the word “zonah” in the famous story of the two women who appear before king Solomon and in describing Rachav in the story of Joshua, ArtScroll cleans up the language and chooses to translate the word as “innkeeper,” not “prostitute” or “harlot.”
And when translating the non-kosher birds listed in the Torah, Artscroll chose to use transliterations rather than listing the English translation of each bird, claiming in its footnote. that we don’t know for certain what some of these birds are.
Ironically, it helps to explain ArtScroll’s success, in that this is precisely what the Haredi community wanted. ArtScroll’s genius was that it also managed to make these positions tolerable, if not fully acceptable, to the Modern Orthodox community, which still found ArtScroll’s volumes indispensable despite these criticisms.
However, my main critique isn’t actually with their translation choices—it’s with their biographical series. ArtScroll’s biographies tend to present gedolim as flawless figures.
When asked about this years ago, Rabbi Scherman was delightfully candid: “Our goal is to increase Torah learning and yiras shamayim… Is it necessary to say that a gadol had shortcomings? Does that help you become a better person?”
I respect the ethical framework here—it’s rooted in kavod haTorah and avoiding lashon hara. But I personally disagree with the premise.
When you remove every human struggle, mistake, or heated debate from a leader’s life, you risk making them so perfect they become unapproachable. If a sage never struggled with anger, made an error, or wrestled with a tough choice, a reader might naturally think, “Well, of course he was great—he wasn’t human like me.” Real inspiration comes from seeing how great people navigate real human flaws and overcome them.
And if we see someone struggle with anger, overcome an intellectual challenge, change his mind, wrestle with competing values, or overcome a personal weakness, the story can often become much more powerful.
This might be the biggest part of what ArtScroll’s biographies are missing.
As to including any dissenting opinions, Rabbi Scherman also did not mince any words: “We include the opinions of whichever gadol is the subject of the biography, but we don’t necessarily discuss dissenting views. We feel that our mission is to educate people and to be marbeh kevod shamayim. We try to stay away from disputes that can often become vitriolic. Getting involved in such things is not our mission. Our mission is to impart a positive message.”
That helps put the biography issue into a larger editorial philosophy. ArtScroll doesn’t see itself primarily as a historical institution. It sees itself as an educational and religious institution.
However, I think there’s a more subtle issue here than simply saying “ArtScroll whitewashes history.”
Scherman wasn’t saying that the great rabbis had no faults. He’s saying that even if there were faults, not every fact about a person is necessarily appropriate to publish.
That’s a Jewish ethical argument about truth itself—and specifically about the relationship between truth and lashon hara.
Scherman is implicitly rejecting the modern journalistic assumption that completeness is an absolute virtue in biography. For him, truth is constrained by other values: kavod haTorah, lashon hara, chinuch, and yiras shamayim.
It’s true that I have trouble with some of ArtScroll’s translations and its approach to its biographies, but at the same time I must admire its marketing prowess. Despite my gentle critiques, my admiration for what ArtScroll has built is immense.
In 1975, an English-speaking Jew who struggled with classical Hebrew faced a massive wall when trying to access high-level learning. Fifty years later, that same person can pull up a chair and delve into Chumash, Gemara, Halacha, and Midrash texts with absolute confidence.
ArtScroll didn’t achieve this by lowering the bar; they achieved it by handing everyone a ladder.
It started with a single rabbi honoring a lost friend with a modest megilla translation, and it evolved into a movement that redefined how an entire generation learns Torah.
Happy 50th Anniversary, ArtScroll!
