Personally, I have very mixed feelings about Artscroll’s contribution to the Jewish world.
I find their gemaros to be invaluable for “bekius” learning, and their language to be concise and crystal-clear. It is a pleasure to reap the benefits of their efforts to promote regular, accessible Torah study for all, and I am grateful to them for it.
That said, I WISH that their contributions were just to the area of limud Torah. I find their Holocaust treatments, for one thing, to be highly glossed over, distilled tales of religious heroism, compacted for our easy consumption to deliver neat little moral lessons. This man had emuna and tried to keep Shabbos, so he survived. Obviously, the other man was lacking in his emuna, so Hashem let the Nazis kill him. I sometimes feel that I’m peering into a historical fiction world wherein only frum Jews suffered and died in the concentration camps and only the tzaddikim amongst them merited inexplicable open miracles.
I have met and spoken to a good number of Holocaust survivors, frum and otherwise, and their stories generally have one running theme in common: desperate, brutal hanging-by-the-nails survival. There was murder, cannibalism and betrayal by unassuming men who set next to them in shul. There was heroism and moral values exhibited by “quarter-Jews” who likely never entered a shul in their lives.
Oftentimes the Nazis themselves were too busy recording the facts and figures of their final solution, so they left the barbarism to the hands of other Jews to wreak upon their own brothers and sisters.
Basically, what I’m saying is that there is no neat, storybook, cut-and-dried version of the Holocaust. It was a GEZEIRA. It was a desperate, hellish, indescribably evil time in our history that is now, in the distance of time, being used to further an agenda.
I feel the same way about the gadol “biographies”. These books COULD be inspirational, motivational stories of human beings who were born with both their feet planted upon the same modern world as us and yet rose above the noise to become great men. Instead, they are tales of angels given human form who were capable of great feats of brilliance and virtue at an age that most of us still haven’t mastered the bathroom. By the end of chapter one, most of us are already nodding to ourselves resignedly and dismissing the tale from the bounds of any relevance whatsoever to our own lives and experience. You can practically sit back and play a drinking game with the term “paragon of humility” or “bastion of Torah.”
So yes, I think Artscroll is slowly revising and reshaping the Jewish world in its own distinct, politically-acceptable image. I think they have now reached soaring popularity with the second generation born into a world where Artscroll has always existed. This generation lives and breathes the stories they tell and speaks in the terminology they have taught them.
Well…I guess you know where I stand on this issue by now.