ISBN: 9780226322056

To an extent no other scholarly book attempts, this one takes you right into the heart of Orthodox Jewish life.  Tavory spent three years immersed in the Los Angeles center of Orthodox Je… More...

To an extent no other scholarly book attempts, this one takes you right into the heart of Orthodox Jewish life.  Tavory spent three years immersed in the Los Angeles center of Orthodox Jewry (Beverly-La Brea), showing us in detail how the various Orthodox groups and subgroups manage their differences (and how they comport with their goyische neighbors).  Because the neighborhood is so close to Hollywood, Tavory makes bold to compare the Orthodox with the Hollywood celebrity, neither of whom can appear in public without identifying marks of being special.  The Orthodox (in their various subgroups:  Hasidic, Chabad, Yeshivish, Sephardic, and others) need to navigate the neighborhood streets with an eye toward avoiding impure sights, smells, or sounds.  The religious connotations of "summoning" enter in here--you have become a certain kind of (Orthodox) person, you are summoned, when you have the proper sense of fulfillment, responsibility, moral, failure, or elation.  The Orthodox in Beverly-La Brea engage daily in acts of summoning, in their strict adherence to religious law and custom.  Tavory shows us vividly how much work goes into being able to have a religious experience.  It is best understood as a patterned structure of summoning.  Given Tavory's deft use of how summoning works in non-Orthodox and non-religious setting (examples from Jane Austen and Thomas Mann, among others), we come away from this book with a greatly enlarged understanding of social life and of identity, self, and culture at large, not just in Beverly-La Brea. Media > Book, [PU: University of Chicago Press]<