Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul

"Academic Boyarin goes popular with a journal of the 12 weeks in 2008 that he faithfully attended morning prayers at the 90-plus-year-old synagogue-the shul-of his Modern Orthodox home congregation on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Besides the daily suspense over whether enough men for a minyan will show up, he records the regulars and others who do; their personalities, concerns, relations, and life in the congregation; the congregation's history, relations with other Orthodox synagogues and institutions, and efforts to keep its historic character and building intact; and the ever-changing face of the neighborhood, now as obviously part of Chinatown as it once was a locus of East European Jewish immigrants. He mentions his dreams, as long as they're pertinent to the shul, and family events within the context of shul life. The big congregational to-do during the period is over one rabbi's departure and the search for his successor. As absorbing as a good cinema verite documentary, Boyarin's personal ethnography may make Lower East Side tourists of many readers hooked by its abundant charm." -Booklist "A meditation on ethnography, on the nitty-gritty, idiosyncratic, contingent nature of ethnography and the ways that anthropologists are personally implicated in the research and writing that they do."-Ay ala Fader, author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn "Boyarin brilliantly articulates a Jewish ethnographic voice that moves beyond salvage ethnography, providing a richly detailed portrait of an enduring institution and a complex neighborhood through the lens of his own experience."-Nathaniel Deutsch, author of The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement "This beautiful, new book confirms Jonathan Boyarin's status as one of the most innovative scholars in Jewish Studies. Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul is a field journal and monument to religious endurance. But, first and foremost, it is a celebration of the pleasures of Jewish life."-Matti Bunzl, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign "In a journal that is always humane, and often humorous, Jonathan Boyarin lovingly details one summer in the life of the Stanton Street Synagogue. Boyarin is the perfect tour guide to take us inside the ever-changing Jewish world on the Lower East Side--a place 'where hip meets hip replacement.'"-Mort Zachter, Author of Dough: A Memoir "Turning his impassioned ethnographic eye on the Stanton Street synagogue on New York's Lower East Side, Boyarin finds high drama in this intimate setting. Characteristically adventurous and experimental, Boyarin offers a fascinating account of everyday life as it unfolds in the moment. At the heart of the story is generational conflict in a neighborhood more Chinese and Latino today than jewish, A model of engaged ethnography."-Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Museum of the History of Polish Jews "Academic Boyarin goes popular with a journal of the 12 weeks in 2008 that he faithfully attended morning prayers at the 90-plus-year-old synagogue--the shul--of his Modern Orthodox home congregation on Manhattan's Lower East Side... As absorbing as a good cinema verite documentary, Boyarin's personal ethnography may make Lower East Side tourists of many readers hooked by its abundant charm."-Booklist "[Boyarin] illustrates in poignant and humorous ways the changes taking place in a historic neighborhood facing gentrification."-Carolina Arts & Sciences "'Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul' is inviting, provocative, funny, and stimulating..."- Emily Katz, H-Net Reviews