Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood

by Iddo Tavory

On a typical weekday, men of the Beverly-La Brea Orthodox community wake up early, beginning their day with Talmud reading and prayer at 5:45am, before joining Los Angeles’ traffic. Those who work “Jewish jobs”—teachers, kosher supervisors, or rabbis—will stay enmeshed in the Orthodox world throughout the workday. But even for the majority of men who spend their days in the world of gentiles, religious life constantly reasserts itself. Neighborhood fixtures like  Jewish schools and synagogues are always after more involvement; evening classes and prayers pull them in; the streets themselves seem to remind them of who they are. And so the week goes, culminating as the sabbatical observances on Friday afternoon stretch into Saturday evening. Life in this community, as Iddo Tavory describes it, is palpably thick with the twin pulls of observance and sociality. In Summoned, Tavory takes readers to the heart of the exhilarating—at times exhausting—life of the Beverly-La Brea Orthodox community. Just blocks from West Hollywood’s nightlife, the Orthodox community thrives next to the impure sights, sounds, and smells they encounter every day. But to sustain this life, as Tavory shows, is not simply a moral decision they make. To be Orthodox is to be constantly called into being. People are reminded of who they are as they are called upon by organizations, prayer quorums, the nods of strangers, whiffs of unkosher food floating through the street, or the rarer Anti-Semitic remarks. Again and again, they find themselves summoned both into social life and into their identity as Orthodox Jews. At the close of Tavory’s fascinating ethnography, we come away with a better understanding of the dynamics of social worlds, identity, interaction and self—not only in Beverly-La Brea, but in society at large.

Genres: Sociology, Judaism, Judaica, Nonfiction

302 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 7, 2016

Reviews

[Alexa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted this book do be something that it wasn't. It was still good, but I especially enjoyed those bits of what I was looking for.

I was looking for stories and details of the daily life if the community. I did like some of the ethnographic analysis, in particular how the Orthodox Jews here approached and sometimes went out of their way to avoid or ignore physical parts of their environment such as a non-kosher hot dog stand or movie poster with a scantily-clad woman and a cross. It made me ponder my own daily actions, what I approach, what I linger on, what I ignore or avert my eyes.

I am awed by the commitment it takes to be an Orthodox Jew. My own practice seems paltry in comparison so I was especially smiling when the author described the phone calls made to ensure a minyan for prayer. At my old Temple before I moved out of state, I used to get calls to see if I would be attending the upcoming Shabbat morning service to complete a minyan.

The author mentions sharing some of his writings on the community and finding he has given offense. The offense is somewhat on a person level, was their friendship genuine?, but moreso on a religious level, was the learning and praying a lie? It reminded me of another Jewish ethnography I read a long time ago. I think it was, "Changing health and changing culture: the Yemenite Jews in Israel" (had to Google search). The author was a secular American Jew and he commented that as he was also Jewish, they expected him to participate in ways he would not be if he was instead in rural Africa or anywhere else he would be seen as more foreign.