Book Launch | Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood Tuesday, March 29, 6:30 - 8:00 PM The Institute for Public Knowledge 20 Cooper Sq, Room 503, New York In Summoned, sociologist Iddo Tavory takes readers into the fabric of everyday life in the largest Jewish Orthodox community in Los Angeles. In doing so, he explores the ways in which both entrenched institutions and fleeting moments of interaction shape community members' identifications and social worlds. 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 LA’s 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 Tavory describes it, is palpably thick with the twin pulls of observance and sociality. 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. Being Orthodox is to be constantly called into being. People are reminded of who they are as they are called upon by organizations, prayers 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. Iddo Tavory is Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University. His research has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, and Theory and Society. He is also the author, with Stefan Timmermans, of Abductive Analysis (2014), which presents a pragmatist approach to the relation among theory, method and observations in qualitative research. He received his PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles. Courtney Bender is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion, Columbia University. She is the author of Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (University of Chicago Press 2003) and The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (University of Chicago Press 2010). She is the co-editor of volumes on religious pluralism, secularism, and the sociology of religion, and served as the chair of the Social Science Research Council's research program New Directions in the Study of Prayer<http://forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/> (2011-15). A qualitative sociologist with a focus on American religious and cultural history, Bender’s current research investigates on the contributions of early twentieth century modernist movements to American spiritual cultures. Hasia Diner is the Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History and Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Historyat NYU, where she also serves as Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. In a series of projects dating to her first book, In the Almost-Promised Land (1977), which explored the ways in which American Jews engaged with issues surrounding the condition of black Americans in the early 20th century, through her most recent, We Remember with Reverence and Love (2009), which examined the ways in which Jews in post-World War II America built a public culture that memorialized the Holocaust, Diner has been interested on the mutual impacts of America and the Jews. She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of eleven books and numerous articles. Samuel Heilman is the Harold Proshansky Chair and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College of the City University of New York, where his work has focused on the social ethnography of Jewish Orthodox communities in the United States. Heilman is the author of numerous articles and award-winning books, including The Rebbe (2010), Sliding to the Right (2006), When a Jew Dies (2002), Portrait of American Jewry (1996), A Walker in Jerusalem (1987), The Gate Behind the Wall (1984), Synagogue Life (1976), and others.