Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul
A Summer on the Lower East Side
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In these pages Jonathan Boyarin invites us to share the intimate life of the Stanton Street Shul, one of the last remaining Jewish congregations on New York’s historic Lower East Side. This narrow building, wedged into a lot designed for an old-law tenement, is full of clamorous voices—the generations of the dead, who somehow contrive to make their presence known, and the newer generation, keeping the building and its memories alive and making themselves Jews in the process. Through the eyes of Boyarin, at once a member of the congregation and a bemused anthropologist, the book follows this congregation of “year-round Jews” through the course of a summer during which its future must once again be decided.
The Lower East Side, famous as the jumping off point for millions of Jewish and other immigrants to America, has recently become the hip playground of twenty-something immigrants to the city from elsewhere in America
and from abroad. Few imagine that Jewish life there has stubbornly continued through this history of decline and regeneration. Coming inside with Boyarin, we see the congregation’s life as a combination of quiet heroism, ironic humor, disputes for the sake of Heaven and perhaps otherwise, and—above all—the ongoing
search for ways to connect with Jewish ancestors while remaining true to oneself in the present.
Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul illustrates in poignant and humorous ways the changes in a historic neighborhood facing the challenges of gentrification. It offers readers with no prior knowledge of Judaism and synagogue life a portrait that is at once intimate and intelligible. Most important, perhaps, it shows the congregation’s members to be anything but a monochromatic set of uniform “believers” but rather a gathering of vibrant, imperfect, indisputably down-to-earth individuals coming together to make a community.
[Boyarin] illustrates in poignant and humorous ways the changes taking place in a historic neighborhood facing gentrification.---—Carolina Arts & Sciences
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
---—Booklist
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 verité documentary, Boyarin’s personal ethnography may make Lower East Side tourists of many readers hooked by its abundant charm.
This is a fascinating tale of a neighborhood in transition and rejuvenation, and Mornings at the Stanton
Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side is a most pleasurable read.
'Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul' is inviting, provocative, funny, and stimulating...