This is a narrative ethnography, in journal form, documenting the life of a small Orthodox Jewish congregation on the Lower East Side of New York in the summer of 2008. The text focuses on the arrival of a newer generation of congregants who are both younger and more transient than the previous immigrant generation. The synagogue and its social life are also portrayed as a microcosm of the gentrification of the neighborhood and resistance to that gentrification.

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.

The Stanton Street Shul is 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 to make themselves as Jews in the process. The book follows this congregation of 'year-round Jews' through the course of a summer when its future must once again be decided.

"This book is an ethnographic description of the experiences of the author at a yeshiva located near his home on New York's Lower East Side, Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ). Jonathan Boyarin spent a good deal of time at MTJ in the 1980s, before his anthropological training, and returned to it in 2011 when he once again became a regular visitor and participant. This book, in essence, is a portrait of life in this yeshiva. Boyarin introduces the MTJ yeshiva and its place in the wider American Jewish community, then takes up the daily patterns, rituals, and rhythms of the place"--

An intimate and moving portrait of daily life in New York's oldest institution of traditional rabbinic learning New York City's Lower East Side has witnessed a severe decline in its Jewish population in recent decades, yet every morning in the big room of the city's oldest yeshiva, students still gather to study the Talmud beneath the great arched windows facing out onto East Broadway. Yeshiva Days is Jonathan Boyarin's uniquely personal account of the year he spent as both student and observer at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem, and a poignant chronicle of a side of Jewish life that outsiders rarely see. Boyarin explores the yeshiva's relationship with the neighborhood, the city, and Jewish and American culture more broadly, and brings vividly to life its routines, rituals, and rhythms. He describes the compelling and often colorful personalities he encounters each day, and introduces readers to the Rosh Yeshiva, or Rebbi, the moral and intellectual head of the yeshiva. Boyarin reflects on the tantalizing meanings of "study for its own sake" in the intellectually vibrant world of traditional rabbinic learning, and records his fellow students' responses to his negotiation of the daily complexities of yeshiva life while he also conducts anthropological fieldwork. A richly mature work by a writer of uncommon insight, wit, and honesty, Yeshiva Days is the story of a place on the Lower East Side with its own distinctive heritage and character, a meditation on the enduring power of Jewish tradition and learning, and a record of a different way of engaging with time and otherness.

The classic book on the Lower East Side's synagogues and their congregations, past and present-now back in print in a completely revised and expanded edition

An interdisciplinary consideration of Paul Gilroy’s contributions to cultural theory and understandings of modernity. In the more than twenty years since the publication of his book The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has become a leading Afro-European intellectual whose work in the cultural studies of race has influenced a number of fields and made the study of black Atlantic literatures and cultures an enduring part of the humanities. The essays in this collection examine the full trajectory of Gilroy’s work, looking beyond The Black Atlantic to consider also his work in the intervening years, focusing in particular on his investigations of contemporary black life in the United States, histories of human rights, and the politics of memory and empire in contemporary Britain. With an essay by Gilroy himself extending his longstanding examination of fascism, racial thinking, and European philosophical thought, in addition to an interview with Gilroy, this volume features Gilroy’s own words alongside other scholars’ alternative conceptualizations and critical rereadings of his works.