Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side by Jonathan Boyarin (review)

Abstract

J Boyarin is a critical anthropologist, a conscientious ethnographer, and an unmatched writer of our time. His recent book, Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side, is a compelling and robust ethnography of Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ), New York’s oldest institution of traditional rabbinical learning. Based on intensive fieldwork at MTJ during his sabbatical year, Boyarin, as an “observant participant” and a “paraethnographer,” builds on his previous work about Jewish communities, the cultural role of scriptural text, as well as the politics of memory and knowledge in order to understand what it means for yeshiva students to study Torah for its own sake. Highlighting the intricacies of dealing with halachaic texts as a primary interlocutor, Boyarin’s Yeshiva Days speaks to a fundamental issue at the heart of anthropology of religion: the relationship between textuality and orthodoxy within the analytic framework of tradition. Given the legitimizing force of authorized texts in the Jewish tradition, Yeshiva Days compels anthropologists and scholars of religion to reconfigure the boundary between the cultural (à la Clifford Geertz) and a more literal text. Situating Boyarin’s motivations and goals, the book’s introduction presents the author’s struggle to find his place in yeshiva as a “secular academic ethnographer” and a “traditional male Jew” wanting to learn Torah (3).1 In Chapter 1, Boyarin gives us a sense of MTJ as a space, both architecturally and liturgically. At the center is the beis medresh, the main study hall where pedagogical and social interactions actively play out. The author then, in Chapter 2, explores MTJ’s relationship with its Lithuanian