Off Melrose: Sustaining Orthodox Jewish religious life in a secular space

My dissertation asks how religious life thrives in the midst of a secular urban space. Following an Introductory chapter, Chapter Two describes how the neighborhood became Jewish-Orthodox, and how the very meaning of Orthodoxy shifted in the last 40 years. The neighborhood first became a destination for middle class Jews around the 1930s, turning Orthodox much later, in the 1970s, through the efforts of East Coast religious institutions. The emerging Orthodox neighborhood, as I show, was not principally populated by pulling in Jews that already lived in it. Instead, by developing prestigious institutions in the neighborhood, the founders of the first wave of institutions succeeded in making the neighborhood into a viable destination for Orthodox Jews across the United States. I then show the constitution of Orthodoxy is related to the shift in the meaning of the category "Orthodox." Whereas Orthodox Judaism once meant that people nominally kept the Sabbath and tried to keep kosher, were not Reform or Conservative, and, more to the point, not American, with the entry of the new Orthodoxy from the East Coast the standards of Orthodoxy were changed, and many people either switched affiliation or moved---with Orthodoxy---towards stricter observance.;The historical narrative sets up some of the institutional stories which I turn to in Chapter Three. In this chapter I try to make sense of what I term the "institutional thickness" of the neighborhood, looking at the ways in which synagogues, the educational system, and the internal welfare emerged, and how they then help to reproduce and sustain a vibrant religious life. I show how the neighborhood came to have an almost personalized institutional structure, with an institution per 20 Orthodox Jewish families, and how these institutions work to sustain participation and constantly pull residents into religious activities, as well as supporting the institutional framework of the neighborhood.;Returning to the ethnographic, in Chapter Four, I look at the different axes of internal differentiation through which members understand their position in the Orthodox community. I look at three axes that members oriented to when they interacted with other Jews in their everyday lives---(a) "more" and "less" religious Jews; (b) Jews that were born into Orthodox households vs. those that became Orthodox later in life, and; (c) sub-affiliations within the community---Hasidic and "Misnagdic" (or "Yeshivish"); Chabad and other Hasidic groups.;Moving from internal hierarchies and distinctions to external boundaries, in Chapter Five I discuss the ways in which Orthodox Jews saw their relation to the non-Jews surrounding them. The attitude towards the "non-Jewish other" as it was manifested in Hasidic tales, or just in offhand remarks, depicted the non-Jew as a threatening entity, that was simultaneously "less" then the Jew was. And yet, most members went to work in the non-religious world every morning, where their best friends were often non-Jews. They thus had to re-assemble the boundaries between Jew and "Other," either by completely ignoring their working relations when they spoke to other Orthodox members, or by focusing (or creating) moments of tension attributed to their Jewishness.;These crisscrossing distinctions and boundaries effectively defined members position, a constant semiotic buzz, as it were, locating members. Chapter Six extends the theme of social echolocation to everyday interactions members have on the streets of the neighborhood. By using the metaphor of echolocation I draw attention to moments of tension and difference that were not defined by members' playing-out an abstract internal project that was somehow held constant in their minds, but rather how they entered into situations in which they were provoked, either by interaction with people or through having to navigate their physical surroundings, to construct their identification as Orthodox Jews.;Chapters four, five, and six, taken together, provide an analysis of difference, a semiotic picture in which people are constantly defining themselves against what (and whom) they are not. The community, however, is sustained by more than institutional thickness and the semiotic seductions of difference. In Chapter Seven, I move from these considerations, to look at the ways in which interactions occurring within public worship situations sustain and shape specific forms of communal life---from seductions of difference to seductions of belonging.;In the discussion, in Chapter Eight, I then synthesize the different strands of analysis, and present a more coherent depiction of Jewish Orthodox life in the neighborhood. Organizing the chapter around three different sociological literatures---regarding the concept of "community," the study of Orthodox Judaism in the United States, and the sociology of religion, I look at the ways in which my study could illuminate questions asked in different areas of sociology. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).