With a remarkable combination of scholarly rigor, empathy, exacting analysis, and love, Eating at God's Table uses an exploration of foodways to make vividly present the lived religious world of contemporary Orthodox Judaism. Its seemingly narrow focus on the foodways of one Los Angeles neighborhood becomes a kind of keyhole through which one can view an entire religious universe. Dr. Myers shows that to understand religious foodways requires us to delve into history, the interpretation of scripture, gendered and racialized social dynamics, ethical worldviews, and much else. This is the most meticulously researched and fertile study of any Jewish community's foodways I've ever encountered, and a model of how a religious studies approach to food can cut to the heart of the complexities through which humans make meaning, revealing things both beautiful and disturbing and a great deal in between.
~Aaron Gross
Food matters, always and everywhere. But sometimes it matters more. Jody Myers's excavation of the food lives of the Orthodox Jews who live in Los Angeles's Pico-Robertson neighborhood provides a stunning example of the inextricable bonds between life, food, religion, and community.
~Hasia Diner
Eating at God's Table employs the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles as an 'ethnographic laboratory' for studying the wide range of Orthodox Jewish approaches to eating and sharing food. Focusing on women, 'lived religion,' and the rules and customs associated with keeping kosher, it shows how Orthodox communities use food as a marker of identity and tool for survival. A major contribution to Jewish studies and the study of religion.
~Jonathan D. Sarna
In Eating at God's Table, Jody Myers takes us inside the kitchens of Orthodox communities in Pico-Robertson. When we open the pages of this book, we sit at their tables and enter her wonderfully curated conversation about the vibrant dynamics and lived religion of these communities.
~Jordan Rosenblum
