Framing Sukkot: Tradition and Transformation in Jewish Vernacular Architecture by Gabrielle Anna Berlinger (review)

It is probably fair to say that when most architectural historians think of Tel Aviv, they think of the White City, that sparkling UNESCO World Heritage jewel that includes an urban plan by Patrick Geddes and approximately four thousand Bauhaus buildings designed by Jewish German émigré architects who fled Nazi Germany for British Mandate Palestine from the 1930s through the 1950s. Although that thought trajectory is more than justified on aesthetic grounds, Tel Aviv has other architectures and darker, alternative narratives of place that are every bit as important as its stories of sleek modernism. It is to one of what Israeli architect Sharon Rotbard has called "Black Cities" that Gabrielle Anna Berlinger directs our attention in her recent ethnographic study of ritual dwellings, Framing Sukkot.¹ The "Black Cities" of Tel Aviv are the place where socially and economically marginalized people, like working-class Mizrahi (non-European) Jews, temporary foreign workers, undocumented migrant workers, many of them from Africa, and, in Rotbard's narrative, Israeli Arabs, live. Berlinger settled in one such "second Israel" for sixteen months of fieldwork in 2010 and 2011. At the edge of Tel Aviv proper, the neighborhood of Shchunat Hatikva ("neighborhood of hope," colloquially known as Hatikva) offered Berlinger a rich field for the folkloristic study of the temporary ritual dwellings known as sukkot (singular sukkah). Built yearly for the holiday of Sukkot, which commemorates the forty-year journey of the Biblical Israelites through the Sinai desert, the little huts symbolize, among other things, the yearning for a permanent home and the impermanence of the material world. They are a very old building type for which there are three thousand years of documentary and material evidence.

In Framing Sukkot, Berlinger takes on two interlocking goals: illuminating our understanding of one of Tel Aviv's marginalized neighborhoods, and exploring sukkot as an important architectural expression of Jewish faith and identity. In 1997, when I set out to write a master's thesis on the architecture of sukkot, there were no critical book-length studies in architectural history or any material-culture-related fields to illuminate my path, so I forged my own, knitting together methodologies from art and architectural history, Jewish studies, and folklore. This gap in the literature has been addressed by Framing Sukkot, a richly layered ethnographic account of contemporary sukkah practice and Jewish ritual performance in both Israel and the United States.

Framing has three meanings for Berlinger. It refers at different times to an architectural practice, a process of study, and an interpretive strategy employed by the author to better understand the wide variety of practices she encountered while conducting fieldwork. Boiled down to their most basic material components, sukkot consist of a sturdy frame, three walls, and a sacred roof. Over the course of three thousand years of repeated construction, this simple formula has produced a dizzying array of creative expressions in aesthetics and structure. Berlinger's book documents a broad cultural cross-section of the type, in and outside Israel. At the heart of the book are the experiences of people who make and live in sukkot. Berlinger's analysis of ritual dwellings in the United States and Israel reveals the many ways in which her subjects create personal identities, attachments to community, and political engagement, all through the mechanism of the sukkah. In the widest sense, her work is about the meanings of home and the quest to belong. It is a well-written, fine-grained, and deeply human study of the urban built environment and the people who live in it.

The book is structured around three case studies, each of which illustrates a guiding principle of contemporary Sukkot practice. Chapters 1 and 7 consist of two short ethnographies of sukkot in Bloomington, Indiana, and Brooklyn, New York. The Bloomington chapter is about mediating tradition. It sets up the...