Kosher Music, Kosher Space, and the Ethnographic Study of Orthodox Jewish Life

In this article, I demonstrate how discourses regarding propriety and artistic expression draw lines around the shifting boundaries of Jewish Orthodoxy, providing scholars with a window into the construction of social-religious taxonomies. Understanding expressive culture as a social phenomenon, this article examines debates over musical propriety—at times referred to as "kosher music"—in Orthodox Jewish communities in order to examine the ways in which "rightness" is claimed and policed. In doing so, I suggest that expressive culture invites us to consider how contests over these boundaries play out on both the individual and communal level, and shift the lines of Orthodoxy and its subcultures. Furthermore, I argue that the ethnographic study of Orthodox expressive culture enables scholars to locate Orthodoxy in new domains, and therefore expand beyond constraining paradigms that understand Orthodoxy in conceptually and methodologically narrower ways.