With few exceptions, classical study of Jewish liturgy has focused on the words of the prayers, largely ignoring the less tangible elements of setting, gesture, halakhic guidance, and music. When scholars like Eric Werner and A. Z. Idelsohn wrote about liturgical music, they, too, considered it a text. In recent years, and influenced by trends in the larger academy, the field has become more interdisciplinary, open to the insights of other scholarly methodologies, resulting in important studies on the archaeological history of the synagogue itself, prayer gestures, liturgical halakhah, and mystical approaches to prayer. Into this context, we can welcome warmly Jeffrey Summit's The Lord's Song in a Strange Land and its ethnographic study of the musical dimension of contemporary American Jewish liturgy.