Wednesday, November 24, 2021
The Making of Satmar Williamsburg
THERE IS A LONGSTANDING ASSOCIATION between Jews and cities, including both positive connotations (Jews at home in the shtetl and the shuk) and negative stereotypes (Jews as "rootless cosmopolitans," per the Stalinist slur). Jewish texts are full of treatises on the city and its discontents. The unique complications of urban religious life are even discussed in the Babylonian Talmud, which instructs us that for Jews, it is "difficult to live in big cities." Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper's fascinating new book, A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg, explains how one Haredi sect has tried to overcome those difficulties and make a home in a contested corner of the biggest city in the United States.
"Goyim can live wherever they want," a Hasidic mortgage broker told Deutsch and Casper, perhaps referring to everyone besides Haredi Jews. "But we yidn [Jews] must live together in the same place. We cannot just move." There are numerous demands to take into account when establishing a Haredi home base, some of which blend beautifully with urban norms but many of which are difficult to secure in a dense and diverse environment like New York City. Haredi life essentially requires mixed-use zoning and development, with housing, kosher shops, and community facilities—shuls, yeshivas, mikvas, and so on—concentrated together. Because they cannot drive or ride on Shabbos and many other holidays, the members of an observant community must live together in close proximity. But religious rules also make low-rise architecture preferable to high-rise living, which requires the provision of a rabbinically-approved Shabbos elevator that stops on every floor on holy days. Homes—even small apartments—need two sinks in the kitchen, two beds in the master bedroom, plenty of room for kids, cabinets to store four sets of dishes, and, ideally, outdoor space with an unobstructed view of the stars. Preexisting fruit trees cannot be removed to clear space for new construction.
A Fortress in Brooklyn shows how one such place was built. The book tells the story of how Hasidic Williamsburg came to be, and how it has survived the challenges that have beset the city more broadly, from the deindustrialization and fiscal crisis of the 1970s to the real estate boom and gentrification of the 1990s and onward. As Deutsch and Casper show in their survey of the period from roughly 1945 to 2020, Satmars in Williamsburg have maintained their foothold in the city in dramatically different ways at different times. In the 1960s and '70s, they actively embraced their place in the mid-century welfare state and fought in particular for new public housing construction in the neighborhood. While they sought to occupy a significant portion of this housing—including, at times, large apartments on lower floors—their efforts to secure their place in the city propelled a mode of development that also produced decommodified housing for their largely Puerto Rican and African American neighbors. Later, from the 1990s onward, segments of Satmar Williamsburg entered the booming real estate business, a move that would polarize the community and threaten many of its members' ability to keep living within the "fortress" of their neighborhood. To resolve this crisis, the Satmar Hasidim expanded geographically, reducing internal pressures but stoking anger over displacement among communities of color in the surrounding area.
A Fortress in Brooklyn highlights Hasidic agency in urban change. While those with only a passing knowledge of Hasidic life might look at the community's most visible markers—the sheitels, the shtreimels, the commitment to religious orthodoxy—and mistake Satmar Hasidim for habitual preservationists or apolitical isolationists, Deutsch and Casper make the opposite case, persuasively presenting Hasidic New Yorkers as active and organized participants in the social production of urban space. The book shows what happens when a community seeks, and to a large degree achieves, spatially bounded self-determination in a city where it remains a tiny minority.
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