Wednesday, February 23, 2022
A Hasidic village in New York is paving the way for a ‘white, Christian, conservative’ America
Years ago, friends of mine visited the Satmar village of Kiryas Joel, established in 1977 in upstate New York. "It was amazing," one of them said of the streets and shops filled with men and women in traditional black clothing. "Literally everyone was Hasidic. It was like visiting Eastern Europe a century ago."
Actually, I pointed out, Eastern Europe wasn't anything like that, least of all the Romanian city of Satu Mare, the home base of the Satmar. A century ago it was bustling with secular culture, diverse Jewish politics, and — above all — non-Jews, who constituted three-quarters of the population.
Indeed, a community like Kiryas Joel could never have existed in Europe. It is a uniquely "American Shtetl," as the title of a new book about the town by David Myers and Nomi Stolzenberg suggests.
In "American Shtetl," Stolzenberg, a professor of law at the University of Southern California, and Myers, a professor of Jewish history at UCLA, provide the definitive study of Kiryas Joel, its history, people, and its profound relevance for America and American Jewry well beyond the town's 25,000 residents.
The authors of "American Shtetl" understand Kiryas Yoel not as an authentic Eastern European Jewish town, but as a recreation of a mythic past built on uniquely American features: above all, the power of religious freedom, private property, and state welfare.
The book is divided into two sections. Part one describes the "past and present" of the city. It opens with a detailed portrait of life in the village today: religious life, gender roles, education, politics, work, charity networks, and economy.
Kiryas Joel is one of the poorest cities in the country, suffering four times the national rate of poverty with over 93% of its residents on Medicaid.
It remains an extremely homogeneous community, where religious or cultural deviance is punished, sometimes harshly. The regular presence of violence in the village against those who reject the rebbe's leadership – slashed tires, torched cars, smashed windows, physical assault, and even death threats – constitutes a steady part of this story.
Though the town's leadership always claimed it was the action of young "hotheads," the authors make it clear that it was a "direct result" of the victims' resistance to the leaders' authority. One famous sermon of the rebbe, the "Ki sisa drusha," openly instigated these attacks.
In the village, religious and political authority are deeply intertwined. Beyond social consequences for defying rabbinic leadership, the rebbe essentially appoints all local political office holders, despite the technical compliance with democratic procedures. Thus religious authorities wield both private and secular power.
The book jumps back to review the history of Satmar Hasidim – relative latecomers to the Hasidic world despite today constituting its largest faction – and their first rebbe, the late Joel Teitelbaum , after whom the village is named.
After losing his entire family in the Holocaust and escaping on the famous Kasztner train which spirited hundreds of Hungarian Jews to safety, the anti-Zionist Teitelbaum failed to find a place in Palestine and ultimately settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1946.
In Williamsburg, the Satmar Hasidim paradoxically attempted to create their own "fortress" of isolation through active engagement in urban politics – to a far greater extent than their prewar ancestors – as documented in last fall's brilliant study of the community, "A Fortress in Brooklyn".
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