Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Nathaniel deutsch and michael casper have provided us with a rigorously researched and fine-grained urban history that will challenge and nuance the way we think about Hasidic communities, both past and present. The authors brilliantly demonstrate how the "shtetl" of Hasidic Williamsburg, a fortress-like world apart in some regards, actually sits at the very center of America's most contested constitutional and political debates regarding race, class, and religion. Although arguably constructed to resist American influences and assimilation, Deutsch and Casper show that Hasidic Williamsburg is a quintessentially American story. Hasidic Williamsburg is a prism through which we can explore America's evolving racial hierarchies that have shifted with each new wave of immigration, and the relative degrees of whiteness along which Jews, and especially Hasidim, remain awkwardly positioned.

I wish to touch upon the issue of race in my response, to think more about what the Hasidic relationship to whiteness means today especially following the broad-based support of this demographic for former President Donald Trump. I will then turn to a few more contemporary and future facing questions regarding social and political changes amongst Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg and the Satmar community in particular. If the goal of Hasidic leaders like Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum was, in the words of the authors, to "remain a people apart" (303) and to build a "fortress" in the city, then in the twenty-first century this fortress has proven to be a highly porous one. Building on the authors' conclusion where they note the globalizing influence of the internet on Hasidim in Brooklyn, I wish to comment on some additional forces of change, both in terms of outside influences entering Williamsburg and the Satmar's outfacing influence on the Jewish world, specifically in regards to Zionism and religious conversion.

First, the issue of race. I personally found chapter 3, "The Politics of Poverty," to be the most engrossing in the book. In this chapter, the authors relate the historic [End Page 233] political battles waged by the Hasidic community of Williamsburg to be considered a disadvantaged racial minority and thereby eligible to receive different forms of governmental assistance. What this chapter demonstrates is that, first of all, religion can absolutely be racialized. As Holocaust survivors who continued to experience antisemitism in the United States, the religious practices and distinct appearance of Hasidim have most certainly served as agents of racialization, rendering them subject to racialized stigmatization. Yet, this particular history of racialized persecution cannot be simply equated with the histories of racial oppression and inequality experienced by the Hasidim's Black and Latino neighbors. Indeed, what this chapter illustrates so profoundly is that there are many shades of whiteness, and Hasidim continue to occupy an off-white category in the American racial hierarchy. Where things get even murkier is the fact that, in their insistence to be acknowledged as a racial minority, Hasidim have demanded specialized government support while at the same time backing political candidates who call for a reduction of governmental influence and services, often to the disadvantage of other racial minorities, and support candidates who, some believe, will protect their "world apart" and interfere the least in Hasidic social and religious life. These dynamics came to the fore perhaps most strikingly when Hasidic Jews voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the 2020 election. As a result of their very refusal to assimilate and "become white folks,"¹ Hasidim paradoxically cast their lot in the last election with a demagogue of white power who, ostensibly, would limit the reach of "big government" and what they view as the "corrupting" influence of liberal elites. What we learn from these recent events is that the maintenance of whiteness and white power relies upon intricate and often paradoxical political entanglements with racialized minorities, including the "off-white" kind. Hasidim, in their desire to remain an unassimilated nonwhite world apart, have been more than willing to leverage white power in order to do so.

Finally, the question of outside influence and change. In the conclusion, the authors note the globalizing influence of the internet and the departure of Satmar families to new suburban...