Hasidic-Americans
- Hasidic-Americans
The authors of this stimulating book advance a most provocative thesis: that a close examination of Hasidic Williamsburg offers a powerful alternative to the dominant narrative of American Jewish history. The latter centers on such inexorable trends as Jewish cultural assimilation, religious accommodation, economic mobility, and residential suburbanization. Hasidism in America, especially the concentration of Satmar Hasidim in Williamsburg, tells an altogether different story, they contend. Instead of "white flight," both Satmar and Lubavitch Hasidim remained anchored in New York City (in the Williamsburg and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn, respectively) in close proximity to Black and Latino neighbors. The authors assert forcefully that Hasidim do not fit the model of Jewish or European immigrant racial transformation: whereas southern Italians, Irish, and East European Jews strived to become "white folks," Hasidim, who came to the U.S. from Eastern Europe mostly after World War II, were uninterested in this bleaching and continued, for reasons of religious and cultural preservation, to hold more in common with marginalized communities of color than with older strands of American Jews. Contrary to the image of the rapid transit of postwar Jews from the working class into the middle and upper strata, a majority of Hasidic households have hovered near the federal poverty rate. Unlike non-Hasidic Jews who experienced lower birthrates and smaller median families after 1940, Hasidic families grew ever larger during the last decades of the twentieth century. Thus, Hasidim by and large resisted the cultural integration that other American Jews pursued and at times even helped shape.
None of this, of course, is particularly news. Still, most previous accounts of American Jewry, even when acknowledging the presence of Hasidim in America, have tended to treat them as marginal. They are viewed as the exception to the rule, a quaint or curious sideshow, even a sentimental relic of a world that is no more. In sharp contrast, what co-authors Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Caspar assert is that the experience of Satmar Hasidim cannot be relegated to the sidelines. Their growing numbers, gritty urban resilience, and institutional and political savvy render them increasingly important players on the American, or American Jewish, historical stage. [End Page 243]
A Fortress in Brooklyn is not the first book to provide an in-depth discussion of Hasidim in America. Nor is it a full-scale and rounded history of Hasidic Williamsburg, let alone of American Hasidism. Instead of a traditional narrative history, the authors home in on a number of themes which they trace in rough chronological progression, including such topics as poverty, interethnic and racial conflict, legal wrangling over church-state separation, crime and street violence. But the spine of their story is real estate; it is the fulcrum on which these and other issues revolve and what is truly original in their study.
This is perhaps the first book on Hasidim, and one of the very few on Jewish history generally, that delves into the nuts and bolts of real estate trends and transactions. Combining urban studies with demography, ethnography and business analysis, Deutsch and Casper present a stunningly vital and convincing portrait of the Hasidic pursuit of territory. Beginning with the September 1946 arrival in New York of the Satmar Grand Rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum—a Hungarian Hasid and Holocaust survivor—Williamsburg became the nucleus and global capital, so to speak, of the Satmar sect, the largest Hasidic grouping in the world.
Teitelbaum's insistence that Williamsburg remain the group's center, even as it sought and eventually obtained land for large-scale settlement in New York City's rural environs, effectively ensured that Satmar would have to use all available tools to retain and expand its foothold in the neighborhood. In fascinating detail, Deutsch and Casper document the various means deployed by the Rebbe and other Satmar leaders to forge an independent path, one free of reliance on the philanthropy of more secularized Jews, in order to entrench their community in north Brooklyn. This effort was all the more striking given that, by the 1950s, Williamsburg was well on its way to urban decline, marked by the erosion of factory economies, white ethnic abandonment, intrusive highway building...
