The Satmar Effect
- The Satmar Effect
Over the years, i have attended weddings of my extended family in Williamsburg. After the family would huddle together outside on Bedford Avenue to watch the wedding ceremony, the men and women would go into separate rooms for the party. Seated in a room filled with women, some wearing hats over their wigs with others boldly donning only their wigs, I often struggled to make small talk. At one wedding almost two decades ago, I asked a distant relative who also recently had a baby what it was like to live in Williamsburg. She replied that while she did not like her expensive and small apartment, she was liking the neighborhood more and more, especially walking around at night to weddings. The streets were more lively. Others chimed in, speaking about how different Williamsburg felt from when they had grown up.
I recalled this conversation as I read through the pages of Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper's wonderful A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg. In the growing body of scholarship on New York City, its development, and the gentrification of its various neighborhoods since the 1970s, few have considered the role Jews of the various Hasidic sects played in this polity's evolution.1 While scholars have shifted their focus to Brooklyn, few urban historians have yet to directly deal with Jewishness as a heuristic category or contemplate what they can learn from communities like Satmar—one of the most successful immigrant groups in postwar New York City—who managed to get the city to address their needs while maintaining their culture.2 Indeed, after reading all I could ponder is the following question: How different would the postwar history of the city of New York sound if scholars took seriously questions of Satmar Jews' communal practices, strategies, and religious beliefs? To be sure, the social and built environment of New York City was forged by many actors. But the key roles played by various immigrant, ethnic and racial groups in its transformation have long been recognized by scholars of New York City history. Moreover, this transformation was rooted in neighborhoods, which as Jane Jacobs argued decades ago, play a crucial role in city life. So why, I wondered, is the experience of Satmar residents in Williamsburg, which is so vividly captured in the contemporary Yiddish [End Page 247] press, so rarely raised in discussions of postwar New York City? The answer to that question has to do with how this group was previously treated by American Jewish historians and scholars interested in immigrant New York. This book enters a long line of books in Jewish history in which New York City looms large. New York has long been depicted as a place that reshaped Jewish communal practices as the city itself was reshaped by Jews' desires, needs, and concerns.3 Often linked to questions of immigration, acculturation, and urbanization, American Jewish historians have had much to say about New York City, the largest urban Jewish concentration in the world for most of the twentieth century but rarely much on ultra-Orthodox Jews. I commend Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper's proper placement of Satmar Hasidim in the long history of various immigrant groups' engagement with New York City. Decimated by the Holocaust, the origin of the Satmar community in Brooklyn was in the decision of European immigrant Jews to replenish their community in one small corner of Brooklyn selected by their charismatic rabbi, Joel Teitelbaum (born 1887).
As this book reminds the reader, those who affiliated with the Satmar Rebbe are part of a long history of ethnic succession and neighborhood change that has long characterized New York City in general and Brooklyn in particular. The arrival and settlement of Satmar in the 1950s followed an earlier Jewish community who left for single homes in other parts of Brooklyn or Long Island. Between 1955 and 1970, New York City's overall Jewish population dropped by more than 40 percent as proliferating crime and drug-related problems drove relocation to the suburbs of Long Island and Westchester (8). What is remarkable is that the Satmar...
