American Shtetl: An Interview with Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers
Plus, 2-28 commemoration in Taiwan, solidarity rally with Ukraine, and book club details
We’re delighted to share this interview with Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers about their brilliant book, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York. Just this week it received the National Jewish Book Award from the National Jewish Book Council. Congratulations, Nomi and David!
If you’ve never heard of Kiryas Joel, it’s considered one of the most successful “separatist” religious communities in the United States. Located in Orange County, New York, a rural upstate area with high poverty rates, it has approximately twenty-five thousand practicing members of the Satmar, a Hasidic Jewish group. Should you visit, you’ll find the sign that welcomes you to town prescribes a host of rules: cover your neckline, wear sleeves past the elbow, wear long skirts or pants, respect “gender separation in all public areas.” Men pray three times a day; the schools teach primarily in Yiddish. Even the bus stop signs are bilingual, in Yiddish and English. As Nomi and David write, Kiryas Joel “expresses nostalgia for a Jewish past,” in particular “the past of European Jewry embodied in the shtetl.”
The book, which came out early last year, was fifteen years in the making, and we awaited it eagerly. (Plus, a collaboration between a law professor and a historian married to each other was obviously right up our alley.) It grapples with questions that have long interested us both: if people want to preserve their customs and rituals, how much freedom should the state afford them? To what extent should we aspire to a liberal ideal of ethnic and religious integration? What alternatives exist?
Kiryas Joel appears to depict that alternative—but paradoxically, as Nomi and David explain, it’s also a product of American liberalism. “If it is a shtetl, it is a decidedly American one,” they write, “rooted in the landscape of this country.”
There’s been wonderful coverage of the book, of which the best is probably the review by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the New Yorker and a two-part podcast with Erika Funke (part 1 and part 2). We also loved their interview with the New York Public Library.
We did this interview back in September, but we couldn’t get our act together. We’re so glad to be sharing this with you now, as the questions they raise are of enduring concern.
Nomi is a legal scholar at the University of Southern California. This year she’s at the University of Pennsylvania as a research fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and the Gruss Professor of Talmudic Law at the Penn Carey Law School. David is a historian at UCLA, where he’s the director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy as well as the of the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate.
Albert: Congratulations on the book. It’s a triumph. We really love it and want to thank you for writing something so nuanced and subtle. How did you first come into contact with Kiryas Joel, and what were your initial impressions of the community?
David Myers: Because of her research at the intersections of law and religion, Nomi’s interest in the community preceded my first visit by about a decade. When we decided to work on a book about it, I wanted to conduct some fieldwork there. I reached out to the community leadership to ask if I could come. And to my great surprise—I would say conducting research on Kiryas Joel has been an unending series of surprises—I was told, “Yes, show up.” That opened up a channel of communication that continued throughout the entire project.
Other than the village leadership, I also came to meet various dissident factions. I gained access to them because I told them that I had spoken to the establishment. They said: “Whom did you last speak with? Sit down. We’re going to talk and we’re going to give you the true story.”
Even with those political divides, I very much got the sense of organic holism from Kiryas Joel. This is a cradle-to-grave community. I got a sense of its daily rhythm. It’s a Yiddish-speaking, stringently observant community that takes incredibly seriously a punctilious observance of Jewish law. It also has a kind of ecstatic dimension of unquestioned faith. As a religious person, I find there’s something incredibly compelling about that.
The religious tradition I come from—my version of Judaism—is one of ceaseless questioning. But Kiryas Joel is a place where, at least on the surface, there’s no questioning: faith is pure and absolute. When you come into contact with that, it’s immensely powerful.
But guess what? People are people. In the community, there are people of pure and unquestioning faith and there are people who ask profound theological questions. There are people who are fully content to live in this self-contained enclave and there are people who are constantly straining at its boundaries. That was one very important realization that emerged out of my time there.
And that’s part of what’s ultimately so very winning about the community, whose people I came to feel in some sense connected to and whom I almost uniformly liked.
Michelle: Correct or not, we detected a bit of longing for that type of community. A reference in the book led me to read Philip Roth’s amazing short story “Eli the Fanatic”—a quite ambiguous tale about Jewish assimilation in America, which in one way could be read as nostalgia for a previous era of faith.
Nomi Stolzenberg: Well, that’s an astute reading, and I would say you’re homing in on some differences between the two of us. As David mentioned, for religious people, there’s something very appealing about this holistic community of faith that fills what’s lacking in modern, alienated, overly individualistic life. For some secular people, this idea of a holistic community is really repellent. And I feel like I’m neither of those.
The other piece of it is gender. This is a traditional religious community in which gender roles are not just different, but unequal. Women are cast in the traditional roles of wife and mother, consigned to the realm of domesticity and subordination. There are also very strict norms of gender segregation.
When we started to include fieldwork as one of our many methodologies, that was one of the first things we had to confront. Interactions between men and women are heavily restricted and regulated in this community. So how was that going to work? How was I going to participate in the fieldwork?
I decided not to. I didn’t accompany David on most of his visits. He made many. I think I accompanied him on one. I had a few encounters, but very few. And that was a choice.
Let’s just start with the fact that the most of the people David encountered were men—certainly in his initial encounters, because he began by meeting with public figures and the public realm is almost entirely male, with some interesting exceptions. So what would have happened if I’d been there in addition to or instead of David? It’s quite possible people would have met with me, since I’m not a member of the community, and the same norms of gender segregation wouldn’t necessarily apply. They are accustomed to engaging with the Gentile world, and it’s not like they’re not going to take meetings with politicians or staff.
But how do you get access to the women in the community and to their lives? That’s a whole different question. I really thought about it a lot. I came to the conclusion that the only good way, methodologically speaking, of gaining access to those women’s lives would be to do what a real cultural anthropologist or a sociologically trained ethnographer would and could do, which is to say long-term embedded participant observation.
I think that would have been possible for me if I were a different person with different training, who lived in a different part of the country and had a different life. But it just wasn’t in the realm of possibility for me. I’m a legal scholar living in Los Angeles, raising three children; it wasn’t within my capacity to pick up and live in this community for many months, if not longer. We just had to reconcile ourselves to not having access—because sure, I could have parachuted in and been like, “Hey, are there some women here who will talk to me?” But then what would I make of that? How representative would any individual woman or couple of women’s experiences be?
So I decided that a little bit of talking to women would be worse than none, in terms of issues of representativeness. And together David and I resolved to be mindful of the gender bias inherent in that dimension of our research, and to seek other ways of trying to understand. Gender roles in the community and the experiences of men and women in its more private dimensions are by nature less accessible to a scholar.
David: I want to respond to your question about longing. For me, I found some fleeting encounters with—to use Weber’s famous term—enchantment. Take the centrality of prayer. In the community, prayer is constant. You can find a prayer quorum every five minutes for a four-hour period. Prayer is organically embedded in one’s daily life. It’s not something you leave to do; you build work and life around it. This represents a fascinating reversal of the secular norm.
But I think the other point that needs to be put on the table is really a political, theoretical matter. I’m more instinctually drawn to communitarian experiments, and I’ve always been fascinated with the ones that struggle to forestall the disintegration and atomization of communities. I’ve always been interested in what the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called the Gemeinschaft.
Nomi: David just gave you a stirring description of the prayer quorums that all men could partake in. But as a woman I couldn’t participate. So that’s why I think these issues of gender and questions of religiosity—even though they are distinct—are not disconnected.
On the issue of Gemeinschaft: I wouldn’t overstate our differences. I mean, who doesn’t have some longing for that? Who doesn’t value a sense of belonging, a sense of community? Who doesn't look critically at the modern alienated society that produces individuals prone to mass shootings?
The book is very much about America. It concerns the changes and evolutions in American society, politics, and culture. We’d essentially completed our research for the book and largely completed the manuscript before the end of 2020.
But, as you know, we had the pandemic and Trump running for president a second time. Along with a number of other religious communities, predominantly Christian ones, Kiryas Joel put up a massive resistance to COVID restrictions. I thought this was a vivid illustration of what had always concerned me. It further convinced me of the reasons I was unable to uncritically sing the praises of an insular community.
What we saw in that context was a desire to not only put one’s faith first, but also put one’s own community above the rest of society. Or even the rest of the globe. They basically said, “Leave us alone and we won’t bother you. Don’t bother us.”
The pandemic illustrated the fallacy of that classic libertarian position. The virus demonstrated that no matter how determined a community is to withdraw from society, it’s not actually possible to isolate completely from the outside world. Therefore, if your behavior is going to have an impact on other people, you need to recognize your obligations to other people. And you need to recognize mechanisms of governance whereby disagreements about what’s in everyone’s best interest are going to be worked out in the most democratic way possible.
Albert: There are so many rich strands to tease out here. One of the really provocative arguments in your book is about the convergences between the right and left on this issue of communitarianism. You show how, starting in the 1980s, as a critique of liberal integrationist positions, both the multicultural left and the right wing of the religious right basically said, “Okay, let’s support communitarian projects.” Do you think there’s a space now within the political spectrum that’s recaptured the liberal integrationism of the 1960s or 1970s? Or do you feel the ground has shifted so much that those arguments have been abandoned?
Nomi: I think that COVID brought us back to recognizing that there’s a fundamental thing called the “public good” that communitarian projects will sometimes brush up against.
David: A quick take on that. In the wake of January 6, at least for me, the pendulum has swung. As I mentioned before, I have always felt a need to appreciate the spirit of communitarianism and even the ethos of separatism as a way to express the core values of a group, or to preserve the sense of a cultural life. But after January 6, I found myself thinking more about the great danger in disaggregating into smaller enclaves that share no sense of the common good. I became perplexed by the lack of any meaningful notion of civic virtue or civic duty, any meaningful notion of responsibility that accompanies the rights of citizenship. And this was all language that I really hadn’t used before.
In other words, part of the story that we tell is the use by communities such as Kiryas Joel of the instruments of liberal, economic, and political practice. It’s all well and good, unless it entails no commitment to the values of civic engagement, civic duty, civic obligation, and some sense of a shared good.
For example, this suggests to me that education in communities like Kiryas Joel must include instruction in what used to be referred to as “civics.” I’m all for Talmud Torah (Torah study)! I’m all for the cultural project of allowing the community to live according to its way of life. But not if it entails the embedded abandonment of any sense of civic obligation. That was what really struck me on January 6.
Nomi: There’s been a dramatic change, right? When I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the sixties and seventies, it was the high point in terms of ideas about an assimilationist, homogenizing melting pot. The idea was that your race or creed doesn’t matter; individuals have to shed any particularistic identity that they have. Recent movements for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reject that. The fundamental premise behind DEI assumes that we don’t need to shed our particular identities, whether ethnic, religious, racial, gender, etc. DEI embraces group difference.
But there’s a difference between DEI and separatism. DEI respects and preserves group differences, but it’s not separatist. DEI says we’re going to have diversity within a single institution, within a single university, within a single workplace. We’re going to have diversity within society at large. Now, it’s very easy to be cynical or critical about the way these policies are actually implemented. There’s the managerial HR version of DEI, which seems more concerned with protecting institutions from legal liability for violating Title VII or Title IX than with actually doing something meaningful.
And of course, there are also people who say, “Oh, DEI goes too far.” For example, student groups within a certain university are too separated from other student groups. There are all kinds of criticisms, and a lot of them are valid. But I think that’s because it's really hard to get E pluribus unum right! It’s difficult to synthesize a vision of equality that respects and values cultural differences with a vision of integration.
And I do think that is, at heart, what animates all these current battles over the teaching of history and what’s going on in school boards. In the United States, practically speaking, the two sites of integration for most Americans—places where you will encounter someone of a different race, religion, or background—are the public school and the workplace. But what’s been happening for so long is a relentless assault on public schools, with white flight and de facto segregation. This assault gained so much momentum under the Trump administration, and it continues today.
The yeshivas and the community we study in this book are very much caught up in these struggles over private education. How far are we going to go in terms of allowing people to go to private schools or homeschooling? A big reason for not letting states make public schooling compulsory—which might have been one of the only ways to achieve true equality and integration in this society—goes back to a Supreme Court decision in the early twentieth century where the court recognized that parents have a right to control the upbringing of their children—in particular, the Supreme Court stressed, with respect to religious values. And in America, that can’t be done in a public school.
But how far are we going to go in terms of releasing private schools and homeschoolers from any state regulation of what’s being taught? And how far are we going to go in the public schools in terms of letting parents opt out of having their kids be taught? Now the controversy is over whether they can learn about the history of racism in this country. And, you know, there’s a real struggle going on to release parents from any obligation to teach children that history, or to adhere to any secular or state-prescribed standards of what is taught to children.
David: There’s a pitched battle going on in New York right now. Both sides are becoming increasingly polarized; both sides have adopted ever more oppositional positions. On one side are advocates of the position I just articulated: students need to be exposed to essential educational tools so that they can function in society. On the other side are advocates of principally religious education. These are mainly stringently observant Jews, but also Catholics, such as the Archdiocese of New York. The issue revolves around the criterion of substantial equivalency. Is a parochial school providing substantially equivalent education to what a child would receive in a public school?
Here’s my khidesh, my innovation: a pox on both their houses. The advocates of substantial equivalency don’t appreciate enough the fabric of cultural integrity that a community like Kiryas Joel represents. They don’t understand how threatened the community feels by the forces of assimilation.
And I feel like people in Kiryas Joel become overly defensive and entrenched. They lose sight of something that, in fact, was present at the beginning of the Satmar educational system in the United States. At the beginning, there was much more English. There was much more openness to learning essential skills other than Torah study.
To come back to the point we were making earlier, I think that pendulum does need to swing back toward the values of democracy and equality that we’re losing sight of today. The language imparted in Satmar schools can connect to those endangered values of democracy and equality. We can no longer safeguard these places as sacred and untouchable. It needs to happen there. And it needs to happen in many other places, such as in the far-right extremist world.
At the same time, we need to make sure that we understand that exposure to the values of democracy and equality doesn’t mean that this community shouldn’t have the right to educate kids according to its own traditions.
But it’s a constant process of recalibration. Now we need a recalibration.
In 2020, we interviewed Nomi on the Supreme Court’s ruling on religious services. You can read Philip Roth’s short story “Eli the Fanatic” here.
Ukraine Solidarity Rally in Taipei
At Liberty Square in Taiwan, hundreds gather to express solidarity with Ukraine on the one year anniversary of the invasion. “Ukraine and Taiwan are two candles in a dark room,” said Miao Poya 苗博雅, a popular council member, in a particularly rousing speech.
The solidarity event was organized by at Taiwan Stands with Ukraine, among them Aurora Chang, Alex Khomenko, Oleksandr Shyn, and Elisa. For the past year they’ve organized mass demonstrations and connected Taiwanese donors to Ukraine. This past year they’ve raised 1.5 million NTD. And just this past Monday they waged a successful campaign to cancel a performance of a Russian singer who supports Putin. As Oleksandr said, the organization started as a “diverse group of people who could not stay indifferent and quickly turned into a movement.”
If you missed our viral interview with Oleksandr Shyn, a Korean-Ukrainian student living in Taiwan, you can find it here (Mandarin version here).
228: we miss the heckling of the new mayor by half an hour
We were quite bummed to have missed the heckling of the new mayor of Taipei. (“Dammit we were right there!” was our anguished refrain—we’d passed by the location of his speech less than half an hour earlier—when the news appeared on our Twitter feed.) We blame Baby P., who was having a meltdown and clearly in need of a nap.
228 is a national holiday that commemorates one of the seminal moments in modern Taiwanese history. On February 28, 1947, crowds gathered outside of the Governor General’s Office to protest the mistreatment of a forty-year old widow who was selling cigarettes illegally on the street. The uprising continued for days, and out of fear of losing control of the island, the Chinese Nationalist government declared martial law and deployed troops from China. During a three day period, Chinese Nationalist troops broke into homes and killed people indiscriminately on the street. The Nationalist governor Chen Yi ordered soldiers to hunt down local political leaders whom they suspected of leftist sympathies. By mid-March, the Chinese Nationalists had killed tens of thousands of people.
Commemoration of the event has long been polarized, but this year’s governmental event sparked particular controversy, as the newly-elected mayor of Taipei, Chiang Wan-an, claims to be the great-grand-son of Chiang Kai-shek. What does it mean that a descendant of the man who authorized the massacre now has to preside over the annual commemoration for at least several more years? This fundamental irony has led to major debate about the state of historical memory and transitional justice in Taiwan. We’ve been following these discussions closely and will write about them in a future post.
If you’d like to learn more about 228, Lev Nachman has a comprehensive Twitter thread that collects some great scholarly resources:
City of Sadness & Diaspora Panel
Thanks to readers who came out to the re-release of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s masterpiece, City of Sadness (1989). What a brilliant film—we find ourselves still thinking about scenes from it. We have a few more outings in mind: to Yunlin for music and art, Hualien for a three-day writer retreat, and the popular Taiwanese film Marry My Dead Body. If you’re interested, reply to this email.
Last week, Michelle spoke at a panel called “How much power does the Taiwan diaspora have?” alongside sociologists Ya-han Chuang and Meng-Hsi Pan, who research Asian diaspora in Europe. We’re grateful to Liya Yu at Klartext Salon for organizing & moderating, and to everyone who came out.
Monologue Night: March 18th
Save the date for GRASS JELLY: A Night of Monologues. Writers in Taiwan are given 48 hours to write a short monologue, which are then performed by actors. It takes place at Divadlo, a Czech restaurant in Taipei, on Saturday, March 18th. Doors open at 18:30, show starts at 19:00. Tickets are 300 NTD. This has been organized by Amy Zhang, whose wonderful short story about Chinese international students in the United States recently won a prize at Joyland. If you have questions, email Amy at amylzhang88@gmail.com.
Book Club: My Name is Lucy Barton and American Pastoral
Talking to you about American Pastoral was terrific. After some thought, we can say unapologetically: we loved this book. For those who missed the conversation, we talked about generational divides, cults, the Weather Underground, anti-Semitism, assimilation, and dinner scenes where rage is barely suppressed. In the Kuo-Wu household we keep coming back to these questions: why did Merry bomb the post office? Could it have been prevented? Did she do it because the Swede was so repressed? Or was historical change such a powerful force it couldn’t be overcome?
For March we’ve chosen the tonal opposite of American Pastoral, the understated and restrained My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. All subscribers are welcome. The next meeting is Friday, March 31st, Friday at 3 PM PST, 6 PM EST / Saturday, April 1st at 7 AM Taiwan time. Reply to this email for a zoom link.
Finally, our one-year grant from Substack expired back in November. Since then, we’ve been breaking even. If you’ve been reading our newsletter for awhile and find it valuable, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This has been a labor of love for us! Thank you for being here and reading.
Glad to read the interview. I watched and loved the tv show Shtisel on Netflix a few years ago. I think of that show whenever I come across other writing on insular Jewish communities.