Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Rooted in Brooklyn

2023; Purdue University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sho.2023.a903289

1534-5165

Jenna Weissman Joselit,

Jewish Identity and Society

Rooted in Brooklyn Jenna Weissman Joselit (bio) Awash in change, postwar america took little notice of the growing presence of Hasidic Jews in their midst. Even when matters of faith loomed large in public discourse of the 1950s, generating much talk of a national religious revival, they were rarely seen or heard. A decade later, America's Hasidim were hard to miss, the stuff of numerous newspaper and magazine articles, literary works, and sociological studies. By the 1960s, the New World had discovered the Hasidism of the Old World, giving rise to a raft of narratives not unlike those once penned by explorers of the Amazon. Between the twelve thousand members of the Satmar community in Williamsburg and the equally substantial enclave of Lubavitch Hasidim in Crown Heights, both in Brooklyn, Hasidic Jews could no longer fly under the radar: There were too many of them to escape notice. Besides, they made for good copy. The persistence of Hasidism—and in the U.S., of all places—upended long held, cherished beliefs about the intimate relationship between modernization and secularization in which both forces inexorably went hand in hand. As Marvin Bressler, writing in 1962 in the American Sociological Review, bluntly put it, the Hasidim of Williamsburg "are becoming an embarrassment to the conventional wisdom of sociology."1 Growing fascination with these particular Hasidic Jews, the remnants of what had once been a thriving Transylvanian Jewish community, was also a way to reckon with the enormous implications of the Holocaust. An adumbration of "memory work," as it's now called, the resulting literature on Hasidim in America was of a piece with Abraham J. Heschel's The Earth is the Lord's (1947) and Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog's Life is with People (1952), both of which were widely seen as a eulogy for a world that was no more. Some of the latter-day Hasidic tales that made the rounds in the United States of the late 1950s and 1960s were journalistic accounts, others literary creations, and still others sociological studies. Varying as much in tone as in method, they ran the gamut from approving to disdainful. Most, though, clustered in the camp of the curious and the befuddled, leaving readers scratching their heads. [End Page 238] Consider, for example, an illustrated spread on Judaism that appeared in Life magazine in June 1955, introducing readers to a contemporary Jewish landscape in which the Hasidim figured as an example of the "old ways." The piece, whose author was unidentified, while its photographers—the celebrated Alfred Eisenstaedt and Cornell Capa—were highlighted, set things rolling from its very first sentence, which read: "Carryovers from the archaic Jewish ways of life can be seen today in a shabby-looking section of Brooklyn called Williamsburg." Elaborating further, the article related that amid the appurtenances of modern daily life such as "drugstores, service stations and delicatessens, move strange figures that seem to belong to another age—bearded men with side curls and wide-brimmed black hats and long black coats. They are the Hassidim." The accompanying suite of black-and-white photographs reinforced the "fish out of water" motif by showing men who pointedly turned away and hid their faces from the camera. Nary a woman was in sight.2 A few years later, in November 1959, Commentary writer Harry Gersh went to Williamsburg to see for himself what went on in that corner of the world. The result, an essay he called "Satmar Jews in Brooklyn: A Zealot Community," made clear from its very title what he had encountered and sought to convey to his readers: a veritable "shtetl" reachable by subway, whose shop signage as well as language on the street, even among youngsters shooting hoops or riding around on bicycles, was Yiddish. Noticeably absent, he pointed out, were women, especially teenage girls, and "TV antennas." What struck Gersh even more forcefully was the degree to which members of the Satmar community took their cue from and deferred to the Rebbe even when it came to mundane matters. "The Satmar congregation," he noted, "does exactly what their Rebbe says and it does only what he says they may do."3...