A Hasidic Town in the Catskill Mountains: A Review of Nomi M. Stolzenberg, David N. Myers, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021, XVI+480 pp.

Abstract

The monograph by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Maers recounts the history and daily life of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic settlement located in the vicinity of New York. The book describes the history of Satmar Hasidism since its occurrence. Satmar is one of the most influential branches of contemporary ultra-Orthodox Judaism. The authors discuss the interaction of the Kiryas Joel community with the political and administrative institutions of the United States. The reviewed monograph is generally more a study of microhistory than a piece of cultural anthropology. The reviewer does not agree with the decision of the authors to substantiate the continuity of the Kiryas Joel community in relation to the shtetls, small towns with a predominant Jewish population, typical for Eastern Europe in the 19th century. Kiryas Joel, like other similar settlements of orthodox Jews, is a new phenomenon that first appeared in the United States. Such closed religious settlements represent a response of the fundamentalist communities to the pressure of the modernizing world. They are a phenomenon typical for many American religious groups. The comparative approach is one of the strong points of the monograph: the authors of “American Shtetl” compare the object of their research with other similarly closed settlements and communities.