A Fortress in Brooklyn
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Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper
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Format: HardcoverPrice: $30.00
The epic story of Satmar Hasidic Williamsburg, from the decline of New York to the gentrification of Brooklyn
"Groundbreaking. . . . To fully understand Satmar, of course, one has to be born into it. But to understand how political prowess and real-estate know-how shaped the group’s current iteration in Brooklyn, it would be wise to start with this outstanding book."—Laura E. Adkins, LA Review of Books
The Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups of people in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of the toughest parts of New York City during an era of steep decline, only to later resist and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of the neighborhood.
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a group of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely opposed the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg’s Hasidim rejected assimilation while still undergoing distinctive forms of Americanization and racialization, Deutsch and Casper present both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.
Nathaniel Deutsch is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among his books are The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World and The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Michael Casper received his Ph.D. in history from UCLA and has contributed to American Jewish History and the New York Review of Books.
“With a decade of research going into the book, based in part on numerous interviews with Satmar community members, the authors have written a fascinating and engaging work that captures the remarkable story of the rebuilding of the Satmar community.”—Ben Rothke, The Times of Israel
"A spellbinding narrative of how the Satmar community went from a small group of post-war stragglers in Brooklyn to significant players in the New York City political and real estate worlds. . . . Fascinating and engaging."—Ben Rothke, jewishlink.news
Publication Date: May 11, 2021
28 b/w illus.
