Did All Jews Become White Folks?: A Fortress in Brooklyn and Hasidic Williamsburg
Reviewed by Gabe S. Tennen
In A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Makings of Hasidic Williamsburg, Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper add an important wrinkle into prevalent understandings of American Jewish history.[1] Deutsch, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Casper, who received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, focus their text on the Hasidic Satmar sect and its creation of a “holy city of Jerusalem” in one corner of north Brooklyn, tracing that community from its nascent beginnings in the 1940s into the 21st century. By offering a detailed and crisply written account of this often discussed but largely underexamined group, the authors provide a caveat to nearly fifty years of scholarship.
A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg
By Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper
Yale University Press, 2021
408 pages
In 1976, social critic Irving Howe wrote that in the late-1800s and early-1900s, “religion might still mean everything to individual Jews, but the Lower East Side was a secular community. It could not be otherwise.”[2] Howe’s characterization of that dense immigrant neighborhood set the course for nearly a half-century of historical research into the American Jewish experience. In this telling, Jews in the United States retained some cultural markers of their identity but shed any correlating linguistic or physical indicators of alterity. Deutsch and Casper remind readers that Howe’s description of secularization and assimilation is not entirely complete. Rather, A Fortress in Brooklyn details a complex community defined by insularity and religious devotion. Yet the authors also communicate that Hasidic Williamsburg is neither static nor unchanging; only partially a “fortress.” Even more, it is an inheritor of New York’s ethnic and racial mosaic, permeable to outside influence and cosmopolitan in nature. Satmars in Williamsburg, the authors argue, are “not merely in the city but also of it – consummate urban dwellers whose street smarts, swagger and sensibilities… make them closer to their longtime neighbors than their co-religionists in the suburbs.”[3]
Deutsch and Casper briefly recount the roots of the Satmar group itself, which, after originating in Hungary, arrived in Brooklyn following the Holocaust. Its leader, Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum, was himself a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Teitelbaum emphasized to his flock religious piety, traditional appearance, the eschewal of materialism, and opposition to Zionism. The burgeoning sect made its way to New York at a moment when the city began to change demographically, with Black and Hispanic communities growing in once-majority white neighborhoods. The Satmars, rather than decamp to Borough Park, the Upper West Side, or Nassau County, remained, and grew, in Williamsburg itself.
The ways in which the Hasidic section of Williamsburg retained its character run counter to prominent assumptions regarding the white exodus from New York City in the postwar period. Historians have detailed the ways in which racism, fears of crime, frustration with government, and a changing landscape brought on by urban renewal engendered white flight.[4] The Satmars of Williamsburg, unlike other white ethnic groups, stayed in the city, and considered assimilation a greater threat to their traditions and lifestyle than the urban ills or prominent prejudices associated with 1960s and ’70s New York. By doubling-down on their commitment to what was commonly perceived as a decaying neighborhood, Deutsch and Casper contend, the group came to resemble more their Black and Hispanic neighbors than other American Jews.
A Fortress in Brooklyn describes how, like other groups arriving in the five boroughs in the postwar period, Satmar Hasidim moved into newly constructed public housing en masse, catalyzed by a dearth of quality housing stock in Williamsburg. Their embrace of public housing also evidenced a lack of stigma towards toward those new projects, which many other white ethnics viewed through a racialized lens. The high number of Satmars in those developments, Jonathan Williams Plaza and Independence Towers, further anchored the group in north Brooklyn. As New York City lost nearly 1 million Jewish residents in the decades following the Second World War, Hasidim often constituted the only lingering Jewish presence in neighborhoods like Williamsburg.
That assertion by Deutsch and Casper regarding the staying power of the Satmars in Williamsburg prompts the duo’s most important intervention into the historiography on American Jews. Some, including Karen Sacks and Matthew Frye Jacobson, argue that in the postwar era, Jews, previously thought of as only nominally white, if at all, were absorbed into that overarching and privileged category. Sacks cites receding American anti-Semitism in the wake of Nazi atrocities and wartime egalitarianism as contributors to those changes. Concerted government action during and after the New Deal added an additional, if gendered, extension of privilege to American Jews, delivering financial support towards homeownership, education, and occupational advancement, constituting what historian Ira Katznelson deems “affirmative action” for whites.[5]
Deutsch and Casper dispute the universality of that “whitening” process among American Jews. Unlike their secular counterparts, many Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg remained either impoverished or solidly working-class, lacking socioeconomic standards associated with whiteness. The group also rejected linguistic and sartorial assimilation, as Teitelbaum “consciously and methodically sought to establish modes of speech, dress, and practice that signified tradition while ostracizing those who refused to accept these norms.”[6] Most surprisingly, the United States Chamber of Commerce designated Hasidic Jews as a “non-Caucasian minority” in 1984, labeling them in at least one the federal agency as, quite literally, not white.[7]
Deutsch and Casper, by bringing their study into the 21st century, present a recent history of the city’s economic rebound and gentrification, both areas just beginning to gain scholarly attention. Though some have already unpacked the origins of gentrification in certain neighborhoods, those works largely focus on the displacement of people of color, the rehabilitation of empty commercial space, and the instrumentality of the city’s elite in orchestrating community change.[8] The exploration by Deutsch and Casper of the gentrification of Williamsburg reveals the impact of that trend on a group often overlooked in discussions of displacement and neighborhood flux.
Like their Black and Hispanic neighbors, many Satmars in Williamsburg resisted gentrification through grassroots and collaborative movements. Flashpoints around new infrastructure, including housing and bike lanes, occurred throughout the 2000s, as the community banded together in efforts to preserve their neighborhood’s distinct character, sometimes finding allies in poor and working-class communities of color. Still, some Satmars also acted as developers or real estate brokers, orchestrating the transformation of Williamsburg, and earning the ire of many of their friends and neighbors. Those “collaborators,” as they were termed, illustrate the ways in which some long-time residents of changing areas may also be facilitators of community change.
As gentrification encroached on the Hasidic enclave in South Williamsburg and high birth rates led to a population explosion, the neighborhood’s borders were remade as Satmars moved into proximate areas of Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant, constituting a “New Williamsburg.” This geographic dispersal of the neighborhood belies the notion that Hasidic Williamsburg is a frozen shtetl preserved in amber. Beyond spatial change, those moving into nearby corners of Brooklyn were often younger and more financially stable, leading to a socioeconomic split between “old” and “new” Williamsburg. Generational differences have also arisen along cultural lines through internet use, growing consumerism, and expanding (though still kosher) culinary tastes, marking a growing engagement with the non-Hasidic world.
Deutsch and Casper’s detailed work opens inroads into other relevant areas of study. Foremost, the authors largely exclude non-Satmar groups. As other areas like Crown Heights undergo neighborhood change, groups like the Lubavitcher sect warrant their own investigation. A Fortress in Brooklyn also highlights the voices of Hasidic actors at the expense of other points of view. What, then, might a specific examination of Hasidic-Hispanic relations, or Hasidic-“hipster” relations reveal about intercommunal cooperation and conflict? A Fortress in Brooklyn therefore prompts other interrogations of Hasidic Brooklyn.
By focusing on a small but prominent sliver of a diverse population, A Fortress in Brooklyn qualifies historical understanding and popular discourse surrounding American Jewry. Punctuated by chants of “Blood and Soil” in Charlottesville, a massacre in Pittsburgh, and random acts of street violence, the last half-decade has added another layer to the already convoluted history of Jews in the United States. Like those prominent instances of rising anti-Semitism, Deutsch and Casper muddy any clear-cut understanding of what it means to be Jewish in America. In doing so, the pair fill an important scholarly gap, inviting researchers to further question any straightforward consideration of Jewish-American identity.
Gabe S. Tennen is a PhD candidate in History at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on politics and culture in 20th century New York City.
[1] Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper, A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2021).
[2] Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 95.
[3] Deutsch and Casper, 303-304.
[4] Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Michael Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Urban Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Gerald Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill Brownsville Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Postwar New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
[5] Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005); Karen Brodkin Sacks, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
[6] Deutsch and Casper, 38.
[7] Deutsch and Casper, 93-97.
[8] Derek Hyra, The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Macmillan, 2017); Neal Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (Milton Park: Routledge, 1996); Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Rutgers University Press, 1982).