Reviewed by: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers Jeffrey S. Gurock Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers. The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 477 pp. The Satmar Hasidic enclave of Kiryas Joel was established in bucolic upstate New York in the early 1970s as an extension of that Jewish sect’s presence in America that initially took root after the Holocaust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, under the leadership of its charismatic leader Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum. In Kiryas Joel, an area that was “formally incorporated as an autonomous village within the town of Monroe” in Orange County (4), they succeeded in creating and maintaining a separatist, homogenous Jewish world, possessed of a “degree of group insularity unimaginable in Europe” (125). Back in the Old World, Jews of various religious and political stripes lived together in shtetls, including numerous Hasidic groups with their different and competing orientations, along with the gentiles who also resided in these largely Jewish villages. Not so in Kiryas Joel, where the Satmar have been able to fashion a life apart from other Americans and other American Jews due to the ongoing willingness of local and federal governments to assist them. [End Page 211] At first glance, these Hasidim might be seen as Jewish Amish, akin to those who reside in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and who—in culturally pluralistic America—have been permitted to adhere unqualifiedly to their traditional customs, dress, and language. Where the Satmar are fundamentally different from this Christian sect is in their wise use of their rights as American citizens to actively engage in politics even as they pray for the day when the messiah will come to return them to the Holy Land of Israel. Rabbi Teitelbaum understood, early on in America, the power of the properly placed vote. He and his successors have directed their followers to cast their ballots for designated candidates. More often than not, these politicians are gentiles; after all, Monroe County is predominantly non-Jewish. While after election day Satmar leaders do not have coffee with the Christians they have backed, they are sure to arrive at the winners’ doorsteps to remind them of what their backing meant to them. Accordingly, in return for their electoral support, state education officials subsequently have, for example, turned a blind eye to Satmar school curricula that are generally in conscious violation of Regents protocols. In the 2020 presidential election, the Satmar showed that in addition to their use of politics for “direct, tangible benefit” to their community (32), they were keen to have their say about America’s cultural environment that exists well beyond the borders of their enclave. Notwithstanding the evident fact that Donald Trump was a “highly imperfect vessel” for their “political expression” in terms of “ethics and deportment,” 99 percent of their voters chose the Republican candidate because he was seen as an “assertive leader” who defied “liberal norms.” So disposed, Satmar activists could even be seen at Trump rallies waving his flags even as they kept respectable social distances from activist Christian religious groups who had comparable views of the challenges facing America. These themes are among the central and most intriguing findings of Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers’s comprehensive study that unravels the complexities of the Satmar Hasidim’s desire for separatism while they engage with American life. As such, American Shtetl now stands along with another recent study of those Satmar Jews who remained in their erstwhile Brooklyn hub and who have also effectively worked within the New York City political system to enhance their lives. Together, these works have deepened our understanding of a highly visible but until-now largely understudied group of American Jews.1 Stolzenberg and Myers could not have crafted their volume without the extensive help of this ostensibly closed Satmar community. Both its leaders and the group’s rank and file granted access to these two ambitious and decidedly non-Hasidic researchers. Obviously, for some reason, they wanted their story to be told. But why and how they came to that critical...