American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York

Nomi M. Stolzen­berg and David N. Myers have writ­ten a heav­i­ly researched, read­able, and exceed­ing­ly inter­est­ing his­to­ry of Kiryas Joel, the Sat­mar Hasidic com­mu­ni­ty estab­lished in 1977 with­in the bound­aries of upstate Mon­roe, New York. It was named for Joel Teit­el­baum, its beloved leader, who sought to estab­lish a com­mu­ni­ty of true believ­ers who would live, study, pray, and pro­cre­ate in a Torah-true envi­ron­ment bereft of mod­ern temptations.  KJ has grown from a few hun­dred res­i­dents to near­ly twen­ty-five thou­sand today, and town author­i­ties antic­i­pate its pop­u­la­tion will increase to near­ly sev­en­ty-five thou­sand by 2035. Although not the first, KJ is unques­tion­ably the most sig­nif­i­cant Jew­ish utopi­an com­mu­ni­ty in Amer­i­ca, and it is, as the title of this book implies, not mere­ly a shtetl but an Amer­i­can shtetl, and its his­to­ry is ​“an espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ing man­i­fes­ta­tion of Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty politics.”

This event will be held virtually via Zoom and is part of our Cultural Arts Speaker Series. Cost is $8 members and $10 non-members.

To register, click here. If you have not already created an account, you must do so first here.

For more information, please contact Sivan Ben-Aderet at [email protected].