A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg - Hardcover

Deutsch, Nathaniel; Casper, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300231091 ISBN 13: 9780300231090

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2021

Synopsis

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, Los Angeles 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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300231091
• ISBN 13: 9780300231090
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 408