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

Recorded on May 6, 2022

Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers present "American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York."

"American Shtetl" tells the story of how a group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows. By unraveling the strands of cultural and legal conflict that gave rise to one of the most vibrant religious communities in America, Stolzenberg and Myers reveal a way of life shaped by both self-segregation and unwitting assimilation.

Nomi M. Stolzenberg holds the Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She has written widely on law and religion. Her publications include “He Drew a Circle that Shut Me Out’: Assimilation, Indoctrination, and the Paradox of a Liberal Education” (Harvard Law Review), “The Profanity of Law” (in Law and the Sacred, Stanford University Press) and "Righting the Relationship Between Race and Religion in Law" (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies).

David N. Myers holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written extensively in the fields of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history. Among his many publications are Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford: 1995), Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2003), Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (Brandeis University Press, 2008), Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction (2017), and The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life (2018).