![]() ![]() Not only is the story of Postville one of rural and urban, immigrant and native, and Christian and Jewish, but it is also the account of Jewish versus Jewish - the Jewishness of intense insularity versus the Jewishness of liberal cosmopolitanism, the Jewishness of tribalism versus the Jewishness of universalism. ![]() It is the intersection, and future, of religion in America and America itself - as it was, as it is, and as it is becoming. ![]() If anything, the years that have passed have made the book more relevant than even when it was published. And while Bloom showed an implied hostility against a strongly manifested faith - and that bias is palpable throughout the book - his irreligiosity was not so overwhelming to distract from the overall evenhandedness of the book. While I am not sure that Postville teaches us something we did not already know - it is an intriguing look at the Hasidic movement and the death of rural America, all at the same time. In many ways, Postville reads like a novel in the sense that the characters he introduces and develops become fixtures in the mind of the reader - we know them and are interested in them. What follows then is a sketch of two antagonistic communities from the inside out.īloom is a talented writer - he weaves scenes and characters that are compelling. The author’s Jewishness, fairly or unfairly, allowed him access to the Hasidic community that no gentile would have been afforded the author’s secularism and “local” status allowed him access to the native Iowan community as well. ![]() More than twenty years ago, a journalism professor from the University of Iowa, Stephen Bloom, published a highly readable and fascinating book on an incredible culture clash that played out in the Northeastern Iowa town of Postville a description of the difficulty that the transplantation of a Hasidic Jewish community into a withering, rural Iowa farm town in the 1980s and 1990s posed from both the Jewish and native Iowan perspective alike. Mariner Books, 2001 (originally published by Harcourt in 2000)ĭid Stephen Bloom write a book that savaged the Jews? Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America Hat the Postville Hasidim ultimately offered me was a glimpse at the dark side of my own faith, a look at Jewish extremists whose behavior not only made the Postville locals wince, but made me wince. ![]()
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