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

Introduction

An American Epic

T HE STREETS OF WILLIAMSBURG were not paved with gold, as early waves of immigrants had dreamed, nor did they contaminate those who walked upon them, as the Hasidim had feared before they arrived as refugees from war-torn Europe. Instead, their names evoked a different mythology, one more redolent of that other place called Williamsburg, located a world away in Virginia rather than Brooklyn. George Taylor, James Wilson, Caesar Rodney, Edward Rutledge, John Penn, William Hooper, and moreall signers of the Declaration of Independencewere the men whose names formed the street map of South Williamsburg. When these members of the Second Continental Congress met in 1776, they could never have imagined that a community of Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jews from the hinterlands of eastern Europe would one day turn the streets honoring them into their own Jerusalem of America. Or that these Hasidim would share the same streets, as well as a public housing project named after the Declaration of Independence, with one of the largest Puerto Rican communities in New York City. Members of these two communities, as well as other working-class residents, weathered the citys infamous decline only to grapple later with the dramatic changes wrought by yet another wave of newcomers, who would transform Williamsburg into a global symbol of gentrification. This book explores how a neighborhood named in honor of Jonathan Williams, the grandnephew of Benjamin Franklin who first surveyed its territory in the early 1800s, became the site for a uniquely American epic of religion, race, class, and, above all, reinvention.

Like the Puritans who founded New England three hundred years earlier, the Hungarian Hasidim who settled in Williamsburg in the 1940s were members of pietistic religious communities whose charismatic leaders railed against the corruption of the world and, especially, against their insufficiently pious co-religionists. The goal of both was to create biblically grounded utopian settlements that would serve to inspireand chastenthose around them. In 1630, while en route to North America from England, the Puritan leader John Winthrop delivered a now-famous sermon about what he considered to be the divinely ordained role of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies. . . . For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

In the postWorld War II era, when liberal Jews in the United States were reinventing the kabbalistic concept tikkunto mean the repair of the world through social justice, civil rights, environmental activism, and so on, Hasidim in Williamsburg employed the same term in a dramatically different sense: to repair their own small corner of Brooklyn and make it a vineyard, free from the corrupting influences of the outside world, albeit one that would ideally spur a much wider spiritual renaissance. They would accomplish this not by stressing what they had in common with their fellow Americans, or even their fellow Jews, but by doubling down on their differenceslarge and, especially, small.