Last night PBS aired an extraordinary documentary titled "A Life Apart: Hasidism in America." Most people are familiar with Hasidim as the "ultra-orthodox" in Israel. On TV news, you usually see the men in their long black coats, beards and sidecurls on the front lines of some demonstration for expansion into Palestinian land. The other major concentration of Hasidim is here in the tristate area around New York City, where some 150 to 200,000 live, mostly in Brooklyn. They came to New York immediately after WWII and decided to replicate their communities in Brooklyn. There are numerous Hasidic sects, all named after the Eastern European towns that they came from. In these towns the Hasids were grouped around a charismatic rabbi. The largest sect is the Satmar Hasids from Hungary, who tend to be critical of Zionism since the sect believes that Jews can only have a state when the messiah comes. The most well known sect is the Lubavitcher Hasidim who were led by Rabbi Schneerson, whose caravan ran down a young black boy. This, combined with rivalry in the neighborhood over scarce housing, led to violent clashes with blacks and the murder of rabbinical student Yankel Rosenblum. The aftermath led to introspective discussions about blacks and jews, such as the kind found in book co-edited by Paul Berman and Cornel West. Ilan Halevi has written an authoritative Marxist history of the Jews (Zed Books). His discussion of the Hasidic movement places it in the context of economic and social dislocations of 19th century Europe: "There is one area where Hasidism not only did not challenge orthodoxy, but outbid the rabbinical discourse: the crucial area of the cleavage Jews and non-Jews. The eschatological justification of difference as essential. Difference was one of the constantly recurring themes of rabbinical Judaism: Separation (havdalah) was a key concept. God separated Israel from among the Nations and this extraction was of an ontological nature: "'Like day from night, like the sacred from the profane.' Talmudic law pushed the horror of the mixing of species to the prohibiting any grafting of vegetable species. Kabbalistic literature was full of such expressions of national pride and messianic particularism. But the intellectual practice of the Mediterranean Kabbala could, through exegesis, lead to heretical questionings of this basic distinction, which cannot simply be reduced to the divine guarantee of the ethnic superiority chosen group. The rabbinical caste, indeed, was dependent on it for relations with the princely rulers and the stratum of intermediaries. The weight of this dual relationship tempered the cosmological tribalism of the Law. It had even, under the tolerant Islam of the Abbassids, allowed this tribalism to harmonize its language with the surrounding civilization, which was itself fascinated by Greek Reason." "Nothing like this, no modification of rabbinical ethnicism was at work in universe of the Hasidim: the fact was that the persecution of the community was occurring in conditions that were unique in the history of this Law. The de facto separation of the Shtetl from the surrounding society, a separation that was not only religious and social, but linguistic and spatial, found in this the theological weapons it needed to assert itself. While postponing to an indefinite future the hopes for a political messiah, Hasidism also expressed, by its outright denial of time and place, the historical subjectivism of the Shtetl which could later fuel the growth of Jewish nationalism. "The internal crisis of the Shtetl, whose roots are to be found in the crisis of Polish feudalism, was exacerbated and radically aggravated. The domain of Polish sovereignty was shrinking rapidly. A kingdom that had stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea grew smaller and smaller as around it tsarist Russia, the Hapsburg empire and the German states grew larger and larger. The Polish question became the European question and centuries-old Polish Jewry saw its territory carved up among several states Austria, which took Galicia, lightened the conditions of Jews there: but Russia, having seized the Ukraine and Byelorussia, oppressed them there, said Lenin, 'more harshly than the Negroes'. The Napoleonic conquest, short as it may have been, precipitated the disintegration, inducing a general upheaval in the empires of the centre and east. Following the French occupation, the whole map of the region was transformed. The new frontier of Austria and Russia, which shared the whole of what remained of Poland in 1815, cut the Ashkenazi world in two, divided the dynasties of Hasidic rabbis, and determined new sub-problematics. The sociological unity of Ashkenazi Judaism was beginning to fracture." These upheavals deepened in the 20th century and the Hasidic population found itself in Hitler's concentration camps, where they died alongside their secular relatives. After WWII came to an end, they relocated to America, led by their Rabbis. When they came here, not only were they in a state of shock but were not sure how they would relate to American society. At first they did not adopt the familiar Hasidic garb. The men were clean shaven and both men and women wore normal clothing. The only thing that made them stand out were their tattoos, which they received in concentration camps. I recall seeing them up in the Catskill Mountains in the early '50s. The assimilated Jews referred to them as "the refugees." I remember how shocking the tattoos seemed to me at the time. No Jew was supposed to get a tattoo because it meant that you couldn't be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Jewish religious codes dictated that you had to leave the world in the same way that you came into it. The only tattooed Jews I knew were merchant marines who got them when they were on a drunken binge in some port. Eventually the Hasidic leaders made an interesting decision which goes against the grain of the American melting pot. They decided to recreate the Hasidic world in urban New York. During the 1950s, when there was enormous pressure to assimilate, when xenophobia was at an all-time high under the auspices of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and when anti-Semitism was expressed openly around the Rosenbergs trial, the Hasidim made the decision to reject American culture and society. They would create an enclave of everything that was "non-American" within the American heartland. Not only did they decide to look non-American, they decided to reject the temptations of American success. Hasidic youth were directed not to go to college, since worldly temptations existed there. Also, during a time of enormous popularity for television and movies, they rejected both as impious. Most Hasidic families are tightly constrained by economic duress. When you have 10 to 12 children--a typical family size--and the breadwinner is a truck-driver or clerk in a Hasidic-owned business, food and lodging expenses alone are onerous. I have only gotten to know one Hasidic person in my life, and then only on a casual basis. This was Joe, a free-lance computer programmer I used to work with at Metropolitan Life. He had 9 kids and lived in a housing project. He said that it was extremely rare to see a Hasidic computer programmer like him because you generally needed a college education. He got into the field when this wasn't necessary. He was a very likable guy with a sense of humor. He made no attempt to proselytize me. If anything, I was more of a nuisance to fellow employees because of my Trotskyist politics. Turning to the documentary itself, there is nothing remarkable about it except for the window it opens onto a very insular world. Hasids are as removed from other Jews like me as they are from Christians. I have never been in one of their households, so it was fascinating to see them dining, praying, playing with children, etc. One of the Hasidim, a jovial fishmonger, explains why the camera-shy group decided to cooperate with the two Jewish but non-Hasidic film-makers. He relates a story told by one of their most famous rabbis. The rabbi was approached by a photographer who wanted to take his picture. The rabbi, as expected, said no. That was unholy. The photographer said that he was a poor Jew and that if he had the photo he could sell it for a nickel and make a living. Hearing that, the rabbi agreed because "it was good for a fellow Jew." (In general, by the way, Hasidic wisdom exists in their story telling. The original illiterate followers of the Hasidic rabbis in Europe relied on this medium to understand life and religion.) The film has been described as a "recruiting" tool for their movement since the Hasids come across as a genuinely blissful group. They love their rabbis, they love their children and nobody gets divorced. Just to provide some balance, the film grapples with the problem of the subordination of women. Interviewee Pearl Gluck explains that she wanted more out of life than being a wife and mother. Pearl is studying film at NYU now and is a remarkable young woman. I reported on her work-in-progress "The Divan" a couple of months ago, which is about the effort of Hasidim in Brooklyn to track down a divan used by their chief rabbi in Europe. The Hasidim are a complex subject. On one hand they evoke admiration for their steadfast refusal to blend in. It was this stubborn "un-Americanism" that appealed to Philip Roth. One of the most memorable stories in "Goodbye Columbus" is about the resistance of assimilated Jews in a suburban town to the presence of a Hasidic yeshiva. The main character goes through an identity crisis/nervous breakdown in the course of the fight and decides to don a Hasidic black robe and parade through the town's main street to everybody's shock. On the other hand, their exclusionism when mixed with power politics can lead to some highly toxic chauvinism. The clashes with blacks in Brooklyn and with Palestinians in the Mideast indicate how the historical pariah and underdog can become the oppressor given sufficient military and economic clout. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
