Portland Public Library

A fortress in Brooklyn, race, real estate, and the making of Hasidic Williamsburg, Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

mapsillustrations

index present

non fiction

A fortress in Brooklyn

bibliography

1198559023

Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper

race, real estate, and the making of Hasidic Williamsburg

Hasidic Williamsburg is famous as one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy communities in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of New York City's toughest neighborhoods during an era of steep decline, only to later oppose and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a community of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely resisted 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 avoided assimilation, 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

Introduction: An American epic -- A land not sown -- Paths of heaven -- The politics of poverty -- Chaptsem! -- The gentrifier and the gentrified -- The war against the artists -- A fruit tree grows in Brooklyn -- The holy corner -- Two-way street -- New Williamsburg -- Conclusion / The camp in the desert