American Hasidism

Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Nathaniel Deutsch

The history of Hasidism in America is over a century old, dating back to the massive waves of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. Initially, the Hasidic presence on these shores consisted of a few minor leaders as well as transplanted congregations that traced their origins back to Hasidic communities in the Old Country, but whose members typically no longer maintained a Hasidic lifestyle. Compared to the millions of Jewish immigrants who sought to assimilate into American culture or who participated in Yiddish-speaking socialist organizations, Hasidim were a mere drop in the bucket. And yet, following World War II, this would change dramatically. Initially arriving as Holocaust refugees and quickly establishing enclaves in Brooklyn neighborhoods—and eventually beyond—Hasidim from several regions of Eastern Europe would, over the course of the next half century, become the fastest growing segment of the American Jewish population. In the process, they have called into question long-held assumptions regarding the Jewish relationship to culture, politics, and religion in the United States.

In this course, we will examine this history using selected readings from books such A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Brooklyn by Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper, New World Hasidim: Ethnographic Studies of Hasidic Jews in America by Janet Belcove-Shalin, Race and Religion Among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights by Henry Goldschmidt, and Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman. We will also examine a wide range of other sources, including Hasidic websites, social media, newspapers, and pashkeviln (“broadsides”).

Course Materials:
Students are required to purchase the following book before the first date of class:

• Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper, A Fortress in Brooklyn, (Yale University Press, 2021) (Purchase)

The instructor will provide all other course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Nathaniel Deutsch is Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies. He has served as the Workmen's Circle/Dr. Emmanuel Patt Visiting Professor in Eastern European Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute. Deutsch is the author of a number of books, including The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (The University of California Press), The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (Harvard University Press), for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, most recently, with Michael Casper, A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg (Yale University Press), which has won a National Jewish Book Award, the Saul Viener Book Prize, and a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. 

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