This chapter surveys trends in traditional and religious culture, in Israel and the Diaspora. The developments presented describe how Jews relate to religious and cultural meaning as well as to the implications that stem from the basic conditions of Jewish life. This year’s chapter focuses on studies and works that deal with Hasidism.

Hasidism in Context

Satmar in New York

Interest in Hasidism, the Jewish spiritual and communal movement founded by R. Israel Baal Shem Tov in the mid-18th century, has increased over the last 50 years, ever since it became apparent that despite the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hasidim in the Holocaust and the eradication of their communities, flourishing Hasidic communities have re-established themselves in Brooklyn, Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, and elsewhere. Such interest of course, mainly focused upon the Hasidic communities themselves, their beliefs and practices as well as their internal organization, both in the community and the family level. There has been, in the past year or two, a new level of interest in the relationship of Hasidism to their non-Hasidic environments. This in the widest sense possible – their geographic, political and social environments, but also their religious and cultural ones – especially among non-Hasidic Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews. This interest is apparent in scholarly books, artful photographic essays (both discussed below) and even popular TV series. It seems that Hasidism has become normalized. One need not dwell only on the exotic beliefs and practices of these communities but could also ask how they fit into today’s multi-cultural and multi-ethnic world. How do they manage in the modern city, and how do they build insular communities outside of the city in rural and suburban spaces?

Precisely these questions are asked in two books about the large and powerful but decidedly insular Satmar Hasidic community. Founded in the 20th century in the Romanian city of Satu Maru, they never participated in traditional shtetl life. From the start they were an ideological group opposed to Zionism and modernity and they used modern urban life to achieve their ends. One book describes and analyzes the urban Satmar community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn while the other focuses on Kiryas Joel, the exclusively Satmar township up the Hudson River. Both books claim that despite its seeming strangeness vis-à-vis American values and the American way of life, the Satmar communities fit remarkably well into both the New York and general American environment. The first book, A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg, by Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper (Yale University Press, 2021) details the urban savvy of the Satmar Hasidic community, while at the same time portraying their different points of view regarding urban populations and space. Thus, they welcomed the replacement of Williamsburg’s non-Hasidic Jews with low-income blacks and Puerto Ricans, believing that the cultural and social gap between the groups would keep at bay the temptation of young Hasidim to leave their community. The Satmar, poor and with large families, were the only white group to live in New York City public housing in the 1950s, and they were able to work the system to become recognized as a “disadvantaged minority group,” making them one of the largest recipients of federal and state aid.

If Satmar Williamsburg presents a “classic New York City story,” the American liberal ideals of private property and religious liberty made possible the establishment of Kiryas Joel, an exclusively Hasidic enclave 60 miles northwest of New York City ruled by Jewish religious law. As described in American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York, by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David Myers (Princeton University Press, 2022), Kiryas Joel started as a private property association in which fellow Hasidim were invited to settle. Due to the political muscle of the Hasidic voting bloc, it eventually became a municipal village with its own New York State school district, which provides public school education for special needs children, which like the Hasidic parochial schools are also separated by gender. Thus, claim its authors, because Kiryas Joel builds upon the American values of private property and the American political system, it is a “quintessentially American phenomenon.”

The Satmar story resonates well with the conclusions of the late Prof. Menachem Friedman, the founder of Haredi Studies in Israel. The Haredi learning society, he argues, is only made possible by the Israeli welfare state, whose various payments and programs support Haredi families, which are generally large and poor. It used to be supposed that modernity, especially its urban, industrial and impersonal variety, weakened religion – that as result of its influences people abandoned the traditional, religious way of life. The Satmar case shows that certain kinds of religion do well in modern, urban environments. This is especially true of ideological religion, which does not rest upon traditional customs and beliefs and the authority of the past, but rather on an active belief in competition with other ideologies (for example being committed to Christianity as opposed to communism or democracy). Such religions very often prepare one for life in the modern city by promoting systematic thinking and a disciplined life style, which enable stable family life and savings. The Evangelicals in Latin America and Pentecostals in Africa are good examples of this, as are the Haredim in Israel and the United States.

Hasidim as Guests in Poland

If the Satmar are an American and New York phenomenon, for award winning Polish photographer, Agnieszka Traczewska, Hasidism is something of a Polish or Polish-Jewish phenomenon. Traczewska documents the return of the Hasidim to Poland more than seven decades after the Holocaust. Her new photo-essay, published in the Spring 2023 issue of the Jewish Review of Books, explores the contemporary Hasidic presence in Krakow. Hasidim come there to visit the graves of famous tzadikim (leaders of Hasidic sects; literally – “righteous men”) and to pray in famous synagogues. The Hasidim are to be found in fields, cities, and forests where there are graves, synagogues, and the remnants of former communities. As in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, presence is a way of denoting absence. The increasing presence of Hasidim as visitors and tourists underscores the absence of Jews and Hasidim as an intrinsic part of Polish life, a role they had played for about 200 years.

Traczewska uses chiaroscuro effect lighting, which gives her photographs a painterly quality. With her radiant blonde hair and blue eyes, Traczewska is unmistakably Polish. But like the Puerto Ricans of Williamsburg, her goyishness is an advantage. She is allowed into spaces that no Jewish or Hasidic woman can enter. Like the novel of Nobel laureate, Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob, about the Frankist movement in Poland, Traczewska’s work, through its dialectic of presence and absence, also challenges the boundaries between what is Polish and what is Jewish. Similar to the books on Satmar, it tends to deny that Hasidism – insular as it looks – is a self-contained phenomenon. Rather, it is a living, breathing thing in constant interaction with its (American, Polish, Israeli) environment.

Hillel Zeitlin and Arthur Green

The interaction and interpenetration between Hasidism and its environment extends beyond the geographical, national, and political dimensions. It also extends to the realms of religious thought, practice, and experience. Modern Western interpretation and appropriation of Hasidism, often called “Neo-Hasidism” or New Hasidism, is over a hundred years old. Famously, the founder of that movement was Martin Buber with his interpretation of Hasidism and his collected and translated Hasidic stories, Tales of the Hasidim, considered to be classics of religious existentialism. However, Buber’s religious outlook was entirely antinomian. He held that following religious rules interfered with the spontaneous freedom of true existential encounters with God, and with fellow human beings. Hence, there was a great gulf fixed between Buber’s antinomian Hasidically inspired religious existentialism and actual Hasidim, who, of course, kept strict Orthodox observance. Buber and his Neo-Hasidic teachings were associated with thoroughly anti-Orthodox forces such as the Reform movement in the United States and the secular Kibbutz movement in Israel (especially Hashomer Hatzair).

Though, there might have been a perception of two radically different approaches, all this time, from the first decades of the 20th century, there were figures who occupied the middle position, that is, Neo-Hasidic writers and thinkers who were not fully Orthodox but who nevertheless were friendly toward traditional practices and, to one degree or another, committed to at least some of them. Such “middle personalities” included Abraham Joshua Heschel and Hillel Zeitlin of the early and mid-20th century, and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Arthur Green of the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st century. It may be a sign of the times that these figures are both garnering attention and inspiring new projects. Two books have appeared recently: a new biography of Hillel Zeitlin and Arthur Green’s summary or his views on Judaism and its meaning for the world.

Hillel Zeitlin (1871 – 1942) was born into a Hasidic (Chabad) family in Poland. As a young man, he left the Hasidic fold and became a follower of literary romanticism and Nietzsche. After several years he returned to an interest in Judaism, but as a seeker of religious truth and experience. A very prolific writer and publicist, it is not clear to what extent he committed himself to Orthodox practice. What he sought was a renewal of religious experience, “similar to what the original Hasidic movement accomplished under the leadership of the Baal Shem Tov” but in terms appropriate to the 20th century. A new Hebrew biography of Zeitlin stressing the ethical aspects of his thought was recently published by Rabbi Dr. Oz Bluman (Ish MeShoresh Navi: HaMeimad Haeti B’bakashat HaElohim shel Hillel Zeitlin, Idra Press, 2023 – trans. A Man Rooted as a Prophet: The Ethical Dimension of Hillel Zeitlin’s Quest for God). Zeitlin was reportedly killed in Treblinka wearing tallit and tefillin and holding a copy of the Zohar.

Green recently published a book summarizing his philosophy, Judaism for the World: Reflections on God, Life, and Love (Yale University Press), which appeared in Hebrew translation this year, Arthur (Art) Green came from a secular background and became interested in religious Judaism through his maternal grandmother. Throughout his life, Green vacillated between religious and non-religious life styles. Today, he remains attached to some religious practices “because this is the way that Jews live,” but disavows Orthodox belief. He wrote an important biography of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a new updated Hebrew edition of which is now being published. Green also recently edited (together with Ariel Evan Mayse) a two-volume anthology, A New Hasidism: Roots and Branches (Jewish Publication Society, 2019) with selections from Hillel Zeitlin, Abraham J. Heschel, and others.

Green was also involved in two important religious initiatives which combined contemporary spirituality with aspects of religious observance, thus blurring the boundaries between Orthodox and non-religious lifestyles. The first was the founding of the first non-Orthodox New Hasidic prayer group – the Havurah of Sommerville Mass (1968). The second was the post-denominational rabbinical program at Hebrew College in Boston, established in 2003. Both initiatives demonstrate the lack of significance that conventional organizational or denominational boundaries have for many contemporary religiously engaged Jews who eclectically mix Jewish religious and non-traditional spiritual elements (Buddhism, yoga, etc.) in a search for meaningful religious rituals and experiences.

This contemporary mixing of traditional religious practices, Hasidic spiritual teachings emphasizing direct encounters with God and contemporary non-Jewish, or even non-religious, spirituality, represents a dance between the religious DNA of Judaism, which is communal and practice oriented (and not individualistic and “faith” oriented), and the contemporary liberal individualist ethos. Hasidism is a valuable resource because it emphasizes the direct encounter with God and also celebrates community and practice.