Joshua Shanes is associate professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston. An expert in modern Jewish political and cultural history (particularly Jewish nationalism and Orthodoxy), he currently lives in Chicago with his wife and six children.
Years ago, friends of mine visited the Satmar village of Kiryas Joel, established in 1977 in upstate New York. “It was amazing,” one of them said of the streets and shops filled with men and women in traditional black clothing. “Literally everyone was Hasidic. It was like visiting Eastern Europe a century ago.” Actually, I…
One hundred years ago, a pogrom destroyed a community. A pogrom is, according to John Klier, who was the subject’s leading authority and author of numerous seminal studies on Russian Jews, “an outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic or social group. It usually implies central instigation and control, or at minimum…
In October 1999, the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) won over 27% of the national vote in parliamentary elections and shortly thereafter entered a governing coalition for the first time. I lived at the time as a visibly Hasidic Jew in Vienna and recall the xenophobic campaign that featured billboards with texts such as, “We…
David Weiss Halivni, a renowned Talmudic scholar, once quipped that he could not pray with the people with whom he talked, and could not talk with the people with whom he prayed. In other words, those with whom he could talk – who could discuss religious ideas beyond accepted norms – insisted on living the…
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