Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place?

gwern

I was browsing my RSS feed, as one does, and came across a New York Times article, "A Village With the Numbers, Not the Image, of the Poorest Place", about the Satmar Hasidic Jews of Kiryas Joel (NY).

Their interest lies in their extraordinarily high birthrate & population growth, and their poverty - which are connected. From the article:

"...officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income. About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically. Women marry young, remain in the village to raise their families and, according to religious strictures, do not use birth control. As a result, the median age (under 12) is the lowest in the country and the household size (nearly six) is the highest. Mothers rarely work outside the home while their children are young. Most residents, raised as Yiddish speakers, do not speak much English. And most men devote themselves to Torah and Talmud studies rather than academic training — only 39 percent of the residents are high school graduates, and less than 5 percent have a bachelor’s degree. Several hundred adults study full time at religious institutions.

...Because the community typically votes as a bloc, it wields disproportionate political influence, which enables it to meet those challenges creatively. A luxurious 60-bed postnatal maternal care center was built with $10 million in state and federal grants. Mothers can recuperate there for two weeks away from their large families. Rates, which begin at $120 a day, are not covered by Medicaid, although, Mr. Szegedin said, poorer women are typically subsidized by wealthier ones.

...The village does aggressively pursue economic opportunities. A kosher poultry slaughterhouse, which processes 40,000 chickens a day, is community owned and considered a nonprofit organization. A bakery that produces 800 pounds of matzo daily is owned by one of the village’s synagogues.

Most children attend religious schools, but transportation and textbooks are publicly financed. Several hundred handicapped students are educated by the village’s own public school district, which, because virtually all the students are poor and disabled, is eligible for sizable state and federal government grants.

... Still, poverty is largely invisible in the village. Parking lots are full, but strollers and tricycles seem to outnumber cars. A jeweler shares a storefront with a check-cashing office. To avoid stigmatizing poorer young couples or instilling guilt in parents, the chief rabbi recently decreed that diamond rings were not acceptable as engagement gifts and that one-man bands would suffice at weddings. Many residents who were approached by a reporter said they did not want to talk about their finances.

...Are as many as 7 in 10 Kiryas Joel residents really poor? “It is, in a sense, a statistical anomaly,” Professor Helmreich said. “They are clearly not wealthy, and they do have a lot of children. They spend whatever discretionary income they have on clothing, food and baby carriages. They don’t belong to country clubs or go to movies or go on trips to Aruba.

...David Jolly, the social services commissioner for Orange County, also said that while the number of people receiving benefits seemed disproportionately high, the number of caseloads — a family considered as a unit — was much less aberrant. A family of eight who reports as much as $48,156 in income is still eligible for food stamps, although the threshold for cash assistance ($37,010), which relatively few village residents receive, is lower....“You also have no drug-treatment programs, no juvenile delinquency program, we’re not clogging the court system with criminal cases, you’re not running programs for AIDS or teen pregnancy,” he [Mr. Szegedin, the village administrator] said. “I haven’t run the numbers, but I think it’s a wash.”

From Wikipedia:

The land for Kiryas Joel was purchased in 1977, and fourteen Satmar families settled there. By 2006, there were over 3,000...In 1990, there were 7,400 people in Kiryas Joel; in 2000, 13,100, nearly doubling the population. In 2005, the population had risen to 18,300, a rate of growth suggesting it will double again in the ten years between 2000 and 2010.

Robin Hanson has argued that uploaded/emulated minds will establish a new Malthusian/Darwinian equilibrium in "IF UPLOADS COME FIRST: The crack of a future dawn" - an equilibrium in comparison to which our own economy will look like a delusive dreamtime of impossibly unfit and libertine behavior. The demographic transition will not last forever. But despite our own distaste for countless lives living at near-subsistence rather than our own extreme per-capita wealth (see the Repugnant Conclusion), those many lives will be happy ones (even amidst disaster).

So. Are the inhabitants of Kiryas Joel unhappy?

Their interest lies in their extraordinarily high birthrate & population growth, and their poverty - which are connected. From the article:

"...officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income. About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically. Women marry young, remain in the village to raise their families and, according to religious strictures, do not use birth control. As a result, the median age (under 12) is the lowest in the country and the household size (nearly six) is the highest. Mothers rarely work outside the home while their children are young. Most residents, raised as Yiddish speakers, do not speak much English. And most men devote themselves to Torah and Talmud studies rather than academic training — only 39 percent of the residents are high school graduates, and less than 5 percent have a bachelor’s degree. Several hundred adults study full time at religious institutions.

...Because the community typically votes as a bloc, it wields disproportionate political influence, which enables it to meet those challenges creatively. A luxurious 60-bed postnatal maternal care center was built with $10 million in state and federal grants. Mothers can recuperate there for two weeks away from their large families. Rates, which begin at $120 a day, are not covered by Medicaid, although, Mr. Szegedin said, poorer women are typically subsidized by wealthier ones.

...The village does aggressively pursue economic opportunities. A kosher poultry slaughterhouse, which processes 40,000 chickens a day, is community owned and considered a nonprofit organization. A bakery that produces 800 pounds of matzo daily is owned by one of the village’s synagogues.

Most children attend religious schools, but transportation and textbooks are publicly financed. Several hundred handicapped students are educated by the village’s own public school district, which, because virtually all the students are poor and disabled, is eligible for sizable state and federal government grants.

... Still, poverty is largely invisible in the village. Parking lots are full, but strollers and tricycles seem to outnumber cars. A jeweler shares a storefront with a check-cashing office. To avoid stigmatizing poorer young couples or instilling guilt in parents, the chief rabbi recently decreed that diamond rings were not acceptable as engagement gifts and that one-man bands would suffice at weddings. Many residents who were approached by a reporter said they did not want to talk about their finances.

...Are as many as 7 in 10 Kiryas Joel residents really poor? “It is, in a sense, a statistical anomaly,” Professor Helmreich said. “They are clearly not wealthy, and they do have a lot of children. They spend whatever discretionary income they have on clothing, food and baby carriages. They don’t belong to country clubs or go to movies or go on trips to Aruba.

...David Jolly, the social services commissioner for Orange County, also said that while the number of people receiving benefits seemed disproportionately high, the number of caseloads — a family considered as a unit — was much less aberrant. A family of eight who reports as much as $48,156 in income is still eligible for food stamps, although the threshold for cash assistance ($37,010), which relatively few village residents receive, is lower....“You also have no drug-treatment programs, no juvenile delinquency program, we’re not clogging the court system with criminal cases, you’re not running programs for AIDS or teen pregnancy,” he [Mr. Szegedin, the village administrator] said. “I haven’t run the numbers, but I think it’s a wash.”

From Wikipedia:

The land for Kiryas Joel was purchased in 1977, and fourteen Satmar families settled there. By 2006, there were over 3,000...In 1990, there were 7,400 people in Kiryas Joel; in 2000, 13,100, nearly doubling the population. In 2005, the population had risen to 18,300, a rate of growth suggesting it will double again in the ten years between 2000 and 2010.

So. Are the inhabitants of Kiryas Joel unhappy?

Do you maybe know of some good book that has a comprehensive explanation of these divisions, preferably with reference to the historical context of their development, and also their ancestral geographic origins?

Not really. As far as I'm aware most of the history books on this sort of thing are either books which focus on a specific group, or are books about the history of Jews from a very long time, and thus don't have as much focus on the last few hundred years when the modern divisions have arose. I've been told that Hayim Ben-Sasson's "A History of the Jewish People" is in general a good book written from a modern, scholarly perspective. It has a section on the modern era which should be good. I haven't read it myself though. I'm not aware of any book that focuses specifically on the chassidim which is what one would probably want. I suspect such books exist, but you can do a Google search as easily as I can, and I'm not going to be able to evaluate the books in any useful way.

However, the main divisions aren't that complicated to summarize, and one doesn't need much detail to have the context to follow things like New York Times articles about them. Data dump follows:

In the late 1700s, the Ba'al Shem Tov started the chassidic movement. The movement initially emphasized song, dance and prayer over religious study. This was a big deal because it gave the regular Jews, not just the bright scholars, something to do. The movement also had a strong mystical element and a focus on charismatic leaders. The movement quickly split into groups based on separate charismatic leaders whom the members would refer to as "Rebbe" (which literally means "my Rabbi"). The different groups were divided up by essentially geographic lines, and became named after the various cities where they were centered. Lubavitch had the Lubavitchers, Satu Mare had the Satmars, etc. A humorous aside is to note that the very late formed Boston chassidim are stuck with a very American sounding name; that is sometimes made up for by calling them "Bostoners" with a heavy Yiddish accent.

There was a strong reaction against chassidic movement which disrupted the pre-existing social norms, and power struggles. Moreover, there was perception (of some but not much justification) that the chassidim were ideological descendants of Sabbatai Zevi, an extremely disruptive individual who claimed to be the messiah about a hundred and fifty years before. The people against the chassidim were often called "misnagdim" from the Hebrew word for "against", and a complicating factor arose that some people used misnagid to mean non-chassic (and chassidim still use it that way sometimes with very negative connotations).

This all took place during the general emancipation of Jews in Europe. Restrictions on their businesses and where they could live were dropped. The rise of the chassidic movement was thus one of a number of factors which severely disrupted the pre-existing social structure. In that chaos, other groups arose also, including Reform Judaism (around 1900 the Conservative movement would break off from the Reform, trying to return to more strict beliefs and practices but not nearly as strict as the Orthodox). At around this era, the notion of Orthodox started to arise as a separate term (prior to that no one needed a separate notion).

At the same time, in reaction to the Reform movement, the so called "ultra-Orthodox" or "charedi" arose becoming more religious and increasing how strict their observances were. At the same time, this group sort of pulled the chassidim along in some ways, making the chassidim more focused on learning and studying of classical texts, and at the same time, the chassidic movement started producing its own texts which became very important for each of the corresponding chassidic groups. Thus the chassidic groups as they exist today are more intellectual than classical chassidim. At the same time, some of the ideas that the chassidim had (especially about singing and dancing being fun things that are good in religious settings) became more common among the general Orthodox population. In that sense, the original chassidim in many ways won, in a similar way to how over time the Catholic church has adopted many ideas that the early Protestants were calling for.

The modern Orthodox also arose, which believed in keeping the classical laws while interacting with the secular world. In principle, this meant also accepting scientific knowledge about things like the age of the earth, however, studies (especially those by Alexander Nussbaum) show that among Orthodox students at secular universities, the acceptance of evolution, or the age of the Earth and similar issues is surprisingly low. The so-called "Modern Orthodox" have been more or less pulled in the last few years to the right in many ways, and attitudes about science is only one aspect. To complicate matters further, many Orthodox people don't like the large set of connotations that either "modern Orthodox" or "charedi/ultra-Orthodox" brings (the issues are similar to those of what constitutes a blegg) and so self-identify as only Orthodox or observant. Some sometimes use the Yiddish word "frum" or occasionally "shomer mitzvot" which is Hebrew for "guards the commandments". Also, some people when they hear the word "charedi" think one means non-chassidic ultra-Orthodox, this is especially true in Israel. And this can lead to some confusion if one isn't careful.

And now that I've typed all this I've realized that I haven't dealt with any of the different groups' attitudes towards the State of Israel, which is actually really important to understanding them in any modern context. So, um yeah, I guess this is a lot more complicated than I realized and I've just internalized it. If there's a real need I can explain that (there are a lot of misconceptions about this among both non-Orthodox Jews and non-Jews. In particular, the ultra-Orthodox are not generally the people who are pushing for right-wing policies in Israel regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)

Thanks for the informative reply! As you note, however, the topic really is too complex to address in a single comment. For one, if I understand correctly, you're writing only about various Ashkenazi groups -- and one of the issues I find most puzzling is how they relate to the other geographic/linguistic/ethnic Jewish groups and their subdivisions. Another question where I can't find a clear answer is the relationship of various local Jewish groups with national governments, both in Israel and in other countries. In particular, in many countries there is ... (read more)

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Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place?

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Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place?

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