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?

As for the attitude towards the State of Israel, my understanding is that religious Jews generally support it, except for an ultra-Orthodox fringe who believe that Zionism is an irreverent mockery...

This is a good (even the best) first step in the process of going from confusion to knowledge, but it's mostly wrong, somewhat less enlightening than replacing the concept of a banana with the concept of molecules, while ignoring atoms and quarks.

"Support [Israel]" doesn't mean only one thing without more context, even in most people's minds, any more than "like people" would if I asked if you "like people". About half the self-identifying Orthodox Jews in Israel and far fewer than that in America do not find any religious justification or basis for the modern state of Israel and are the Chareidim. This includes almost all Chasidim. Worse than not finding warrant for it, there is Talmudic justification for opposing its creation, while reactions to finding it created predictably differ.

The most noticeable members of this group are the dozen or hundred or so portion of the Neturei Karta who spend a lot of time and effort seeking to replace the state with another state, any other state, even an Arab one, at any cost. They are better known in the West than influential or representative people for the same reason an Afghan might be more likely to know about the Westboro Baptist Church than the Anglicans.

The reaction of most Chareidi Jews to the state is more similar to their reaction to most things without scriptural warrant, such as glasses or air conditioning, i.e. little concern. At least, it would likely be so, if not for a few other important factors.

Sticking with religious issues for now, it is a largely secular state. It is not obvious how religious or coercive any religious person should want their government, but it's easy to see why autocratically minded theocrats could reach a (deceptively unanimous) consensus that the current state isn't religious enough, details aside. This widespread opinion is a theoretically defeasible concern, unlike the narrowly-held pure religious opposition to any non-Messianic state.

The next issue is a social reaction to the rest of the Jewish world, particularly the Religious Zionists but more broadly the Modern Orthodox in general. Religious Zionists find that the current state meets their religious criteria to deserve their full backing. This position is more popular among the less religiously extreme. Reaching it requires a more expedient and flexible reading of religious texts and understanding of what the tradition entails. The conclusion that Israel is A-OK is what the judge should feel in his heart before inquiring into the religious texts. To quote Barack Obama, "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges." It is no coincidence that the "living constitution" branch of Judaism that decided to go along with what the other Jews were doing had previously decided that it wasn't necessary to wear fur hats in the summer.

The identification of the secular state of Israel as religiously significant is regarded by Chareidim as akin to idol worship, a reductio ad absurdum of deciding what the tradition says before examining it, and it is to Religious Zionism that the Chareidim are opposed, along with their opposition to the domestic policies of the state.

It is these less extreme religious Jews who are the "settlers", attempting to graft biblical injunctions of foreign policy to Israel. Interpretations of these vary widely, perhaps the most widespread interpretation absolutely forbids surrendering territory but is very lenient and practical regarding how hard one must try to conquer all of the designated land. Relatively fewer of these live in America, as they see it as necessary to dwell in the state, particularly where it advances Israel's strategic interests.

Less literal and more liberal Jews who are still Orthodox are more likely to have a standard set of liberal positions, including regarding Israel and church-state separation.

It is in one sense very unfair to call extremists more religious than non-extremists. Many self-identifying Orthodox Jews might even assert and/or believe that the greatest rabbis of the other camps are more religious than they are, even for less extreme camps. In another sense, it is of course quite fair.

So we see the flexibility of interpretation has led to the centrists being the most irredentist, a position one expects to find religious extremists occupying. It is generally false that the extremists compensate by having logically irreconcilable differences with the state, though this notion can be forgiven since the most visible do and the rest have practically irreconcilable differences with the state as it is.

Demographically, Chareidim in America are less extreme than those in Israel, particularly among the non-Chassidim. Religious Zionists are far fewer, and the Modern Orthodox form a solid continuum from Religious Zionists to the secular American left. The mainstream Israeli left is probably to the right of the American left's statements, though perhaps not to its actions, if you consider Obama representative or if you think important the left's non-response to Guantanamo staying open, drone strikes in Pakistan continuing, undeclared action in Libya, etc. American non-Chassidic Chareidim are somewhat more pro-Israel than one would expect from the extent to which they are less extreme than Israeli non-Chassidic Chareidim, and are probably less cheated by conflation with Chrisitian fundamentalists than any other Jewish group regarding their beliefs and degree of nationalism.

Sephardim never collectively went through the shock of the enlightenment and have more traditional social forces, such as social cohesion around place of origin rather than level of observance and extended families with all levels of observance represented. Even the less religious are generally unlikely to see Reform or Conservative as at all valid and consider Judaism as degrees of Orthodoxy, and Israeli Ashkenazim are similar in this respect. Sephardim generally have little sympathy for active anti--Zionism and behave more like liberal somewhat nationalistic Modern Orthodox Jews with mildly Religious Zionist Rabbis, the top leaders of whom are actually mildly anti-Zionist and confederate with Chareidim.

This is all intended to be an enlightenment for those who know only of bananas as fruit, in which I explain bananas are made of little bricks called molecules. If anyone wants to correct or add anything, or take this as a starting point for explaining how bananas are really made of quarks (but first we really must teach you atoms as if they were billiard balls...) feel free. This isn't the type of thing I have done any formal study of but it's the type of thing one develops a perspective on, however biased, and I find that regarding this topic there is so much confusion that I think reading this will help many.

So we see the flexibility of interpretation has led to the centrists being the most irredentist, a position one expects to find religious extremists occupying.

This is actually more or less how I imagined it (though of course I'm nowhere as familiar with all the details). Thanks for the very informative comments.

2NancyLebovitz15y

Thanks for the details. It's unnerving to think that there's drastically more detail behind the details, but I'm interested in whatever you want to write about them.

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Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place?

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