Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America [Paperback]

Stephen G. Bloom (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 2001

In 1987, a group of Lubavitchers, one of the most orthodox and zealous of the Jewish sects, opened a kosher slaughterhouse just outside tiny Postville, Iowa (pop. 1,465). When the business became a worldwide success, Postville found itself both revived and divided. The town's initial welcome of the Jews turned into confusion, dismay, and even disgust. By 1997, the town had engineered a vote on what everyone agreed was actually a referendum: whether or not these Jews should stay.

The quiet, restrained Iowans were astonished at these brash, assertive Hasidic Jews, who ignored the unwritten laws of Iowa behavior in almost every respect. The Lubavitchers, on the other hand, could not compromise with the world of Postville; their religion and their tradition quite literally forbade it. Were the Iowans prejudiced, or were the Lubavitchers simply unbearable?

Award-winning journalist Stephen G. Bloom found himself with a bird's-eye view of this battle and gained a new perspective on questions that haunt America nationwide. What makes a community? How does one accept new and powerfully different traditions? Is money more important than history? In the dramatic and often poignant stories of the people of Postville - Jew and gentile, puzzled and puzzling, unyielding and unstoppable - lies a great swath of America today.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Postville, Iowa (population 1,478), seems an unlikely place to find a sizable Jewish population, let alone an ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher population. It is, after all, in the heart of pork country, and the world headquarters of the Lubavitchers is far away in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. But when the Hygrade meat processing plant, just outside Postville, went belly-up, threatening the town with decline, Sholom Rubashkin bought it and turned it into a glatt kosher processing plant, complete with shochtim and a rabbinical inspectorate. By the late 1980s, "Postville had more rabbis per capita than any other city in the United States, perhaps the world."

The enterprise was a huge international success, with its kosher meats exported even to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Jewish population grew to 150, and they were rich. The town was saved, and the people were grateful. All's well that ends well? Not quite. The Hasidim kept to themselves, did things their own way, and basically had no interest in integrating into Postville. And why would they? Their laws are strict, their mission clear, their community defined by race and religion. They are not interested in watermelon socials or coffee klatches at the diner. Their little boys do not swim with their little girls, are not educated together, and do not go on play dates with goyim. Small-town Iowans, on the other hand, are very friendly. They know each other's news, they support each other's businesses, they wish each other Merry Christmas, they want you to feel at home. They don't like that the new townspeople stomp up the street hunched over, talking in a foreign language and looking straight through them when greeted. They really don't like it when one of the newcomers drives around town with a 10-foot candelabra strapped to his car playing music at full volume for eight consecutive winter nights. They don't actually know about menorahs or Hanukkah.

Into this comes secular Jew Stephen Bloom, a professor at the University of Iowa. By the time he arrived in Postville, the town was riven along religious lines. One of the townspeople was running for mayor on the sole platform of annexation of the land on which the plant stood. Rubashkin was threatening that he'd shut the plant and leave if that came to pass. Bloom closely considers both sides, and the result is a wonderful book. It is a fascinating tale of culture clash in the American heartland: the John Deere cap meets the black fur hat. It is a book about identity and community and what it means to be American. It covers all the things you aren't supposed to talk about at the dinner table--religion, politics, and even sex. It is full of suspense: Will the plant be annexed? Will the Jews leave? And it is also Bloom's exploration of his own sense of belonging. --J. Riches --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Bloom's account of a vicious clash between the residents of a small, intensely Christian town and the group of Lubavitcher Jews who open a highly successful kosher slaughterhouse there is a model of sociological reportage and personal journalism. In 1987, after a Hasidic butcher from Brooklyn bought a slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, and began to relocate Jewish and immigrant workers to the area, the town began to change. While some residents were suspicious and anti-Semitic, most were happy to see the town rise above its previous financial destitution. But the Lubavitchers, who traditionally live and work within their own closely knit communities, were not interested in fitting into Postville, and many were dismissive of, or overtly hostile to, its original citizens. After the Lubavitchers started buying real estate and exerting greater influence on the town's finances, longtime Postville residents began to feel marginalized, yet their reactions caused the Jews to become more isolationist. The slaughterhouse also caused problems: workers were paid below minimum wage and were uninsured, women workers were sexually harassed and fighting among the (often illegal) immigrant workers escalated. Finally, the town took legal action to gain more control over the slaughterhouse. Bloom, a professor at the University of Iowa, writes cleanly and with great insight and temperance about these events. As a secular Jew, he also weaves in his own story as he tries to find some common ground with the Lubavitchers. His book proves an illuminating meditation on contemporary U.S. culture and what it means to be an American. Agents, David Black and Gary Morris. BOMC and QPB selection; 8-city tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (September 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156013363
• ISBN-13: 978-0156013369
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (89 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #271,234 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I teach narrative writing at the University of Iowa. I'm the author of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (Harcourt, 2000), Inside the Writer's Mind (Wiley, 2002), The Oxford Project (co-author, Peter Feldstein; Welcome Books, 2008), and Tears of Mermaids: The Secret Story of Pearls (St. Martin's Press, 2009). I've worked for The Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, San Jose Mercury News, and Sacramento Bee. Here's a link to more information on my most recent book, Tears of Mermaids: http://macmillanspeakers.com/stephengbloom.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's a Memoir, It's not Supposed to Be Objective..., July 26, 2005

By 

Colleen McMahon ""Omnivorous Reader"" (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (Paperback)

I picked this book up randomly, at a thrift store, but I am always fascinated by non-fiction books that offer glimpses into other cultures and in books that look at the assimilation or non-assimilation of various groups into the American mainstream. POSTVILLE: A CLASH OF CULTURES IN THE HEARTLAND OF AMERICA is the portrait of a typical small midwestern town (almost stereotypical, as the author waxes on about parades, agricultural festivals, and kids who don't have to lock up their bikes in front of the corner stores) trying to come to grips with a settlement of militantly anti-assimilationist settlers in their midst: a group of Hassidic Lubavitcher Jews who have purchased the closed meat packing plant and reopened it as kosher slaughterhouse, bringing economic life back to the town but unearthing a host of conflicts with the locals over a host of issues of custom and lifestyle.

Many of the reviews of POSTVILLE here take issue with the author coming down on one side or the other of the division in Postville, Iowa and thus finding the book flawed because it is not objective.

But Bloom never pretends to be writing an objective or sociological treatise. The book is as much a memoir of his own coming to terms with his internal conflict between his Jewishness and his feelings of being a fish out of water in Iowa, and his longing to find a place that he fits in--is it by a deeper embrace of his Jewishness and thus his differences, or by further assimilation? A main part--if not the main point-- of the story is his own developing attitudes and his eventual realization that he has chosen to support one side--and thus one way of life--over the other.

Over a period of several years, Bloom makes trip after trip to Postville, at first drawn by the incongruous settlement of Jews there, and perhaps seeking a spiritual connection and answer to his own feelings of isolation. Bloom becomes fascinated with the schisms in Postville between the native (and nearly 100% Christian) Iowans and the Jewish newcomers who seem determined to stay separate and who seemingly deliberately flout local conventions of politeness, neatness and unassuming behavior.

As Bloom interviews numerous people in Postville, both Jewish newcomers and Postville natives, the schism in the town gradually coalesces around the issue of a referendum on annexing the land that the slaughterhouse is on, allowing the town to possibly exert more control over the business there and by extension, perhaps, the Jews. Both the native Iowans and several of the Lubavitchers reach out to him, telling him of their viewpoints and trying to recruit him to their point of view.

Bloom reports what he is shown by both sides, and in the end finds that he comes to support the native Iowans rather than the Jews. He does seem to give breaks to the native Iowans for sometimes nakedly anti-semitic statements (particularly when they move from concrete, personally unpleasant experiences with individual Lubavitchers in the town to generalizations about "the Jews" and the way all Jews are. On the other hand, some of the unpleasant behaviors of some of the Jews in the town feed entirely too neatly into a larger world of nasty stereotypes waiting to be applied.)

Bloom's conclusion seems to be that the Iowans he deals with, both in Postville and in Iowa City, are by nature of long isolation and homogeneity suspicious of and slow to welcome any outsiders, Jewish or otherwise, and that they are willing to try to get along with people who try to get along with them. The Lubavitchers, with their unconcealed attitudes of superiority, their rufusal to moderate even some of their behaviors in deference to local custom (even behaviors that don't infringe at all on their beliefs, such as keeping their yards neat or refraining from attempting to bargain prices at the stores, which the townsfolk see as insulting) and their complete disinterest in having any sort of relationship with the people they are living alongside, consistently show no inclination at all to try to get along. And Bloom, as a Jew and an outsider, ultimately chooses the path of trying to fit in over that of flaunting his difference. He chooses as his role model Doc Wolf, the legendary doctor of Postville and surrounding areas who for over 60 years doctored the locals, delivered babies and made housecalls, with most people unaware that he was Jewish and those who did not caring.

This is certainly a book well worth reading, but it's best to read it as one man's personal odyssey distilled through his observations of a larger sociological moment, than as a work of anthropological or sociological objectivity or disinterest. Of course, held to the latter standard it will fail, because that's not what the book ever set out to be.

38 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Another View by an Iowa City Jew, September 10, 2001

By 

Jason B. Lassner "jmaniowa1" (Iowa City, IA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (Paperback)

Stephen Bloom's book proved to be a quick and interesting read about a subject to which I can relate. Like Bloom, I am a secular Jew who moved to Iowa City a number of years ago and who has taken an interest in how the Hasidim and local Iowans in Postville have gotten along. I have visited the community on several occasions and have informally talked to a few of the Hasidim. I was even approached by two of them while having lunch at the kosher delicatessen and asked to put on tefillin (the Jewish "good deed" that Bloom himself performs with the owner of the slaughterhouse). My impression is that Bloom's portrayal of the transformation of the town as well as the clash of cultures is accurate. It is also valuable from a number of perspectives, including how it addresses the issue of assimilation. Jews, as well as other strongly identified religious and ethnic or cultural groups, have a difficult balance to strike in rural areas such as Iowa: retain (at least some) of their unique identity while also becoming a part of the community. Postville is an example of a place where the strongly identified newcomers, the Hasidim, choose not to even acknowledge the locals and their customs or way of life. This has dire consequences for all involved, although, paradoxically, the success of the Hasidic owned and run kosher meat packing plant has invariably influenced the local economy. For the better.

While this book was informative and enjoyable to read over a weekend, I hesitate to recommend it whole-heartedly because the author's voice got in the way. Mr. Bloom seems to have concluded that he, as the narrative observor, was entitled to inject his own internal conflict about being a Jew in rural Iowa into the story as if it is of particular interest to all readers. As a reader who can relate to many of Mr. Bloom's observations about adapting to Iowa culture as an identified Jew, I am not quibbling with his conclusions. However, his own story impeded his ability to comment on the situation in Postville without generalizing to a rediculous degree about all parties. Even when he seems aware of this, I still found it to be annoying and difficult to ignore.

For those seeking to understand the effect of multicultural perspectives on a small rural community, Postville is a worthwhile book. It is also informative and interesting for Jews who seek to answer some of their own questions about their religious and/or cultural identity by learning about how the author accomplished this. I just wish his own struggle had been a side-light to the main story rather than its competition.

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars an interesting look at ourselves, April 21, 2002

By 

Randy Keehn (Williston, ND United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (Paperback)

This is a good book and Mr. Bloom has done a very good job putting it together. The basic focus is on a group of ultra-orthodox Jews who set up a kosher meat-cutting business in little Postville, Iowa. I lived for a number of years in nearby Decorah, Iowa so I was interested in reading it as soon as I heard of it. I glanced at some of the reviews in Amazon and I could tell that the author has raised quite a bit of controversy over his approach to the subject. What is interesting is that he is accused of being biased both for and against each side of the controversy. Personally, I think he has done a good job of staying in a sort of middle ground approach. Let's face it, his Jewish background was a strong point given our current societal tendency to blame differing opinions on racism, sexism, anti-semitism, etc. Bloom is, thus, uniquely able to approach the subject unincumbered in ways that others would have been. As one who is proud of his Iowa roots, I felt proud of the praise Bloom gave my home state and some defensiveness when he was critical of its' citizens. I attended a junior high school in Des Moines that had two or three of the citie's synagogues in its' territory. In or around 1967, the junior high school was spray-painted with hateful ant-semitic statements. As I came to school that day, my reaction was one of great surprize. This was something that was obviously the work of someone not in touch with the mainstream of thought in our community. However, I learned that day that not all Iowans are perfect. Mr. Bloom has reminded us of that (not that we REALLY think of ourselves that way).

The interactions of the two societies; rural Middle-America and Orthodox Jewish, did not go well in little Postville. The author ends up taking sides but only after a seemingly thorough attempt to hear both sides out. I was surprized at the aloofness of the Jews in their new surroundings. I knew that the local citizens would have done at least a reasonable job of making them feel at home if they had been given a chance. I found myself having to realize a different perspective on Orthodox Jews. I have read just about every book written by Isaac B. Singer and Sholom Aleichem. I love the stories of the Jewish societies in Eastern Europe in the decades prior to WWII. I always assumed that little mention was made of the Goyim because the Goyim didn't want anything to do with the Jews. I now realize that there was a likely, unspoken, opposite point of view in which the Jews wanted nothing to do with the Goyim.

In many ways this is a tragic story but it is also an illuminating story of our modern American society which prides itself on its' diversity. To preach about assimulation as the method our ancesters followed ignores the seperation of different races and faiths that was the standard of the past. Yet to try and praise an ethnic group that disavows all others but their own gives us a distaste that's hard to ignore. Professor Bloom has written an excellent book. His style of writing makes the reader glad that a person of his talent is teaching journalism. You need not be Jewish or Iowan to get a lot out of this book; just American.