Curious Case of Kiryas Joel

Curious Case of Kiryas Joel PDF Author: Louis Grumet
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613735030
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Twenty years ago, on the last day of session, the New York State Legislature created a publicly funded school district to cater to the interests of a religious sect called Kiryas Joel, an extremely insular group of Hasidic Jews. The sect had bought land in upstate New York, populated it solely with members of its faction, and created a village that exerted extraordinary political pressure over both political parties in the Legislature. Marking the first time in American history that a governmental unit was established for a religious group, the Legislature's action prompted years of litigation that eventually went to the Supreme Court. The 1994 case, The Board of Education of the Village of Kiryas Joel v. Grumet, stands as the most important legal precedent in the fight to uphold the separation of church and state. In The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel, plaintiff Louis Grumet opens a window onto the Satmar Hasidic community and details the inside story of his fight for the First Amendment. This story—a blend of politics, religion, cultural clashes, and constitutional tension—is an object lesson in the ongoing debate over freedom of vs. freedom from religion.

Curious Case of Kiryas Joel

Curious Case of Kiryas Joel PDF Author: Louis Grumet
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613735030
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Twenty years ago, on the last day of session, the New York State Legislature created a publicly funded school district to cater to the interests of a religious sect called Kiryas Joel, an extremely insular group of Hasidic Jews. The sect had bought land in upstate New York, populated it solely with members of its faction, and created a village that exerted extraordinary political pressure over both political parties in the Legislature. Marking the first time in American history that a governmental unit was established for a religious group, the Legislature's action prompted years of litigation that eventually went to the Supreme Court. The 1994 case, The Board of Education of the Village of Kiryas Joel v. Grumet, stands as the most important legal precedent in the fight to uphold the separation of church and state. In The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel, plaintiff Louis Grumet opens a window onto the Satmar Hasidic community and details the inside story of his fight for the First Amendment. This story—a blend of politics, religion, cultural clashes, and constitutional tension—is an object lesson in the ongoing debate over freedom of vs. freedom from religion.

American Shtetl

American Shtetl PDF Author: Nomi M. Stolzenberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691259291
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history-but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. This book tells the story of how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows. Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers paint a richly textured portrait of daily life in Kiryas Joel, exploring the community's guiding religious, social, and economic norms. They delve into the roots of Satmar Hasidism and its charismatic founder, Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, following his journey from nineteenth-century Hungary to post-World War II Brooklyn, where he dreamed of founding an ideal Jewish town modeled on the shtetls of eastern Europe. Stolzenberg and Myers chart the rise of Kiryas Joel as an official municipality with its own elected local government. They show how constant legal and political battles defined and even bolstered the community, whose very success has coincided with the rise of political conservatism and multiculturalism in American society over the past forty years.

The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel

The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel PDF Author: Louis Grumet
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781613735022
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"The 1994 US Supreme Court case Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet stands as the most important legal precedent in the fight to uphold the separation of church and state. In this book, plaintiff Louis Grumet opens a window onto the insular sect of Hasidic Jews at the center of the case, and details the inside story of his fight for the First Amendment and against New York's most powerful politicians"--

This Land Is MY Land

This Land Is MY Land PDF Author: Louis Grumet
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781614686460
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
A regiment of well-armed Mohawk Indians descended from Canada the night of May 13, 1974, repossessing 612-acres of Adirondack wildness to which they claimed aboriginal rights. For three long years, an occasionally violent and perpetually tense standoff between the "radicalized" or "traditionalized" Mohawk, local residents and the New York State Police festered like a ticking time bomb until future Governor Mario M. Cuomo negotiated a precariously balanced truce. Cuomo's solution-which masterfully dealt with the imme-diate problem at hand (getting the Mohawks out of Moss Lake) without resolving, or even addressing, the unresolvable underlying issues (the return of nine million acres of land)-resulted from dozens of volatile negotiating sessions in which Louis Grumet, co-author of This Land is MY Land, was the key envoy. This Land is MY Land is an insider's account of the history and politics that returned a chunk of wilderness to the people who inhabited the region centuries before the Europeans arrived, provided the Mohawk with a new homeland in northern New York and deftly offered the State a face-saving resolution.

Becoming Eve

Becoming Eve PDF Author: Abby Stein
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 1580059171
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The powerful coming-of-age story of an ultra-Orthodox child who was born to become a rabbinic leader and instead became a woman Abby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews. But Abby felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. She suppressed her desire for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations of faith. Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood to mainstream femininity-a radical choice that forced her to leave her home, her family, her way of life. Powerful in the truths it reveals about biology, culture, faith, and identity, Becoming Eve poses the enduring question: How far will you go to become the person you were meant to be?

Hasidic Williamsburg

Hasidic Williamsburg PDF Author: George Kranzler
Publisher: Jason Aronson, Incorporated
ISBN: 1461734541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Hasidic Williamsburg recounts the dramatic emergence of this unique community in the face of major crises. It is the story of the loyalty of its members to their rebbes and their teachings and to the milieu they created in an old Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Based on his previous book Williamsburg: A Jewish Community in Transition, which reported the transformation of this moderately Orthodox Jewish community and its rise to prominence after the influx of numbers of refugees from Nazi persecution and the Holocaust, George Kranzler presents the findings of a decade of research into the survival and life-style of Hasidic Williamsburg as a functioning community. Hasidic Williamsburg portrays the desperate struggle and relentless efforts of its leaders, foremost among them the Rebbe of Satmar and other prominent hasidic rebbes, to stem the progressive disintegration of the Jewish neighborhood. It presents their valiant attempts to provide the vital resources for its survival in the face of persistent poverty and other grave problems and to develop programs that would secure the future of this unique hasidic community. Kranzler concludes with the assertion that at the beginning of the '90s its inhabitants are hopeful of being able to weather the present crisis and to continue to function as one of pluralist America's viable religious communities.

Mitzvah Girls

Mitzvah Girls PDF Author: Ayala Fader
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830990
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Mitzvah Girls is the first book about bringing up Hasidic Jewish girls in North America, providing an in-depth look into a closed community. Ayala Fader examines language, gender, and the body from infancy to adulthood, showing how Hasidic girls in Brooklyn become women responsible for rearing the next generation of nonliberal Jewish believers. To uncover how girls learn the practices of Hasidic Judaism, Fader looks beyond the synagogue to everyday talk in the context of homes, classrooms, and city streets. Hasidic women complicate stereotypes of nonliberal religious women by collapsing distinctions between the religious and the secular. In this innovative book, Fader demonstrates that contemporary Hasidic femininity requires women and girls to engage with the secular world around them, protecting Hasidic men and boys who study the Torah. Even as Hasidic religious observance has become more stringent, Hasidic girls have unexpectedly become more fluent in secular modernity. They are fluent Yiddish speakers but switch to English as they grow older; they are increasingly modest but also fashionable; they read fiction and play games like those of mainstream American children but theirs have Orthodox Jewish messages; and they attend private Hasidic schools that freely adapt from North American public and parochial models. Investigating how Hasidic women and girls conceptualize the religious, the secular, and the modern, Mitzvah Girls offers exciting new insights into cultural production and change in nonliberal religious communities.

King of the Mountain

King of the Mountain PDF Author: John M. Caher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781573921978
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Once known for his historically significant landmark decisions on civil rights for women and the handicapped, free speech, the right to die, and for banning discrimination, New York's Judge Sol Wachtler rose to the top of this profession and was a high roller in state politics. But his career came to a screeching halt when his whirlwind affair with a socialite came to light. This biography, written with Wachtler's full cooperation, offers a complete, unbiased look at the judge's life. Photos.

Megilat Sefer: The Autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697-1776)

Megilat Sefer: The Autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697-1776) PDF Author: Jacob Emden
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1612590012
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
The autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697-1776), now available for the first time in English translation. Translated directly from the original manuscript with notes.

Unorthodox

Unorthodox PDF Author: Deborah Feldman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439187010
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Traces the author's upbringing in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, describing the strict rules that governed her life, arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, and the birth of her son, which led to her plan to leave and forge her own path in life.