The re-ghettoizing of the Jews

The implication here is obvious and with dark historical precedent. From the late 18th century, Jews were forbidden to live or conduct commerce anywhere in the Russian Empire outside of the Pale of the Settlement, about one-fifth of the entire territory. In these areas, Jewish rights were restricted, with targeted regulations in areas such as property ownership and even, at one point, the removal of voting rights, due to the increasing Jewish population in the “shtetls,” or towns.

Jews did as the tsar ordered, often leasing large tracts of land from a local nobleman and settling as a community. Cut off from the benefits of the greater society, the shtetl became a self-contained center for Jewish life, with an internal economy and with plenty of poverty and social service organizations to replace what might have been state assistance.

In the modern West, Jews are better able to blend in — except for the Haredim, sometimes referred to as the “ultra-Orthodox,” clad in dark suits with black hats, large families, and traditional values. That sets them apart immediately as an unrelatable “other,” a group of people who are deprived of the right to be seen as individuals.

The very night of the Jersey City shooting, video circulated on social media of some residents calling the shooting “Jew shenanigans” and saying, “They all [are] the problem because if they ain’t come to Jersey City, this [expletive] would never go on,” alongside calls to “get the Jews out of Jersey City.”

Joan Terrell-Paige, an elected member of the Jersey City Board of Education, wondered on Facebook whether we are “brave enough to explore the answer to [the murderers’] message,” as she called the Jews in Jersey City “brutes” who “threatened, intimidated, harassed,” and “waved bags of money” in the faces of homeowners.

The rhetoric is hardly exclusive to Jersey City. At a meeting in Montclair, New Jersey, James Harris, the chairman of the New Jersey Association of Black Educators, spoke about how the Jewish community in the central New Jersey town of Lakewood “controls” everything at the expense of the minorities, expressing the angst he felt at seeing “folks in long black suits and curly locks” on the streets of Jersey City and wondering whether the black community is “going to be displaced by these people who are not all that friendly.” The same thing was happening in Montclair, he said, where poor residents were feeling “pressured by somebody” to move out.

Yet as Tablet’s Armin Rosen pointed out over the summer, there’s no “public record showing dozens of random attacks against gentrifying white hipsters in the same neighborhoods.” Plus, in many of these cases, the Haredim have been gentrified out of their New York neighborhoods rather than being the gentrifiers.

Here we have the predicament of what we might call the “recognizable Jew” in the modern world: He is not welcome to move anywhere new, and if he stays where his community already is, he becomes the face of gentrification and concentrated power. Which led us to the surreal moment when it became necessary, in America in 2020, for Orthodox activist Chaskel Bennett to state that “Jews must have the right to live wherever they want, free of bigotry and intolerance.” Not everyone agrees.

Setting aside the absurdity that street violence in New York or Jersey City (population 270,000) is due to fear that the city, or any part of it, would transform into a Pale of Settlement enclave, or that a place such as Monsey, which has had an Orthodox community for nearly 70 years, is experiencing friction because Jews are now fleeing the city to move there, the trope also exposes a profound ignorance of the Orthodox that has come to define much of the coverage about us in recent years.

Where I live, in New Jersey’s Ocean County, this charge has been made often. While we have thankfully been spared thus far from the daily violent attacks, overtly anti-Semitic rhetoric is the norm on area social media pages, and towns have enacted ordinances to make it difficult for religious Jews to move there.

My town, Lakewood, has 15,000 Orthodox families. As recognizable Jews seek to live in neighboring towns, officials have pulled the “shtetl card.”

It is true that Orthodox Jews tend to live close to each other, with good reason. Because religion is central to their lives, there is the need for a religious infrastructure in any place Orthodox Jews will seek to move. Jews need to pray three times daily, so they need synagogues — within walking distance, since they do not use cars or operate machinery on the Sabbath. They need to have access to kosher food, so they need a kosher supermarket. And they need to be able to educate their children, meaning any community needs private religious schools. All of these are costly endeavors, nearly impossible to sustain without a community already in place. It’s why, in the reporting about the shooting in Jersey City, which is a relatively new Jewish community, you hear about the grocery, synagogue, and school all located on the same block.

Are these the characteristics of a Jewish shtetl? Perhaps some would see it that way. But, as the Star-Ledger’s Mark Di Ionno wrote about Lakewood in August 2017, it is also a “typical sociopolitical story, no different than that of the Irish in Jersey City, the Cubans in Union City, or African-Americans in Newark.”

On top of all that, the Orthodox are both incredibly family-oriented and tend to have high birthrates. When deciding where to settle, closeness to the family is typically a significant factor. Using Lakewood as an example, while the average family size in New Jersey is a little more than 2.5, in Lakewood, it is over five — and growing. The birthrate there is four times the state average, at more than 40 births per 1,000 people, meaning more and more people are born each year who will eventually want to live near each other.

In cities such as New York, where I was born and raised, this never posed much of an issue, as the city was big enough to allow for the natural expansion of the Jewish communities in the various sections of Brooklyn in which we lived. However, in more suburban areas, where the “arrival” of a Jewish community might be more pronounced, there has historically been pushback on the part of the local governing bodies, who do not want this sort of cultural “invasion” in their town and would prefer to keep Jews confined to the “enclaves” where they already live.

Think the word “invasion” is too harsh? It was used unambiguously in 2016 by the (now former) mayor of Toms River, New Jersey, Tom Kelaher, to describe the Jews buying homes in his town. Toms River is one of the towns bordering Lakewood, and, as the town grows beyond its natural limits and the limits of its infrastructure, Lakewooders have, for the last half-decade, been looking toward these towns, only to be told they aren’t wanted there.

Residents responded to Jews buying homes on their blocks by pressuring neighbors not to sell, putting out “Toms River Strong — Don’t Sell” yard signs. In one instance, an entire block of residents reportedly emptied their driveways, taking up all the street parking when a neighbor, who had hired a Jewish realtor, held an open house. These residents continued to press their local government to “do something” to keep the Orthodox Jews from moving into their town and “turning it to another Lakewood.”

The horror.

Neighboring Jackson is under investigation by both the New Jersey Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division and the Department of Justice after local officials enacted ordinance after ordinance in a concerted effort to keep Jews from moving out of Lakewood and into their town. These included prohibitions on the construction of an eruv, a virtually unnoticeable string of fishing line that encircles public areas and permits observant Jews to carry items on Saturdays. Jackson voted to make it illegal to build any school dormitories, a project only the Jewish community was contemplating undertaking. The town required land eight times the size of a typical lot for anyone to build a house of worship.

The town’s mayor, Mike Reina, admitted in a conversation with a GOP county chair that the intention of the last was to prevent the construction of synagogues. Reina was also quoted as having told “concerned citizens” in a private meeting that “the key to keeping Jackson the way we all know and love it” is to “tell your neighbors” not to sell.

Local media reported that then-Council President Rob Nixon, when asked at a public meeting before the enactment of these ordinances what the township planned on doing to stop the Jews from moving in, said that “the threat can be eliminated if people held their ground and refused the offers being made on their properties and remain committed to Jackson Township and their neighbors.”

At the same time, Open Public Records Act documents show that Reina and Nixon compiled a watchlist of Jewish-owned properties, instructing township employees to monitor them for any prayer services that might be taking place. Some of the residents recorded code enforcement officers knocking on their doors and warning them that they were not allowed to conduct religious services in their homes on any sort of continuing basis.

Despite all this and more, towns such as Jackson in New Jersey insist they do not bear any anti-Semitic animus. What they are concerned about, they say, is the overdevelopment of towns that already have existing Jewish communities. That’s unconvincing, says Rabbi Avi Schnall, the regional director of Agudath Israel of America’s New Jersey office (which is currently in litigation with Jackson on many of the ordinances mentioned earlier). He points to the contrast between how Toms River has dealt with it and how Jackson has. “In Toms River,” Schnall told me, “we’ve seen a governing body which manages to deal with concerns about overdevelopment while learning how to allow Jews to become a part of the town — by treating them like the citizens they are, instead of trying to make them feel as unwelcome as possible.”

In Toms River, the Orthodox areas see vehicles from the police department on patrols, affording them an extra level of protection as they spend their days in prayer and celebration. In Jackson, Reina and Nixon focused on denying permits for Jews who sought to build sukkot, the small huts Jews put on their porches or in their yards for a week during the holiday of that name.

Sadly, the Toms River approach seems to be more the exception than the rule.

The same sort of denial of a Jew’s right to live wherever he or she might choose played itself out in other New Jersey towns such as Mahwah, where the town council passed two ordinances that one resident characterized as intended to “keep the Hasidic Jewish people from moving into Mahwah.” The state attorney general agreed. Mahwah eventually repealed those ordinances as part of a settlement that also included an agreement to notify the attorney general’s office before passing any further ordinances of that sort over the next four years and to release a public statement that it would enforce laws in a “non-discriminatory manner.”

It also continues to play out in upstate New York towns such as Chester, where Attorney General Tish James just filed suit against the town for what she called a “campaign to deny housing to members of the Jewish community” by “blocking the construction of homes [solely] to prevent a religious group from living” there. At issue is a 117-acre piece of property the town already had granted permits for — before it learned that Hasidic Jews bought the property from the original owner.

That would not do. Former town supervisor Alexander Jamieson said at a May 2018 public meeting that officials are “doing what we can to alleviate 432 Hasidic houses in the town of Chester,” a sentiment echoed by the current supervisor, Robert Valentine, at the same meeting. So, they have been denying the building permits, unapologetic about their intent, with Valentine even telling the New York Times in July that “if there was any way we could choose who could live there, we would do it. But we can’t.”

The concept of the shtetl is a throwback to old Europe. So are special laws designed to restrict where Jews can live and what they can build. Let’s hope America’s flirtation with heading down Europe’s path ends there.

Eli Steinberg lives in Lakewood, New Jersey, with his wife and five children.