Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America By Stephen G. Bloom. Harcourt, 338 pages, $25.00
The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex,Faith, and Civil Rights By Arlene Stein. Beacon Press, 267 pages, $27.50
A stranger comes to town. It's one of the greatthemes of American literature and film, not to mention contemporary Americanpolitics. Often our towns don't seem big enough for everyone, especially whenprofound disagreements arise. Liberalism at its most limited sometimes tries tooverlook those disagreements, as if all we needed to live happily side by sidewere a kindergarten diversity curriculum in which brown- and yellow- andpink-skinned children and children with two mommies happily taste one another'sfoods and sing one another's holiday songs. But that pleasant vision of pluralismcan itself offend those who believe tolerance to be dangerous and immoral whileseeing their own philosophy as the One True Way. What happens when liberalismmeets fundamentalism, when Why can't we all just get along? meets Get theebehind me, Satan?
That question runs through two recent books about strangers who rideinto town and decide to stay. In Stephen G. Bloom's Postville, small-town Iowa is shaken when an unfriendly group of Lubavitcher Hasidim buy a failed Iowa slaughterhouse so that they can supply kosher meat and poultry to Orthodox Jews worldwide. The story in Arlene Stein's Stranger Next Door is more complicated: In a small Oregon town, an evangelical Christianity springs up among dispossessed white men and women and finds political focus in a campaign against "special rights" for gay people (who are all but nonexistent here). Each book structures its story around a local election that everyone understands to be a referendum on those cast as aliens. The back story is that of a global economy increasingly shifting work away from local white men while bringing in outsiders whose habits and values seem arrogant, inconsiderate, and strange.
Postville is the lighter read, and frames its microcosmic culture clash with Bloom's own story. In 1993 Bloom, a San Francisco journalist, takes a job as a journalism professor at the University of Iowa. At first he and his wife are enchanted by Iowa City's exotic cultural habits: people sitting on the wraparound porch, driving under the speed limit, fishing with fresh-dug worms, eating all-pork meals at the county fair. But after a few years, the Blooms notice that they don't quite fit, both as "city slickers," as the locals call them, and as Jews. For their fellow Iowans, Christianity is neutral background; Jesus is unthinkingly invoked by teachers and scoutmasters, neighbors sing Christmas carols outside their door as if this were benign, and the newspaper's Easter headline is "He Has Risen."
And so when Bloom hears about the Lubavitcher Hasidim in Postville, 350 milesnorth, wearing their payot (those curly earlocks) and black hats in a state "where pigs outnumber people by almost five to one," he's riveted. "While I knew the Lubavitchers to be fierce fundamentalists who proselytize other Jews the way Jehovah's Witnesses go after nonbelievers," he writes, "I also realized that the Hasidim in Postville were as close to family as Iris and I could muster in our new home state." Although the Hasidim, notoriously xenophobic, don't answer his calls requesting an interview, eventually a non-Jewish plant manager at the kosher slaughterhouse invites him to come by. Once he's inside, the Hasidim recognize his ethnicity and start recruiting.
The fact that Bloom is actually going inside the slaughterhouse flabbergaststhe locals, whom he interviews as well (and who don't realize that he can beJewish without a yarmulke and so forth). Postville is so small--population1,465--that "no one used turn signals because everyone knew where everyone elsewas going." The local newspaper covers everyone's vacation destinations,afternoon visitors, and birthday-party decorations. It's a town so monoculturallydescended from German Lutheran settlers that before World War II, German wasspoken more often than English on the street. But by 1987, when Aaron Rubashkin,a Brooklyn butcher, came looking for a place to start a glatt-kosher slaughterhouse, Postville was in economic crisis. Fueled by the worldwide Orthodox boom and advances in international shipping, Rubashkin's business became wildly successful, bringing money into town.
Nevertheless, 10 years later, the locals aren't exactly happy with theirmarriage of necessity. "The Jews," as they're called, drive like maniacs, nevermow their lawns, build without permits, bargain furiously (which the locals feelimplies the price is unfair), and wait months, if ever, to pay their bills.Disregarding the fundamental rule of Iowa coexistence, the Hasidim won't evenmake eye contact on the street. One of Bloom's local informants asks: "Hadn'ttheir mothers taught them any manners?"
Bloom does his best to be fair to the Hasidim as he explores theirhermetically sealed world. He notes his relief at the familiar speech rhythms,the questions upon questions. He accepts an invitation for a Shabbat stay with aHasidic family, revels in the food, and prays with his hosts on command. Butfinally, Bloom is a liberal, not a fundamentalist: He's repelled by theirintolerance, their insularity, their open delight in cheating "the goyim," andtheir manipulative arguments. He quotes one Hasid as saying proudly: "I am aracist... . Why haven't the Jews been extinguished after scores of attemptsthroughout history? That we are still here defies logic. There is only oneanswer. We are better and smarter. That's why!" Bloom's heart is with thePostville local who says: "It's not such a great religion if they don't want tobe a part of the community, is it?"
Bloom's background as a daily journalist shows; while the book brims withfactual details, it lacks a sustaining narrative. As a result, parts ofPostville are compulsively readable, filled with vivid information about such things as the town's history, kosher killing and evisceration, the filthy, algae-covered mikveh for Hasidic men, and Rubashkin's all-expenses-paid importation of labor. But there's too much filler: reconstructed "conversations" full of nothing much, for instance, and detail about an assimilated Jewish doctor who'd coexisted nicely before the Hasidim came. Bloom's own story doesn't fully hold the book together. Nor does the confrontation he constructs: a vote over whether the town should annex the slaughterhouse land and that of other local businesses, subjecting them to city taxes and law--an effort the Hasidim call anti-Semitic. Annexation passed; the Hasidim stayed. Postville's biggest disappointment is its failure to take on the larger questions: What does it mean that more people worldwide are taking refuge in separatist ideologies like the Lubavitchers'? And what is to be done when a separatist culture crashes into a pluralist one?
These are the questions that Arlene Stein takes up in TheStrangers Next Door. In 1992 the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) ran a statewide initiative campaign to prevent antidiscrimination protections based on sexual orientation. After the statewide measure failed, the OCA targeted rural towns and counties that had voted in favor and attempted to pass similar measures locally. "Rural Oregon was a rather unlikely site for a battle over homosexuality," writes Stein, a sociologist at the University of Oregon. "In this vast, sparsely populated region of the country, there were few visible signs of queer life: ... no out homosexuals lobbying for civil rights; no lesbian/gay coffeehouses, newspapers or running clubs." Why this moral panic about a nonexistent threat? Stein chooses one rural town (calling it "Timbertown" to protect her informants) so that she can closely examine the larger symbolic meanings behind the campaign.
Stein recounts how Timbertown had uneasily absorbed successiveintrusions of newcomers--back-to-the-land counterculture folks, Jesus freaks,latte-drinking Californians--whose manners and morals offended the town'sfrontier values of "strength and obedience, self-discipline, self-reliance, andrespect for authority." This uneasy meeting of cultures grew nastier as thelumber economy began to sputter. Loss of prosperity led to a 1980s and 1990sexplosion of membership in evangelical churches. There, many with shaky financesand unstable lives found shelter, invoking a strict God and a stern but lovingchurch family to shepherd them through change. Their beliefs infused thestruggles of everyday life--from maintaining sobriety and sexual restraint tomaking friends and sewing slipcovers--with purpose and meaning. But many, Steinbelieves, remained deeply ashamed of their personal failures, embarrassed bytheir lower-class God--in need of a scapegoat to help define their outsiderChristianity as "traditional" and to prove to themselves that they walked in thepath of righteousness. "By declaring who is strange," writes Stein, "we come toknow who is familiar." Enter the OCA and its antigay campaign.
The town's few lesbian business owners and school administrators were tooafraid to come out. Opposing the "no special rights" measure was thus up toheterosexual liberals, who peddled a generic (and inadequate) support fortolerance and diversity. For the liberals, the campaign was about somethingother than gayness, which many weren't quite comfortable with. Many of them werefighting their own scapegoats, with the OCA activists standing in for allbackward Oregon "rednecks" (that class slur against white people who workoutdoors). Writes Stein: "If few OCA members were college educated, thisgroup was, in contrast, a relatively educated, cosmopolitan one; if OCAmembers repudiated the values of 1960s-style personal self-expression, socialexperimentation, tolerance of difference--this group proudly embraced them."
It was, in other words, a class battle--a battle of worldviews--and thus farmore divisive than either side expected. The liberals underestimated the depthof feeling on the other side, which was fed by class resentment, job loss,falling wages, and despair at failing family relationships, as well as by disdainfor supposedly rich gay people wantonly escaping their sex roles and familyduties. Stein argues persuasively that liberalism hasn't offered a compellingvision of what's moral and good in family and community life, and that"diversity" rhetoric can be patronizing. When one identifies oneself as lesbian,say, or as Hasidic, "born that way" just doesn't cut it: Obviously, the offenderis still choosing every day to embrace a set of values that repels, evendisgusts, a neighbor. Stein articulates the OCA activists' furious resentmentat diversity rhetoric this way: "Who was protecting their rights, theirlivelihood? Who was championing their needs when they lost their jobs, when their homes were repossessed, when they struggled to maintain their community? Who was making them feel included?"
What's especially valuable about Stein's book is her detailedlook at each individual's take on the meaning of the campaign and her patientexploration of the wide variety of forces shifting the ground of these people'slives. She reveals both OCA activists and their liberal counterparts asindividuals with more ambivalence and nuanced emotion about the election than canbe divined from the angry boycotts of local businesses, the furious letters tothe editor, or the protest demonstrations that became screaming matches.
Stein traces the way the global economic climate's peculiar currentsare responsible not just for liberal choices like openly gay lives but also forthe rise in American fundamentalisms. None of us can get back to where we oncebelonged: That world is gone and we must choose a new one. Gay-pride parades,Pentecostal churches, ritual mikvehs, and NPR cruises are a few of our newly invented homes. None can fairly be called "traditional," since all are chosen adaptations or reactions to modern life. If once upon a time we had small-town harmony, it was because we could purge our world of strangers, shipping the Puritans off to America, shipping the Quakers off to Rhode Island, shipping the Mormons off to Utah, and so on. But how do you kick the strangers out of town--whether the strangers are Starbucks-drinkers or Hasidim--if their cash props up your fading livelihood, or if they can turn to FedEx and Visa and the Web for everything they need?
Learning to live together while disapproving of--perhaps even despising--oneanother's behavior and beliefs is not the same as "celebrating diversity." It's agrittier and less utopian accommodation to those who are both like and unlikeourselves. Timbertown's antigay measure passed, but like the Postvilleannexation, the win was largely symbolic. It was presumptively overruled when theSupreme Court, in the 1996 Romer v. Evans decision, struck down the Colorado antigay amendment on which the Oregon measures were patterned. Meanwhile, most churches on the OCA side decided that political involvement was too divisive and returned to ministering to individuals. But neither did the liberals win, conquering ignorance and hate as they'd hoped. The waves of global capitalism continue to wash strangers, with their peculiar and distasteful choices, into town. As we've so terribly seen in recent weeks, we'll be facing showdown battles, large and small, again and again in years to come.
