What You Should Know
8/4/23
We were near the Catskills last Saturday — driving through farms and massive country houses with huge lots of land and horses and Trump flags and big expensive lawn mowers parked out of front. And then suddenly it was like we got teleported to a different world. Men and and boys in black hats and black pants and white shirts lounging on porches and playing behind fences. Girls in threes and fours walking alongside the highway — dressed in long skirts. Women doing the same but in wigs. As we kept driving I could barrack type housing obscured by trees and fences flashing by on both sides of road. Then came the kosher meat stores and the synagogue where the local little church should be. There was even a political ad: warning Jews not to join the Zionists, as this went against the Torah. We didn’t travel back in time. We got deposited in a parallel universe: a modern shtetl.
Were they Chabad? Satmar? Some other neo-traditionalist sect?
The anti-Zionist poster should have tipped me off. Chabad is rabidly pro-Zionist. Some of the wildest and most bloodthirsty settlers in Israel are from that sect. The Satmar, on the other hand, aren’t fans of a secular Jewish state.
So the people out here are mostly (completely?) Satmar, the small Hungarian sect that bloomed anew in Williamsburg.
I just reading around and found out that there are places like this all over here — and that they’re growing. The most infamous shtetl out in this part of New York was just 15 minutes away in the village of Bloomingburg. It is the brainchild of a scummy non-Satmar Orthodox developer from New York, the son of one of the most respected Orthodox rabbis in America. He saw an opportunity: Brooklyn — and especially Satmar Williamsburg — was overcrowded and expensive. Young pious families were having a hard time starting out on their own. So why not build an Hasidic development out where land is cheap and the local government immiserated and open to, eh, influence. He got the idea from a different upstate New York Satmar shtetl, Kiryas Joel. And it looks like he pulled it off, despite the fact that he pled guilty to voter fraud in order to push the development through, all while accusing locals who opposed his conspiracy to buy off the local government of being evil antisemites.
Success in business means God is with you. Just read the Torah.
We’ll be talking more about this on the next episode of The Russians. So tune in.
—Yasha
PS: See previous WYSKs here.
Too bad this is only in Russian, but I like this essay by a historian who I talk about sometimes — Yuri Slezkine , who is at UC Berkeley — about the changing conceptions of “the Western World” and how Russia used to see itself as firmly planted within it, rather than pretend that it has always fought it like it does now. He ends with something Dostoevsky wrote in 1877: “…we can't give up Europe. Europe is our second fatherland. I am the first to passionately confess it and have always confessed it. Europe is almost as dear to us as Russia; it has the entire Japhetite tribe, and our idea is to unite all nations of this tribe, and even further, much further, to the Semites and Hamites. What to do?”
I haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet but I’m glad people are talking about all the various horrors of nuclear tech because of it. It’s been weird to see my generation, wedded as it is to the status quo, rebranding nukes as a clean great energy with no downsides.
People here in America think that only the evil Soviet Union would allow something as horrific as Chernobyl to happen? Well… “It is estimated 12 billion curies of radiation were released during atmospheric testing conducted between 1951 and 1963 at the NTS. In comparison, the Chernobyl disaster released an estimated 81 million curies of radiation when the No. 4 reactor melted down in 1986.” — A great essay on all the nuke tests that America carried out in Nevada and the massive amounts of radiation they spread.
…check out Evgenia’s old interview with Kate Brown about Chernobyl.
The rest is for subscribers…