Armin Rosen: The Satmar Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Hidden in Brooklyn, a Surprisingly Vibrant Communal Model

David H.— Along with everything else, the post-October 7 period is a time for rethinking the old boundaries that divided Jews. It is a time for communities to learn from one another. In this remarkable essay, Armin Rosen explores the community of Satmar Hasidim in Williamsburg, New York—and finds a remarkable approach to Jewish communal life.

Armin Rosen is a Brooklyn-based writer for Tablet Magazine, as well as a frequent contributor to the Washington Examiner and Al Arabiya. He has reported from throughout Africa, Europe, and the Middle East for a range of American publications.

The following is an exclusive reprint from the anthology Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, edited by David Hazony. Copyright © 2023 Wicked Son. Reprinted with permission.

The Satmar Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Hidden in Brooklyn, a Surprisingly Vibrant Communal Model

Armin Rosen

In a city of ethnic enclaves, few feel as total as Brooklyn’s Lee Avenue. It begins at Flushing Avenue, in the strange frontier between Bushwick hipsterdom and the historic black community of Bed-Stuy, under the dual mystery of a whitewashed, old Pfizer factory and a menacingly blank-faced Woodhull Hospital. When Lee ends at Division Avenue, three quarters of a mile later, you are steps away from Peter Luger Steakhouse, the Williamsburg Bridge, a forest of million-dollar one-bedroom condos, and every yuppie amenity known to American capitalism.

In between is the Hungarian shtetl, an image of European Jewry before its destruction.

There are no chain stores on Lee, unless the kosher butcher Satmar Fleisch counts as a chain. There are almost no non-Jewish-focused businesses, period. English retreats: The newspapers and the ads on the bus shelters are in Yiddish, which is the language of daily speech among men with white stockings pulled up to their knees, women in ankle-length dresses, and seemingly hundreds of unattended and unworried children, with the boys often on scooters or little mountain bikes, and the girls pushing their younger siblings in strollers. Perhaps the largest retail business on Lee, closer to the Willoughby end, is an off-brand toy store, secular in its inventory but packed only with Haredi Jews. Everything on Lee is packed. It is lively even by Brooklyn standards, as swarming with activity as the blocks around the Bedford station on the L train, less than a mile away.

There are hatters and clothing shops but the only luxury goods on conspicuous display are silver kiddush cups and candlesticks. There’s a wonderful Hungarian-style kosher sit-down deli nearby, dating from the 1940s, although the cholent and pastrami at Gottleib’s aren’t quite good enough to attract tourists, and even kosher foodies from other parts of town tend to ignore the place. “Town” becomes an abstraction on Lee Avenue, where nearly everyone sticks to the Satmar dress code, speaks the Satmar language—these are some of the last Jews in New York whose primary language is Yiddish—rides Satmar buses to Monsey and Kiryas Joel, studies in Satmar institutions, works in Satmar businesses, shops only at Satmar grocery stores, and reads Satmar newspapers. (There are other Haredi communities in Williamsburg, including significant populations of Pupa and Breslov Hasids, but they are a fraction of Satmar’s size.)

Lee Avenue isn’t like Kingston Avenue, the rambunctious Chabadnik main street, a global Jewish hub where it’s normal to hear Hebrew, English, French, and Spanish; or Thirteenth Avenue in Borough Park, the Judaically diverse crossroads of Brooklyn’s largest Orthodox neighborhood. Lee is somehow more austere, more inward-facing than the borough’s other main drags. No one dances in the middle of Lee during any holiday.

The Satmars are a bit of an austere bunch in general. They read the weekly haftarah in an undertone; the few Satmar apartments I’ve been to are kept almost spotlessly clean. Satmar weddings are not drunken or effusively joyous affairs. It is not an unwelcoming place, but in contrast to the city’s more celebrated ethnic high streets, there’s nothing on Lee that’s pitched toward people who don’t live nearby. A visitor quickly realizes they are in a place that belongs to people whose lives and priorities appear to have little in common with their own, one that exists almost in defiance of everything surrounding it.

I am always seized with the disquieting suspicion that the people around me on Lee, however bizarre and cloistered they seem, are in fact living lives more serious than mine, organized around the most sublime possible objectives: God, family, the transmission of eternal truths, and survival into a future so certain that that they can see it right in front of them.

The energy of some underlying holy purpose begins to dissipate well before the other side of Broadway, such that by the time I reach the Bedford Avenue Whole Foods, it feels as if the city has reverted to its default level of frivolousness. Lee’s isolation is not just sociological, but spiritual. I always feel as if I have found it by accident.

***

The Satmar Hasidim of Williamsburg are the most openly scorned group of people in New York City. Brooklyn’s gentrifiers, which is to say much of the rising professional class, often know them as inscrutable landlords making unpleasant demands in difficult-to-place accents. The New York Times, the city’s establishment guide to the boundaries of acceptable thought, accuses Satmar schools of being Dickensian indoctrination factories where children are beaten. Members of the community are routinely harassed on the streets—they are sucker-punched, or have their black hats knocked off. Few consider the rash of violent antisemitism against them to be any kind of a crisis. They are objects of silent, sneering curiosity the moment they board a subway car. New Yorkers barely think of them as fellow members of reality.

To their many critics, the Satmars are a misogynistic, pre-modern inconvenience, angering even to look at or think about, habitual defrauders of the government who conspire to use the public housing system to keep black and Hispanic people out of their neighborhoods. They tend to annoy Jews because of their opposition to the existence of the State of Israel. At a superficial glance they seem like throwbacks to a quietist past, specters of the Old-World Jews who failed to stand up for themselves—convinced, perhaps, that golus required them to be weak and oppressed.

Whether they actually believe any of that remains unclear. The Satmars are notably uninterested in openly pleading their case to mainstream society or even to their fellow Jews, including on pressing matters of communal safety. They often seem uninterested in their fellow Jews, period, at least the ones that are not also Haredi.

American Jews are, in turn, uninterested in them, except insomuch as they manifest an unenlightened and supposedly inferior way of being Jewish. For the numerous New Yorkers whose Jewish identity is mostly shaped in reaction to one or another allegedly gross and backwards type of Jew, the Satmars are a godsend.

And yet a resident of north Brooklyn notices after a while that the Satmars are everywhere—the footprint of their community is physically massive and constantly growing, their families are large, their school buses are full, and their wedding halls are filled nearly every night of the week. One eventually discovers, with some astonishment, that the building right above the Flushing Avenue stop on the G train has a very large mikveh in its basement. Even a curious observer sees only a fraction of the Satmars’ total communal infrastructure.

It is true enough that the Satmars lack the openness and access to secular culture that metropolitan liberals believe to be the only possible criteria for living under humane conditions. But the Satmars have also shut out some of the most corrosive tendencies in modern society. Newfangled social-justice dogma has not crippled their education system. They have successfully resisted the onslaught of an omnipresent internet and many of the horrors that come along with it. The Satmars actually have kids—unlike the majority of my adult friends in Brooklyn—and those kids can read somewhere between two and three languages and have many of the same answers to life’s big questions that their parents do. That the Satmars have transmitted both their values and an ethos of multilingual literacy to their children is a significant accomplishment within a culture—American as well as Jewish American—where God and the written word are rapidly losing their status.

The Satmars, in other words, are one of the only segments of the American Jewish community that has really nailed the continuity thing. Even more impressively, they did it in north Brooklyn, a short walk from the William Vale hotel and the House of Yes.

How? And more importantly, why? Perhaps it is brainwashing that is keeping the Satmar community so much stronger than its secular, liberal Jewish neighbors, and they sustain themselves only because their rabbinically dictated communal norms are so ruthlessly enforced. Or maybe Hashem is right, and adherence to the mitzvahs really is the price of Jewish flourishing, even if it’s one that most of us don’t have the inclination to pay, myself included.

I don’t think mind control or the inherent truth of Haredi Judaism really explain it, though. I am no expert, but after years of occasionally reporting on the Williamsburg Satmars, I have another, more reassuring explanation for their relative communal health: They just want it more than we do.

The Satmars are American Judaism’s starkest manifestation of what it takes for Jews to survive the centripetal forces of a secular society. Luckily for the rest of us, what it requires is pretty straightforward. We have to actually take being Jewish seriously, rather than treating it like a hobby or weird personal trait or a costume that can be taken on and off at will. We have to fight for a Jewish life—even and maybe especially in America. We have to want it as much as the Satmars do.

***

History helps explain why the Satmars are so motivated to protect their way of life. The Satmars of Brooklyn were Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust—the Satmar dayan, or chief judge, whose Covid-era public funeral provoked such outrage in late 2020, had a number from Auschwitz tattooed on his arm. Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar rebbe, made it on the Kastner Train of Hungarian Jewish notables who were spared death upon arrival at Bergen-Belsen. He then reconstituted his community in the hottest-boiling part of the American melting pot: Brooklyn, right on the East River.

In the generations since the Satmar arrival, nearly all former evidence of any kind of mass Jewish presence has disappeared from the Lower East Side, once the largest Jewish community on earth. That is not the case across the river in Williamsburg, where survivors of the European horror arrived in a neighborhood that was about to be sliced apart by the construction of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.

The Satmars stayed even as a concrete trench tore through the neighborhood. Even as the city got worse, they stayed. In the grimy and violent 1970s, they launched Brooklyn’s first shomrim neighborhood watch. With the encouragement of their rebbe, Satmars began purchasing distressed industrial real estate in neighborhoods like Bushwick, where they opened light factories and warehouses—and, later, rental properties and condos. They did not leave for the suburbs, expanding into Rockland and Orange Counties only when their Brooklyn sh’chuna ran out of space or grew in ways that threatened always-delicate relations with nearby black and Puerto Rican communities. They did not disappear into the larger society, the way other mid-century groups of New York Jews did. They refused to change who they were, and they refused to care that they were refusing to change.

The most notorious instance of their refusal to change touches on the issue for which the Satmars are best known within the Jewish world. Despite briefly settling in mandatory Palestine in late 1945, Teitelbaum was one of Haredi Judaism’s most passionate opponents of Zionism, a position that still keeps him and his movement far outside most of the rest of Jewish life (even though frequent Satmar travel to Israel and a near-total lack of interest in geopolitics separate them from the BDS crowd). Celebrating the political reality of Jewish statehood would have been a risky theological capitulation.

I have always found Satmar anti-Zionism to be a forgivable quirk, perhaps even proof of intellectual and spiritual integrity. And of all the things the Satmar can teach us, the most important is to embrace discomfort and not to be ashamed of ourselves.

They can teach us a great deal more than that, too. They can teach us not to be too delighted with our own prosperity. On average, the Satmars are some of the poorest people in New York. But the community has its multimillionaires—a half-in, half-out Satmar once told me the number was about fifty—most of them made rich from the real estate and construction sector, who subsidize almost all Jewish infrastructure. For the most part, the wealthy spend their money on perpetuating yiddishkeit rather than on fancy houses or cars. There are numerous Satmar families in public housing, but no one goes hungry on Shabbat. I know of one Williamsburg charity, with a skeletal website and few professional staff, that spends an eye-watering $12 million a year buying kosher groceries for disadvantaged families in Haredi communities around the world.

The Satmars, like other Haredi groups, consider education intrinsic to their way of life. The Satmar yeshiva system might not meet secular American standards, but it seems to meet Satmar standards nicely, in the sense that the community thrives within a social and political environment where their success should be impossible. They have made obvious what many Americans would rather forget: That there is a direct relationship between what a community values, what it teaches its children, and whether it endures at all. They know that education is survival; the schools are the largest and best-maintained buildings in Jewish Williamsburg.

Unlike Israel, New York is not built to accommodate Jewish observance, and Haredim are a tiny minority in a quasi-hostile society. Intense political discipline means that Satmar concerns are taken seriously among elected officials, giving the community some loose form of official protection. In contrast to much of the rest of America, they are arch-pragmatists politically, voting not on ideology but on relationships and communal imperatives, supporting social liberals when it serves their interests. Such a nakedly transactional politics can look baffling and even paradoxical. But the Satmars understand that the world doesn’t exist to make them feel at ease.

It is the Satmars’ willingness to endure social ostracization and carry out difficult choices in the name of sustaining their community that explains why there are now Satmars in Jersey City. Over the past decade, Williamsburgers displaced by the high cost of living in Brooklyn created an outpost of a hundred families in a depressed section of the first city across the Hudson, complete with shuls, a school for young children, and a single kosher grocery store. That community suffered a deadly attack in the fall of 2019, when two black nationalists set off a hostage crisis at that grocery store, killing its owner, a rabbinical student, and a non-Jewish employee.

I reported from the neighborhood the day after the attack, in a run-down corner of an already unattractive city, where the non-Jewish residents seemed to share the views of a local school board member who later called the killings a justified response to “the assault on the Black communities of America.” The Satmars haven’t left Jersey City. They are not leavers. They care about having lives more than they care about their lives being easy.

What is “life” to a Satmar? They showed us during Covid. The community happily paid a $15,000 fine for holding a wedding that thousands of people secretly attended in the fall of 2020, when the city was still under lockdown. Mass funerals, such as the dayan’s, scandalized the New York tabloids. The Satmar leadership didn’t seem to care very much, or even at all. Satmar yeshivas and summer camps were open for much of 2020 while the secular world cowered from the pandemic. For the community, celebrating a marriage and the promise of new life, honoring the dead and reinforcing the connection between the living and the eternal, and educating and socializing the young are imperatives that override respect for state authority or the strict need for physical well-being.

It was as if the Satmars had decided there was no point in sustaining one’s body in a society where the truly essential things could no longer be done.

I am not sure they were wrong. During the pandemic, the Satmars took on the risk of being scorned for living out values that made perfect sense to them and should have made perfect sense to the rest of us, too. Standing alone is a common experience for the Satmars, just as it has been for Jews throughout our 3,000 years of documented history.

***

There is much to admire about the Satmars, if we care to look at them with something other than self-satisfied judgment. Satmars do not leave cities or change their way of life when things start getting difficult, they orient their entire lives around a rigorous and text-heavy version of Jewish education. They have filtered out many of secular society’s worst excesses, and they don’t shriek about their own supposed victimhood. American Jews should learn from their example.

Yet a reasonable observer could also look at the many less edifying aspects of Satmar society—the position of women, the lack of emphasis on English, math, and science in the education system, the outsized power of a small all-male religious leadership, the extremely limited range of life paths that don’t require leaving the community, the coldly instrumental view toward the rest of the world—and wonder if Jewish survival in America is even possible or desirable, if this is what’s needed to secure it.

We should know better. Non-Orthodox American Jews once had proud examples of what it means to take Judaism seriously here—of what it means to really, actually want it. Then, over the course of a century or so, nearly all of them either disappeared or failed. Yiddish vanished. Distinctively American Jewish religious movements dwindled into irrelevance. Israel advocacy and Holocaust commemoration built formidable political operations and left a vast physical and organizational legacy, but they were inevitably an expression of a specific era’s anxieties. The “Tikkun Olam” ideology—the orthodoxy that social justice is our special Jewish American destiny—is too generic and earthbound to keep us engaged at any kind of scale.

That the Satmars and American Haredim in general are now among our most visible avatars of intense, uncorrupted Jewish commitment is not a sign of their extremism, but of everyone else’s lack of imagination. Judaism is limitless enough to contain sources of meaning and cohesion that don’t require adherence to a mystical, self-segregating way of life. None of them come easy—Hebrew and Torah are tough, shacharit is very early in the morning, Israel is controversial and far away and sometimes ugly, children hate going to Hebrew school on weeknights, kosher meat is expensive, camps and schools and youth groups are hard to organize and even harder to make affordable for median-income families, and there’s enough to read and see and care about in the world without feeling the need to crack open Dara Horn, never mind the Rambam.

But we must embrace the difficulty. The real gift of Judaism, and a key source of its survival across thousands of often-bloody years, is that it forces us to grow familiar with the constant discomfort that is intrinsic to human existence. The Satmars understand this. And if we don’t, they will be all that’s left of us in the future.