LIVE from NYPL: American Shtetl: Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers with Larissa MacFarquhar

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In 1972 leaders of the Satmar Hasidic dynasty in Williamsburg purchased a small tract of land in upstate New York. Five years later Kiryas Joel was born, a legal jurisdiction granted to the Satmars by the state of New York. The new book American Shtetl, by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, is the story of Kiryas Joel, an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. Stolzenberg and Myers document 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.

Stolzenberg and Myers speak with New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar about their new book and their fifteen years of research into Kiryas Joel, an “only in America phenomenon.”