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What happens when a small Iowa town becomes home to one of the world's busiest kosher slaughterhouses?
IN 1987, A SMALL IOWA FARMing town named Postville was on its last legs economically when a Jewish butcher from Brooklyn turned things around, buying a shut-down meat-processing plant on the outskirts of town and turning it into one of the world's busiest kosher slaughterhouses.
The butcher, a Lubavitcher hasid named Aaron Rubashkin, and his slaughterhouse brought 350 jobs to Postville, dramatically improving the town's prospects. The abbatoir also brought some 150 Lubavitchers to live in Postville (population 1,478), suddenly giving the town, in a state where pigs outnumber people five to one, the distinction of having more rabbis per capita than any other place in the country.
What happened when these two very different communities came to live side by side makes for a fascinating story, which journalist Stephen G. Bloom fell into after he and his family moved to Iowa City - 125 miles south of Postville - in 1993, when he became a journalism professor at the University of Iowa.
His engrossing book, "Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America," is the result, the tale of how instead of learning to live together, the two communities came to despise one another.
Bloom, who writes in a clear, unpretentious style and has a keen eye for detail, spent four years visiting Postville - where he soon learned that an uneasy tension had developed between the Jews and the locals. Though the hasidim had clearly saved Postville from becoming yet another down-on-its-luck Midwest farming town, the old- timers felt slighted by the Lubavitchers.
There's a way things...