Journalist Stephen G. Bloom's Postville

The two cultures are the white, Lutheran long time residents of the small farming town of Postville, Iowa and the ultra orthodox Hassidic Lubavitchers Jewish Americans from Brooklyn, New York. As Bloom notes, "As in all of Iowa, Christianity has always been at the heart of Postville" (89).

When the Jews began arriving in the mid-1980s,

Postville, as it had always been, was a closed,

Insulated, solidly Christian communityBas much a

shtetl as the Hasidim's ancestors had created in

Eastern Europe, as much as the one the Lubavitchers

had created in Crown Height, Brooklyn. Shtetlach

Were incubators and fortresses of Jewish tradition

Where religious values were preserved and

The two religious traditions at conflict are two in which cultural values cannot be separated from religious values, especially for the Hasidic group. Bloom notes that a key value among the Iowan farmers and families was a "mutual support system among neighbors" (56). The harsh winters, hard farm life, and uncertainty of crops required a strong communal bond to ensure survival of the small

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Approximate Word count = 1181
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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