Postville, Iowa, has the most rabbis per capita of any city in the United States.
It's hard to tell without sticking around for a few hours. Even at first glance, the town is like a thousand others in Iowa. Nestled in the middle of sprawling corn fields, it's made up of a couple of dozen two-story buildings clustered on a seemingly random spot on a state highway. It seems a little empty and a bit dusty.
But if you stand on Main Street, in front of the Postville Herald-Leader office, you'll begin to notice things that look out of place. For one thing, every third or fourth man walking down the street will be dressed entirely in black, topped with an expensive hat and sprouting a long beard.
That's because about 20 years ago, members of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism chose an empty processing plant outside Postville as the location for a new, entirely orthodox kosher slaughterhouse.
Today, this means that this formerly Christian, mostly quiet and entirely unassuming piece of Iowa is now full of out-of-towners. What's more, the slaughterhouse's preferred base of labor is immigrants from Eastern Europe and Latin America. If you walk up and down Main Street in Postville, as I did two weeks ago while looking for a place to eat lunch, you'll probably hear more Spanish than English and see plenty of ads in Polish on the windows.
The changes in Postville, however, aren't as superficial as the clothes people wear or what accents people have. Probably half the storefronts downtown are adorned with signs written in Spanish or Hebrew. Agriprocessors-the kosher slaughterhouse-is the biggest business in town. Signs on the highway leading into the city read "Hometown to the World," an obvious reference to the town's recently cosmopolitan population.
I'm not the only one who's noticed; Postville's relationship with these new arrivals has been the subject of a book by University of Iowa Professor Stephen Bloom titled "Postville," one of the first books I read after coming to Iowa.
Postville is interesting enough on its own merits, but even more so in light of the recent uproar over illegal immigration. It's the apocalypse that illegal immigration alarmists are constantly warning us about. The city is awash with people who speak, look and pray differently than the people who have lived there for decades. A language other than English is spoken in the streets and the economy depends on recent transplants from abroad. And most insidiously, the alarmists would say, these newcomers have brought with them demands for political correctness. Some have said that situations just like this threaten the very survival of our country and culture.
It would only be natural to assume that the town would be torn by disagreement and dissatisfaction over how to integrate or reject the new arrivals. Bloom's book makes it clear that the natives of Postville were not entirely comfortable with the transplants when they first arrived, and there is still uneasiness in town.
But overall I think a general civility has taken hold in Postville. It has the same quiet atmosphere of almost every other American town I've been in. The storefronts with their strange lettering are mixed in with the more familiar shops and are as well-used. Hasidim and farmers mingle around the truck selling sweet corn in the grocery store parking lot. Kids pass each other in the halls of the high school without shooting each other furtive second glances. Country music and Israel National Radio unabashedly share the airwaves. There is normalcy here.
That's more than I can say for the national political scene. I'd like to see a little more of Postville in our national discourse, especially about illegal immigration. This goes beyond what side of the issue you fall down on. There is a ferocity leveled against illegal immigrants that, I think, severely threatens the future unity of our nation.
So, every once in a while, when I hear someone get really worked up over illegal immigration, I want to remind them that there's a place where they're dealing with a much stranger situation with a whole lot more humanity.
Frank Holleman is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Monday.
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