A few years ago, I read a fascinating book, Postville, about a small town in eastern Iowa. Accounts of life in small-town America interest me, because I’m a product of just such a place. What elevated Postville for me, though, was the story it tells about the clash between the deeply engrained midwestern culture of rural Iowa and the increasing dominance of the place by an entirely new element — ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher Jews, transplanted from Brooklyn to run a kosher meat-packing operation, Agriprocessors. This was irresistible stuff for me, having grown up Jewish in a town where diversity was defined by the difference between Swedes and Norwegians.
Postville is a good read, but recent events have made it more than that. Now it’s background reading for a very high-profile set of legal proceedings that involve federal charges on 91 criminal counts (ranging from bank, wire, and mail fraud to money laundering) against Agriprocessors (with more in the works for hiring illegal immigrants) and have left the rest of the country with a shortage of kosher meats. Here’s a recent overview of the proceedings. In case anybody else is interested, I’ll provide an update or two as the events play out.