Iowa Town Facing a Diversity Dilemma

Aaron Goldsmith is Jewish.

He sits on the City Council in Postville, Iowa.

And dozens of his fellow citizens want him off.

Those three facts--which may be related and, then again, may not--have of late ratcheted up tensions in Postville, a tiny farm town in far northeast Iowa that has been engaged in a remarkable experiment in diversity.

For 150 years, Postville was basically all white and all Christian. Then an ultra-Orthodox Jew from New York came to build a kosher slaughterhouse. Dozens of Hasidic Jewish families followed. So did immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala and Bosnia, from Ukraine, Nigeria and the Philippines--all drawn to jobs at the slaughterhouse and a nearby turkey plant.

Many locals tried mightily to get along. And many of the newcomers reached out to the community.

But tensions persisted, especially between Postville’s old-timers and the Jews. The Hasidim spoke Hebrew on the streets. Refused to eat in the local (non-kosher) pizzeria. They looked, to the locals, so very different, so odd, the men in long black coats and prayer shawls, the women in wigs, the little boys with hair curling down past their shoulders. To make matters worse, the city accused the kosher slaughterhouse of polluting a local river and levied a $2-million fine. The Jewish owners refused to pay--and the two sides sank into an angry legal battle of suits and countersuits.

Into this charged environment, enter the 43-year-old Goldsmith.

He was appointed--the first Jew to serve on Postville’s City Council--to fill a midterm vacancy. The council members who voted, 4 to 1, to seat him for a year--until the November election--spoke with pride of reaching out to the new face of Postville. “We were breaking new ground,” Mayor John Hyman said. “We wanted the council to be representative and reflective of the other cultures in town.”

But within a week, residents were circulating a petition to boot Goldsmith out.

The petition requested a special election to fill the council seat. And some of the 126 who signed said they did so simply because they felt strongly that their representatives should be elected, not appointed. “It’s not an issue of whether [Goldsmith] is Jewish or Mexican or American. It’s just that we feel we should be able to elect our council members,” said Sandra Helgerson, who runs a beauty parlor in town.

Yet 81-year-old Dorothy Radloff said with utter candor that she signed the petition because she did not want a Jew on the council. “We’re just afraid if they get one in, then pretty soon the whole council will be Jewish and they’re going to run the town,” she said. “They’re working to take the town over and push the rest of us out.”

Farm Towns Must Absorb Immigrants

Such raw antagonism, forced to the surface by Goldsmith’s appointment, has unsettled some in Postville.

And it raises issues for the rest of Iowa--indeed, for much of the Midwest--as more and more traditionally all-white farm towns absorb immigrant workers of different ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds.

Iowa’s jobless rate is one of the lowest in the nation--so low that some employers have taken to staging job fairs in prisons, with an eye on hiring convicts once they finish serving time. Immigration represents a possible solution to the tight labor market. Yet in a state that’s long been at least 95% white, immigration represents a source of tension as well. Postville--the subject of a front-page Times story two years ago and, more recently, of a PBS documentary and a book--has been scrutinized as a model of what to expect from rapid demographic change.

Goldsmith, for his part, thinks the town is doing well.

He does suspect the petition was motivated largely by anti-Semitism, and he calls that “very disturbing.” Yet Goldsmith is quick to add that he’s always felt at home in Postville. His business, which makes equipment for the disabled, has been honored by the Chamber of Commerce. He’s been asked to give speeches to local groups. Indeed, since moving to Postville from Los Angeles in May 1998, “I’ve experienced tremendous warmth from this town,” he says.

Since his appointment to the council, Goldsmith has not received a single nasty letter or call. On the contrary, many of his neighbors--and even many strangers--have come up to shake his hand and wish him well. “I feel like Jimmy Stewart in a Frank Capra movie,” he marvels.

So, while he calls the petition “a bit of a black eye” for his town, he remains optimistic and adamant: Diversity can work--in Postville and anywhere else. “This town has beautiful facets,” he insists. “It just needs to be polished.”

University of Iowa professor Stephen Bloom, who studied the town for five years to write “Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America,” has come to a harsher conclusion.

Focusing on old-timers’ relationship with the Jews, Bloom says that “the two communities are at war”--and he blames the Hasidim for refusing to adapt even to such small but symbolic local customs as keeping lawns trimmed with military precision. “The [Jews] have kept up walls and become a separate entity,” Bloom said. “That works quite well in Los Angeles, where there are myriad separate communities. It doesn’t work at all in a tiny, cohesive town of 1,500 where people depend on one another to survive.”

Special Election Planned for April 24

Perhaps the ultimate test of which vision is more accurate will come in the special election, scheduled for April 24.

Goldsmith already has decided to run on his record: In his first two council meetings, he persuaded his colleagues to seek federal mediation of the legal tangles involving the city, the kosher slaughterhouse and the turkey processor. He also plans to campaign as a “councilman for everybody,” to emphasize that he’s not just there for the Hasidim.

So far, no one has filed to run against him.

And word around town is that no one will.

For the furor over the petition has turned the special election into a sort of referendum on the concept of diversity in Postville government. Anyone who runs against Goldsmith risks being tarred as anti-Semitic.

“If I were a betting woman,” said Sharon Drahn, editor of the Postville Herald-Leader, “I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts that he’ll win.”