Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. Professors Nomi M. Stolzenberg (USC, Gould School of Law) and David N. Myers (UCLA) will relate the story of how a group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in suburban New York. Their co-authored book, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton, 2022), was awarded the 2022 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish studies.

David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor of History and holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA, where he serves as the director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. He also directs the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. He is the author or editor of many books in the field of Jewish history. From 2018-2023, he served as president of the New Israel Fund.

Nomi Stolzenberg holds the Nathan and Lily Shapell Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. Her research spans a range of interdisciplinary interests, including law and religion, law and liberalism, law and feminism, law and psychoanalysis, and law and literature. She is currently working on the subject of religious liberty theory and “faith-based discrimination.”

Stolzenberg received her JD from Harvard University. She has taught at Columbia Law School and the University of Pennsylvania. At the USC Gould School, she helped establish the USC Center for Law, History, and Culture, which she currently codirects.