Postville

I recently borrowed a DVD of this documentary from the library at about the same time I heard of a new documentary on the same topic.


The film is about a small Midwestern town, Postville, Iowa, which experiences an influx of Orthodox Jews when they take advantage of the low cost of living there and proximity to livestock to start a kosher farming business. Since the meat they produce has to be kosher, their employees for the most part have to be Jews, who bring along their families to live there. They keep to themselves, which flummoxes as well as miffs the Midwestern community, who is more used to being neighborly and unused to the "strange" customs of the Jews. You can see how some townsfolk are truly shocked at the Jews not really caring about them or their opinions of them. Later the townsfolk are concerned again because Hispanics started moving in to be laborers in the meat plants, and deemed an undesirable element. Rather than seeing the economic good this has brought the town, most of the people in the documentary just see negative differences.

This topic really speaks to a lot of modern topics such as immigration and the global movement of food. I wished more people, especially the Jews, were able to be interviewed, although I can see they really don't want to associate with anyone and just keep to themselves.

The newer documentary I heard about, AbUSed: The Postville Raid, focuses on the immigration raid in this community in 2008, so I wondered if this earlier doc contributed to pointing out the existence of illegal immigrants here. The two films would make a good double feature, and I hope to catch the new film if it comes this way.