Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America By Stephen G. Bloom. Harcourt, 338 pages, $25.00

The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights By Arlene Stein. Beacon Press, 267 pages, $27.50

A stranger comes to town. It's one of the great themes of American literature and film, not to mention contemporary American politics. Often our towns don't seem big enough for everyone, especially when profound disagreements arise. Liberalism at its most limited sometimes tries to overlook those disagreements, as if all we needed to live happily side by side were a kindergarten diversity curriculum in which brown- and yellow- and pink-skinned children and children with two mommies happily taste one another's foods and sing one another's holiday songs. But that pleasant vision of pluralism can itself offend those who believe tolerance to be dangerous and immoral while seeing their own philosophy as the One True Way. What happens when liberalism meets fundamentalism, when Why can't we all just get along? meets Get thee behind me, Satan?

That question runs through two recent books about strangers who ride into town and decide to stay. In Stephen G. Bloom's Postville, small-town Iowa is shaken when an unfriendly group of Lubavitcher Hasidim buy a failed Iowa slaughterhouse so that they can supply kosher meat and poultry to Orthodox Jews worldwide. The story in Arlene Stein's Stranger Next Door is more complicated: In a small Oregon town, an evangelical Christianity springs up among dispossessed white men and women and finds political focus in a campaign against "special rights" for gay people (who are all but nonexistent here). Each book structures its story around a local election that everyone understands to be a referendum on those cast as aliens. The back story is that of a global economy increasingly shifting work away from local white men while bringing in outsiders whose habits and values seem arrogant, inconsiderate, and strange.

Postville is the lighter read, and frames its microcosmic culture clash with Bloom's own story. In 1993 Bloom, a San Francisco journalist, takes a job as a journalism professor at the University of Iowa. At first he and his wife are enchanted by Iowa City's exotic cultural habits: people sitting on the wraparound porch, driving under the speed limit, fishing with fresh-dug worms, eating all-pork meals at the county fair. But after a few years, the Blooms notice that they don't quite fit, both as "city slickers," as the locals call them, and as Jews. For their fellow Iowans, Christianity is neutral background; Jesus is unthinkingly invoked by teachers and scoutmasters, neighbors sing Christmas carols outside their door as if this were benign, and the newspaper's Easter headline is "He Has Risen."

And so when Bloom hears about the Lubavitcher Hasidim in Postville, 350 miles north, wearing their payot (those curly earlocks) and black hats in a state "where pigs outnumber people by almost five to one," he's riveted. "While I knew the Lubavitchers to be fierce fundamentalists who proselytize other Jews the way Jehovah's Witnesses go after nonbelievers," he writes, "I also realized that the Hasidim in Postville were as close to family as Iris and I could muster in our new home state." Although the Hasidim, notoriously xenophobic, don't answer his calls requesting an interview, eventually a non-Jewish plant manager at the kosher slaughterhouse invites him to come by. Once he's inside, the Hasidim recognize his ethnicity and start recruiting.

The fact that Bloom is actually going inside the slaughterhouse flabbergasts the locals, whom he interviews as well (and who don't realize that he can be Jewish without a yarmulke and so forth). Postville is so small--population 1,465--that "no one used turn signals because everyone knew where everyone else was going." The local newspaper covers everyone's vacation destinations, afternoon visitors, and birthday-party decorations. It's a town so monoculturally descended from German Lutheran settlers that before World War II, German was spoken more often than English on the street. But by 1987, when Aaron Rubashkin, a Brooklyn butcher, came looking for a place to start a glatt-kosher slaughterhouse, Postville was in economic crisis. Fueled by the worldwide Orthodox boom and advances in international shipping, Rubashkin's business became wildly successful, bringing money into town.

Nevertheless, 10 years later, the locals aren't exactly happy with their marriage of necessity. "The Jews," as they're called, drive like maniacs, never mow their lawns, build without permits, bargain furiously (which the locals feel implies the price is unfair), and wait months, if ever, to pay their bills. Disregarding the fundamental rule of Iowa coexistence, the Hasidim won't even make eye contact on the street. One of Bloom's local informants asks: "Hadn't their mothers taught them any manners?"

Bloom does his best to be fair to the Hasidim as he explores their hermetically sealed world. He notes his relief at the familiar speech rhythms, the questions upon questions. He accepts an invitation for a Shabbat stay with a Hasidic family, revels in the food, and prays with his hosts on command. But finally, Bloom is a liberal, not a fundamentalist: He's repelled by their intolerance, their insularity, their open delight in cheating "the goyim," and their manipulative arguments. He quotes one Hasid as saying proudly: "I am a racist... . Why haven't the Jews been extinguished after scores of attempts throughout history? That we are still here defies logic. There is only one answer. We are better and smarter. That's why!" Bloom's heart is with the Postville local who says: "It's not such a great religion if they don't want to be a part of the community, is it?"

Bloom's background as a daily journalist shows; while the book brims with factual details, it lacks a sustaining narrative. As a result, parts of Postville are compulsively readable, filled with vivid information about such things as the town's history, kosher killing and evisceration, the filthy, algae-covered mikveh for Hasidic men, and Rubashkin's all-expenses-paid importation of labor. But there's too much filler: reconstructed "conversations" full of nothing much, for instance, and detail about an assimilated Jewish doctor who'd coexisted nicely before the Hasidim came. Bloom's own story doesn't fully hold the book together. Nor does the confrontation he constructs: a vote over whether the town should annex the slaughterhouse land and that of other local businesses, subjecting them to city taxes and law--an effort the Hasidim call anti-Semitic. Annexation passed; the Hasidim stayed. Postville's biggest disappointment is its failure to take on the larger questions: What does it mean that more people worldwide are taking refuge in separatist ideologies like the Lubavitchers'? And what is to be done when a separatist culture crashes into a pluralist one?

These are the questions that Arlene Stein takes up in The Strangers Next Door. In 1992 the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) ran a statewide initiative campaign to prevent antidiscrimination protections based on sexual orientation. After the statewide measure failed, the OCA targeted rural towns and counties that had voted in favor and attempted to pass similar measures locally. "Rural Oregon was a rather unlikely site for a battle over homosexuality," writes Stein, a sociologist at the University of Oregon. "In this vast, sparsely populated region of the country, there were few visible signs of queer life: ... no out homosexuals lobbying for civil rights; no lesbian/gay coffeehouses, newspapers or running clubs." Why this moral panic about a nonexistent threat? Stein chooses one rural town (calling it "Timbertown" to protect her informants) so that she can closely examine the larger symbolic meanings behind the campaign.

Stein recounts how Timbertown had uneasily absorbed successive intrusions of newcomers--back-to-the-land counterculture folks, Jesus freaks, latte-drinking Californians--whose manners and morals offended the town's frontier values of "strength and obedience, self-discipline, self-reliance, and respect for authority." This uneasy meeting of cultures grew nastier as the lumber economy began to sputter. Loss of prosperity led to a 1980s and 1990s explosion of membership in evangelical churches. There, many with shaky finances and unstable lives found shelter, invoking a strict God and a stern but loving church family to shepherd them through change. Their beliefs infused the struggles of everyday life--from maintaining sobriety and sexual restraint to making friends and sewing slipcovers--with purpose and meaning. But many, Stein believes, remained deeply ashamed of their personal failures, embarrassed by their lower-class God--in need of a scapegoat to help define their outsider Christianity as "traditional" and to prove to themselves that they walked in the path of righteousness. "By declaring who is strange," writes Stein, "we come to know who is familiar." Enter the OCA and its antigay campaign.

The town's few lesbian business owners and school administrators were too afraid to come out. Opposing the "no special rights" measure was thus up to heterosexual liberals, who peddled a generic (and inadequate) support for tolerance and diversity. For the liberals, the campaign was about something other than gayness, which many weren't quite comfortable with. Many of them were fighting their own scapegoats, with the OCA activists standing in for all backward Oregon "rednecks" (that class slur against white people who work outdoors). Writes Stein: "If few OCA members were college educated, this group was, in contrast, a relatively educated, cosmopolitan one; if OCA members repudiated the values of 1960s-style personal self-expression, social experimentation, tolerance of difference--this group proudly embraced them."

It was, in other words, a class battle--a battle of worldviews--and thus far more divisive than either side expected. The liberals underestimated the depth of feeling on the other side, which was fed by class resentment, job loss, falling wages, and despair at failing family relationships, as well as by disdain for supposedly rich gay people wantonly escaping their sex roles and family duties. Stein argues persuasively that liberalism hasn't offered a compelling vision of what's moral and good in family and community life, and that "diversity" rhetoric can be patronizing. When one identifies oneself as lesbian, say, or as Hasidic, "born that way" just doesn't cut it: Obviously, the offender is still choosing every day to embrace a set of values that repels, even disgusts, a neighbor. Stein articulates the OCA activists' furious resentment at diversity rhetoric this way: "Who was protecting their rights, their livelihood? Who was championing their needs when they lost their jobs, when their homes were repossessed, when they struggled to maintain their community? Who was making them feel included?"

What's especially valuable about Stein's book is her detailed look at each individual's take on the meaning of the campaign and her patient exploration of the wide variety of forces shifting the ground of these people's lives. She reveals both OCA activists and their liberal counterparts as individuals with more ambivalence and nuanced emotion about the election than can be divined from the angry boycotts of local businesses, the furious letters to the editor, or the protest demonstrations that became screaming matches.

Stein traces the way the global economic climate's peculiar currents are responsible not just for liberal choices like openly gay lives but also for the rise in American fundamentalisms. None of us can get back to where we once belonged: That world is gone and we must choose a new one. Gay-pride parades, Pentecostal churches, ritual mikvehs, and NPR cruises are a few of our newly invented homes. None can fairly be called "traditional," since all are chosen adaptations or reactions to modern life. If once upon a time we had small-town harmony, it was because we could purge our world of strangers, shipping the Puritans off to America, shipping the Quakers off to Rhode Island, shipping the Mormons off to Utah, and so on. But how do you kick the strangers out of town--whether the strangers are Starbucks-drinkers or Hasidim--if their cash props up your fading livelihood, or if they can turn to FedEx and Visa and the Web for everything they need?

Learning to live together while disapproving of--perhaps even despising--one another's behavior and beliefs is not the same as "celebrating diversity." It's a grittier and less utopian accommodation to those who are both like and unlike ourselves. Timbertown's antigay measure passed, but like the Postville annexation, the win was largely symbolic. It was presumptively overruled when the Supreme Court, in the 1996 Romer v. Evans decision, struck down the Colorado antigay amendment on which the Oregon measures were patterned. Meanwhile, most churches on the OCA side decided that political involvement was too divisive and returned to ministering to individuals. But neither did the liberals win, conquering ignorance and hate as they'd hoped. The waves of global capitalism continue to wash strangers, with their peculiar and distasteful choices, into town. As we've so terribly seen in recent weeks, we'll be facing showdown battles, large and small, again and again in years to come.