The original dissidents of Kiryas Joel | Michael Sussman

Video link to this interview: https://youtu.be/jcz0xmkm10s

The Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel’s early days in the 1970s and 80s were anything but quiet. They were marked by infighting, lawsuits, dissidents, and a legal battle so consequential it’s still taught in American law schools today.

In this interview, I speak with lawyer Michael Sussman, the man who came to represent some of Kiryas Joel’s most outspoken internal critics during its formative years. Though he was neither Hasidic nor Orthodox, Sussman became deeply entangled in the village’s internal struggles—so much so that, to many of us growing up there, his name became part of the folklore. There was even a dissident synagogue nicknamed the Sussman Shul.

This conversation explores the early legal wars that shaped Kiryas Joel: battles over governance, power, dissent, and most famously, the creation of a public school for children with special needs. That case—Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet—went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and sits at the uneasy intersection of religious freedom and the separation of church and state.

I also approach this story personally. Kiryas Joel is where I grew up and spent 25 formative years of my life. I married at 18, became a mother to my son Seth shortly after, and absorbed these conflicts as background noise to childhood—names, sides, “politics” that hovered at the edges of daily life. As an adult, I’ve returned to this history with new questions and a deeper curiosity about how insular religious subcultures navigate American law.
This interview is part of a broader attempt to document the oral histories of Kiryas Joel’s early years. I have made repeated efforts to reach figures from the other side of these disputes to record their recollections as well, but so far without success. That invitation remains open.

If you want to go deeper into this story, here are essential resources:
Book — American Shtetl
https://amzn.to/49Lmz5z

Documentary — City of Joel
https://amzn.to/4soIDKC

Archival footage collected by dissident Joseph Waldman:
https://www.youtube.com/@thekingofaron

Website for Michael Sussman:
https://www.sussman.law/

This is a story about Kiryas Joel, but it’s also a story about America: about pluralism, law, dissent, and the price of making space for radically different ways of life under one constitutional roof.


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-frieda-vizel-podcast--5824414/support.