Reptiles and Amphibians of Minnesota Field Guide Book

A jaunty Jewish journalist paints a disturbing portrait of small town locals/yokels and out-of-town ultra-orthodox who open a kosher butchering plant in rural Iowa. The locals are rendered as somewhat ignorant and a tad xenophobic. The author's descriptions of the Jews are a white supremacists' dream: rude, unfriendly, haughty, obnoxious, pushy and disrespectful. The owners' obsession with money, and the serial swindling and haggling with the gentiles is embarrassing. The rest of us'the vast majority, non-Orthodox Jews'have to manage the fallout from this, our conflicted feelings about rude Jewish supremacists making the locals' mild anti-Semitism understandable. On the one hand, a serviceable portrait of pious orthodoxy; on the other, the intolerable warts of this insular community and its business practices. The story gets worse after the book was published: exploited labor, strikes, and the Chabad general disregard for law, order and non-Chabadniks. Do the Amish have such struggles?