SHOFAR 40:3 | 2022 249 BOOK FORUM Un-Settled Questions Frontier Logic and Satmar Political Theology Sam Shuman Animals are chosen as totems, as the famed French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss tells us in Totemism, not because “they are good to eat,” but rather because they are “good to think [with].” This certainly applies to rodents. As subterranean creatures, they scurry behind and between walls. In their trespass, they expose the fictitious boundaries we erect and domains we seek (however pre- cariously) to maintain. 1 As vectors of contagion, they often become a symbol of the uninvited Other. Rodents appear, if only fleetingly, on the pages of A Fortress in Brooklyn. Michael Casper and Nathaniel Deutsch note that: Hasidim drew on the rich trove of Jewish folk and magical beliefs to facilitate suc- cess or avoid disaster from the evil eye and other destructive forces. In this regard, many Hasidic developers from Williamsburg swore by the power of amulets in- spired by the Kerestirer Rov, Rabbi Yeshaya Steiner (1851-1925), to stop rodent infestations. Steiner was said to have miraculously cured a mouse problem in a tiny town in northeastern Hungary, and by the early 2000s his distinctive portrait could be seen throughout Brooklyn, tacked to the tall green wooden fences around construction sites. In all of these ways and more, the new class of Hasidic develop- ers sought to bridge two worlds by harmonizing their religious beliefs with their real estate practices (199-200). I smiled with glee when I first read this section. Little academic scholarship has been published on Steiner, who is the current subject of my ethnographic and archival research. His followers—both in his own lifetime and today—refer to him as Reb Shaye or Shayele (using the Yiddish iminutive form to express their doting affection). Shayele is indeed summoned to “facilitate success” and “avoid disaster.” As Casper and Deutsch display a few pages later, his portrait is hung at a series of construction sites around Brooklyn. But the rodents are only part of a much more complex story.